How Can You Tell When Lead in SFDC Is Handled?

[Anonymous]

First post of all time...so here goes.

How can you tell when your salesperson has adjudicated a lead?

We send email alerts over, and the salesperson is supposed to accept or recycle leads in SFDC through the Add to Marketo Campaign button on each lead record.

The trouble is, I don't know how to tell what -- if anything -- Sales has done.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[Devraj_Grewal]

Brad,

If Sales is using a request smart campaign through Sales Insight to mark which leads they are accepting or rejecting, you can track which leads are members of those smart campaigns. You can then monitor which leads have been accepted, rejected, and haven't had activity on them yet. You can create a smart list with the filter "member of smart campaign" and select the request smart campaign.

[Darrell_Alfons2]

Yup Devraj has good points.

Brad Cope​ how about having sales change the lead status when leads are assigned to them. You can also track that in Marketo. Change from MQL to Sales Accepted Lead or whatever you want.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Darrell and Devraj.

Those are good ideas. Seeing them has made me feel bolder to consider two more ideas:

Since the problem is lack of sales activity in SFDC relative to Marketo leads, it seems like I could do two more things to fill in the blanks:

1) Create a smart list that pulls all of the Marketo leads in a certain period and displays them with a Lead Status column. My trouble is I’m not sure what the status for an untouched lead is: Unqualified? Likewise, does that mean a Qualified lead was accepted by Sales?

2) For a related problem, I suspect some salespeople use our leads but don’t create Opportunities from the Contact record – meaning leads come out of nowhere with no name attached…but really that was us. So could I create a smart list that pulls all of the Opportunities created during a certain period and then filters them by the Company Names of leads we sent over during a certain period? In other words, it would match “surprise” Opportunities with the Marketo leads that actually triggered them.

My apologies if this is getting arcane and/or paranoid.

[Darrell_Alfons2]

good questions brad and good points.

so it really is going to come down to process and what you hold sales accountable for.

When new leads get sync'd to salesforce you can setup what the default status is on the marketo side or on the salesforce side. An example would be marketing qualified lead, but I've also seen statuses like prospect, or open etc. When sales reviews the lead they can choose whether to accept it by changing status to accepted, or in progress, or SAL, or they can disqualify it, or recycle it. All of those would be lead status options.

If you cannot get your sales team to follow this process, then there are some things you can do on the salesforce side to automate it.

And for your other question, you can build rules in salesforce to prevent orphaned opps from being created.