Manage Leads from Existing Accounts

[Itay_Billet4]

How to you usually treat leads that are coming from existing accounts (either open opportunities or customers)?
Not sure if preferrable to convert those leads into contacts, OR keep them as leads and change ownership to sales (as in our case, the SDR team aren't supposed to call those).
I know it's a SFDC process (as Marketo doesn't care if it's a lead or a contact), but it affects other processes - nurturing, segmentation etc...
Any Ideas?

[Anonymous]

We would definitely convert the leads to the accounts. That's the beauty of accounts - you can see all lead activity rolled up in one place. Is your nurturing, segmentation, etc. based on lead vs. contact? Wouldn't you want alignment to an account to impact (accurately) nurturing, segmentation etc.?

Without knowing your process, from the outside looking in it's hard to see the benefit of leaving them as leads.

[Itay_Billet4]

I would definitely like to see all leads as contacts under these accounts. The process is not firm enough, so there are some cases that existing customers are left as leads..
Do you use any automation / code to enforce this (i.e. SFDC automatically convert the lead into a contact if the account exist), or 
does the SDR Team consistently checks for duplicates / existing accounts before engaging the lead?

[Anonymous]

We have not automated the conversion process. Someone from Marketing or an SDR scrubs new leads that come in. We use lead scoring so they prioritize what they scrub based on score and urgency. Our sales reps can't see the leads tab at all so we try to convert everything to an account as much as possible.