mql as success step in channel?

[Pia_Simeoni2]

Does anyone see an issue with adding another success step of MQL to Tradeshows and Webinar channels? So in addition to "Visited booth," or "Attended/Attended on Demand" I'd like to add one more for MQL.

[Matjaž_Jaušove2]

MQL is a "characteristic" of a contact/lead, not a type of interaction with the marketing program. MQL is usually derived from what the lead does (interactions) and who s/he is (company, job level, etc). So I'd advise attaching that to a lead, not a program.

[Pia_Simeoni2]

Thank you! That makes sense. When we go to events, we come back with names marked as "hot leads." How would you show in the SFDC campaign, out of the hundreds of leads and contacts that registered, attended/were absent etc, which ones are MQLs?

[Willow_Allen]

There is a "contact now" field on the lead record in your SFDC instance. When you upload members to a campaign via Marketo, include a flow step that says "Change data value" of "Contact now" to True.

In SFDC, create a Campaign Members report that displays members of a campaign with the lead attribute of "contact now."

Alternatively, you can simply use the same Flow step to do the following:

• MLQ = True
• MQL Date = {{system.date}}
• Lead Status = Marketing Qualified
• Product Interest = (product line)

^ This will auto route your leads to the correct sales rep within your instance. In this situation, you build 2 reports in SFDC. Campaigns with Contacts, MQL = true AND Campaigns with Leads, MQL = True.

I agree, program success steps would not be the correct venue for displaying this data. Doing so shifts a SFDC Lead from being an MQL and instead says that the Campaign member is the MQL which means a sales rep assigned that lead would not see the MQL status on the record assigned to them without checking the campaign object first.

[Pia_Simeoni2]

Hi Willow Allen​! Thanks for your reply. The problem we're coming across is that if we get a demo request for NimbleUser on 9/7, and then a demo request for MIP on 9/10, the MIP info will overwrite the NU MQL Date and product line. We can't accurately count MQLs if lead and contact records are constantly overwritten.

[Willow_Allen]

That was by the initial design. Because an MQL is an MQL is an MQL... Otherwise you'd be double counting your MQLs each month. Because of the way sales was intended to operate, sales would be responsible for handling all product sales for a given customer. So, as soon as an MQL was assigned to a rep, that rep was supposed to followup and work in deal for multiple products because a change in product interest does not reassign the lead to someone else.

[Dan_Stevens_]

All of our program channels include progression steps (program statuses) all the way to closed-won (the four highlighted ones below).  For us, we use program status as a key attribute for lifecycle reporting.  There are many ways to accomplish this - for us, this was the ideal way when we setup our instance - especially since we're in a MS Dynamics CRM environment, where the Campaign object is not part of the native sync like it is with SFDC.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

I am not a big fan of this because it seems to tell that MQL are driven by a specific campaign. Moving from a last touch mind set, where Marketing and sales fight to be the source of the lead to a situation where both teams collaborate and contribute to the identification and development of leads requires a lot of change management and clear messages. Anything that tends to identify 1 specific program as being the source or the one that made the lead MQL will slow down the change.

So, if you use such program statuses, be very careful on how you communicate them.

[Pia_Simeoni2]

Unfortunately, at our organization, MQLs CAN be driven by a specific campaign. For example, attendees of a product webinar = MQL. Hot leads from a show = MQL. We have multiple products served by multiple sales teams and we need to count each MQL for each product. Our issue is that an MQL for Product A can be overwritten by an MQL for Product B in SFDC. As a result, we lose the historical count for Product A. I thought a workaround could be stamping them as MQL in a success step in Marketo, so at least we have that stamped into stone somewhere. Hope that makes sense.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Pia,

They can, but they do not always are. Who can really say that the attendee to a product webinar would never have come to your web site and download a white paper before the webinar? In attributing the MQL to the webinar, you implicitly deny the role of the white paper. Stamping it at campaign level will resolve your multi-product issue indeed, but will create another bias in your reporting and will drive bad budget decisions (to the detriment of the Top-Of-The-Funnel content).

What you are trying to do here is to combine attribution reporting with multiple lead management processes applicable to the same person. You could use multiple lead status fields (one per product) and multiple scoring (one per product too), but this will not completely solve your attribution issue and might not be very scalable.

There is no real possibility in Marketo alone to create a true multi-touch attribution model in conjunction with multiple lead management processes. To do this, the Marketo solution would be using multiple Revenue Cycle models (one RCM for each of your product line) + Advanced Reporting. But again, if the number of products is high, scalability will be the issue.

You can also consider third party solutions or a data warehouse. I do not know id Bizible can support multiple Lead Mgt processes. Worth asking them.

-Greg