People by status

[JacobIreland_]

Hello, 

My company has historically had a process to create an account and a contact for new leads which enter SFDC (even if the lead does not qualify to an opportunity). The lead would naturally follow a standard qualification process and eventually either be converted to an opportunity or the lead stage would change to reflect (recycle, uncontactable etc). With the implementation of Marketo forms this practice would not be viable due to duplicate persons in Marketo. As a result, the company decided that all new leads which entered SFDC will be converted to a contact as a first step (by an inbound sales team) when synced from Marketo to SFDC. Whether the lead was an MQL, SQL or an opportunity would be created etc is irrelevant, the converted lead to contact would then move onto qualification and opportunities created after this action occurring. Once an opportunity is identified by the inbound team, an opportunity would be created and the contact would be associated with the opportunity and assigned to a sales manager. 

The contact record in SFDC does not have statuses like a normal lead would in SFDC leading to a complicated revenue model cycle/ lead cycle model and difficulty in differentiating between old contacts whom we are re-marketing to, new contacts manually added into the CRM by sales teams assigned to the accounts and the new contacts whom are essentially leads. 

As a result, the decision was made to fill the person status void with campaign member status. An simplified example would be Member, Responded (which would be classified as a lead), Opportunity . As a result this makes it difficult to set relevant campaign member statuses to reflect particular programs e.g. registered, attended.

Due to deciding upon this method all new leads which are converted to contacts (prior to sales qualification) are of course associated with the campaign they came in by (as campaign members) and campaign member statuses would reflect (responded=lead) so that we can report upon leads which are in SFDC (but are essentially contacts). This would allow for reports to be created based up campaign member statuses for new business leads which are in SFDC as contacts v general contacts in SFDC whom may also be in the campaign (with a status not of member) and contacts whom don't sit in specific SFDC campaigns. 

Q1. Is this method viable? 

Q2. Is this method viable for reporting? 

Q3. Can somebody recommend an alternative to this method knowing that the business re markets to a lot of known historic contacts and wants to differentiate between a contact whom is contact and a contact whom is now a MQL again?

[Darshil_Shah1]

I must say, this sure is a quite knotty process. Taking a step back, I'm curious to know why you follow the process of converting all the lead records to contact records even before they're qualified. I think if you were to use the lead and contact records conventionally (i.e., don't convert lead records to contacts as soon as they're synced), a lot of your process would become simpler. Also, with an apt process and sophistication in place, you can very well track people getting qualified/flowing through your lead lifecycle multiple times (instead of creating duplicate records). I'm a bit edgy, that between the all process changes and shifts you've articulated in your question, you may have some records that conform to your previous process and then some records that conform to your new process, and you'd face challenges while reporting.

[JacobIreland_]

Thanks for the response Darshil, in agreance and am pushing back on the idea.  As for the process of converting all of the lead records to contact records, there does not appear to be any valid reason other then a decision was historically made on it. Similarly, advocating for change here.  

Could you please elaborate on "Also, with an apt process and sophistication in place, you can very well track people getting qualified/flowing through your lead lifecycle multiple times (instead of creating duplicate records)"

Ideally leads & contacts would be used to track person stages. What would your advice be regarding replicating lead stages on the contact record? This is currently not in place and is a factor contributing to the businesses belief that they have to utilise campaign member statuses to essentially track person stages. 

[Darshil_Shah1]

Okay, so with a single model, you can have a Re-MQL stage to which people who are already MQL and above could be transitioned and brought back to their original state (e.g. if they were MQL previously, transition back to MQL). That way you'd have a Change Revenue Stage, Status, etc. logged for reporting. You'd have to figure a way out on how to let people who're in >= MQL stages qualify for Re-MQL and MQL campaigns- one way would be to reset their Behavior Score to 0 as soon as they hit the MQL stage. The major downside of this approach is that if there are multiple sales reps working on the person's multiple interests/inquiries, then, in that case, you'd have greater mileage in creating purpose duplicate records when people re-MQL in Salesforce.

Additionally, once people are done flowing through the lifecycle model for the first time, i.e., they have been marked as one of the closed stages, disqualified, lost, etc., you can safely reset their Scoring fields to 0 (unlike the previous case when they hadn't reached the closed stages, as in that case, your Sales rep might need a lead's scoring data when they're working on it), so in case they re-engage, they could very well start their journey through the lead lifecycle again.

Ideally leads & contacts would be used to track person stages. What would your advice be regarding replicating lead stages on the contact record? This is currently not in place and is a factor contributing to the businesses belief that they have to utilise campaign member statuses to essentially track person stages. 

IMHO, if you're strictly converting leads to contacts as soon as they get synced over, then it'd make sense to replicate lifecycle for contact records, but I'm still curious about the need to convert leads to contact records before they're qualified/deemed as an opportunity ready?