Lead Status for Nurture / Recycle

[Scott_Daily]

We're approaching our one year anniversary with Marketo and I'm taking the time to reevaluate a lot of initial decisions we made, now that we have a better understanding of the platform.

One of the simple, yet oh-so-complex, decisions we made was about our Lead Statuses in Salesforce.

Originally, we decided not to use a Lead Status of "Nurture" or "Recycle" because we identified particular Disqualification Reasons to fall under this bucket. However, we're now tackling the goal of cleaning out a large quantity of leads from our SDRs' queues and want to remove all the leads they were never able to get in contact with. Essentially, we need to implement a time-based rule to act as an outflow so after "X" weeks leads are moved from an SDR queue to a Marketing-owned Nurture/Recycle stream.

My thought: we can easily add a Lead Status of Nurture or Recycle, make sure leads with those statuses don't count against SDR quotas and continue to reach out occasionally via nurture streams. These emails can still appear to be coming from an SDR because they're still technically owned by them.

I know this is nothing new, but curious about some Pros and Cons to this strategy from the community. Hoping to reduce the time until another iteration is needed

Thanks!

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Scott,

What you're suggesting is generally a solid approach - you want marketing to take over the leads that've staled out with sales. However, the automatic lead status switching may have issues because sometimes, you may find yourself taking leads that sales is actively working, but the information in SFDC just hasn't been updated properly. For this reason, I'd suggest that alerts or views be created and leads that fall out of the SLA be escalated to management - the decision to switch to nurture should be a manual vs. automated one based on time-triggers.

The Nurture status is great - I'd just recommend forcing folks to put a Nurture or Recycle Reason so you can be more intelligent in marketing, and so everyone can keep track of the thought process.

Hope this helps!

Charlie

[Scott_Daily]

Thanks, Charlie! Definitely makes sense finding the balance with how to move leads into Nurture. I'd assume or hope there can be some sort of a combination - SDRs can manually move leads as needed, but also have some sort of rule so they're not moving hundreds of leads manually every couple weeks.

Appreciate the insight!

[Alex_Stanton1]

Hi Scott,

Do you have a Revenue Model (sometimes called Lead Lifecycle) set up in your instance? If you do, you could look at  records based on Revenue Stage and how long they have been in a specific "bucket" in addition to lead status. You can find more info here: Understanding Revenue Models - Marketo Docs - Product Docs. This would provide a different angle and additional insight in your database. 

[Scott_Daily]

Hi Alex,

Yep, when we initially set-up our Revenue Model we had a Nurture/Recycle bucket, but it was tied to Disqualification Reasons. We've definitely found that we had a gap, which is the issues I'm trying to solve. Always helpful to go back to the basic docs - thank you!