Is lead assignment best managed in SFDC?

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I would like to find whats the best approach in managing lead assignment, in Marketo or SFDC or both. Currently we do both. In my experience lead assignment is done on the SFDC (Sales Operations side).

If anyone has best practices around this, would love to hear them. Thank you!

[Anonymous]

Thanks all this was really helpful!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Nimisha,

The answer to the question also depends on 3 factors :

• Are the visitors on your web site mainly leads or contacts. Leads can assigned in SFDC with Lead Assignment rules, while contacts cannot and will have to be either added to Telemarketing salesforce campaigns or managed with task creation
• Who will be responsible for managing and evolving these rule: sales or marketing. Sales will likely not have access to Marketo, so if they need to own this, better do it in SFDC
• How complex are these rules. On this specific point, SFDC has some more capabilities than Marketo for complex formula evaluation.

-Greg

[Diederik_Marte4]

Hi, I've seen both work great. If you use SFDC it will run faster, as Josh mentioned. You're not bothered with the sync interval time. In Marketo you can also create dispatch rules, but realize in whatever system you are creating them, they need maintanance. As Sales Operations has a first insight in personell change in the sales force, they could well be best suited for the job. BUT Marketo allows you to create dispatch rules, based on lead behavior (whcih pages visited, keywords used), where SFDC will mainly focus on demographics (e.g. country, number of employees, etc). So depending on your companies lead assignment criteria, Marketo could also be a valid option. I've had experience where we wanted to dispatch leads, but we didn't know things like country. We would then fall back to inferred country. Or if we didn't knew the potential solution someone is interested in, we would look at visited pages, downloaded content, used keywords, etc.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Gregoire!

We have a lead scoring model in place to help us with lead assignment for various marketing activities. For list uploads from events, and other marketing activities I end up having to assign to SDRs by territory, using Lead Owner Change in Marketo.

Appreciate all the responses!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Nimisha,

It's key that you keep the scoring and the lead management separated. So the scoring will stay in Marketo, and the LAR will be on either side.

See https://nation.marketo.com/message/113266#comment-113266 

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Diedrick,

in order to tackle the "behavior" issue you are raising, it's better to separate the process in 2:

• Marketo sets a lead status based on scoring / behavior
• SFDC runs the LAR, that is triggered by the change in the status.

-Greg

[Ravi_Ansal2]

Hi Nimisha Gandhi​,

I wouldn't say that only SFDC lead assignment is the best way. I think it depends were the lead comes from. If the Lead is created by your sales team then it should surely be assigned via SFDC lead rules. whereas if the lead was created via some web activity then you can create a smart campaign and assign it to a Queue or your sales team depending on the Product or industry fields.

The only thing i would suggest is to make sure that no reassignment is done via Marketo. To  avoid that you can always go with the filter of New lead created via filled out form or List import.

Hope this helps

[Anonymous]

Thank you Ravi!

[Josh_Hill13]

It also depends a bit on the complexity involved. My preference is to let SFDC handle LARs when it starts getting complex. SFDC tends to run faster.

The important part is to have this all mapped out and to understand things like:

• SFDC LARs run once on creation unless you force them to re-run on something like Lead Status change.
• Marketo cannot force a reassignment except on First Sync and using Change Owner
• Syncing Programs to SFDC Campaigns will send ALL your leads to SFDC and they will run through the LARs.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Josh!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Josh,

We have developed a workaround in SFDC that enables to trigger SFDC LAR on lead update and not just on lead creation. It takes a field and a trigger, not so difficult to do.

There is also this idea to vote for:

-Greg