Nurturing leads that have been converted

[Anonymous]

We import new lists into sfdc using ring lead.
If the person is already in sfdc as a contact, it just updates the contact but it seems that we should create a lead and dedupe later if/when we convert the lead. Thoughts?

This speaks to my larger concern about a lot of 'leads' and names that were converted or created as contacts.
What rules do you use for including contacts in your nurture? We have a lot leads that were converted to contacts
incorrectly or prematurely that we want to nurture - what is the best way to do this if we are using lead status as the 
criteria for nurture? Could we use 'Contact Status'?

We plan to keep the lead in the lead owner's name while nurturing and jusyt change the status if a certain lead score is hit.

[Anonymous]

It's really not a best practice to have duplicate Lead and Contact records in SFDC.  We use the Lead/Contact's behavior to determine which nurture stage to add them to.  If they download early stage content or engage in an early stage activity, we add their name to a Early Stage list, which then triggers them to be added to an early stage nurture campaign.  If they subsequently download a mid-stage content piece or engage in a mid-stage activity, we add their name to a Mid-Stage list, which will add them to a mid-stage nurturing campaign and move them out of the early stage nurture campaign if they are already in that.

[Anonymous]

Adding to Elliott's point: rather than maintain duplicate records, set your campaigns (scoring, nurturing, etc) to check for contacts and leads that meet the requirements.  For example, if you send an email to everyone who's score exceeds 40, you would trigger on lead score exceeding 40 OR contact score exceeding 40.