Process Question: Lead Aging Reports, out of Marketo or Salesforce?

[David_Gaible]

Hi Marketo whizzes, happy Halloween!

Our largest sales team is seeing a slowdown in pipeline velocity, and we know this is driven in part by an increasing number of MQLs sitting unaddressed. We need some lead aging reports! I'm of the mind sales ops should run these reports out of Saleforce, but I could get them automated out of Marketo. Any one have a process that they really love, or one that they really hate?

[Justin_Norris1]

Hey David Gaible​,

Lead aging reports could be run out of either Marketo or SFDC. Do you guys have any SLAs in place with the sales team? You will need that commitment in place to drive a change in behavior. 

Ideally you would have a maximum time a lead can sit in MQL, and would have the support of sales leadership to enforce it. E.g., 4 days for an MQL via lead score, 24 hours for a fast track.

Depending on your sales process, the way you track this can vary.

At the person level: If your team mainly works from lead or contact list views, then you would track the SLA at the person level. For example if you track SLAs in your Revenue Cycle Model in Marketo, you can report on this information in the Success Path Analyzer report. Alternatively, you can have a workflow rule or smart campaign that checks a "violation" box on the lead/contact and triggers an alert if lifecycle stage hasn't changed. You would then report on leads/contacts in the CRM that have the SLA violation box checked.

This process can break down if someone is cycling through the funnel multiple times and may have several missed SLAs.

At the task level: In a task-based sales process you can set the SLA date as a custom field when the task is created in the CRM and do some formulas to calculate SLA violations at the task level.We've also done some fancier stuff such as preventing the task from closing if the associated lead/contact's lifecycle stage or lead status has not changed or auto-generating reminder tasks when an SLA date is approaching.

This is definitely more complex but if set up properly can scale better for a more complex sales process.

In either case I prefer reporting on it in the CRM because

a) it's easier to drill down on

b) you really need sales ops to look at the reports and help enforce, and they will prefer to do that in the CRM

[David_Gaible]

Thanks Justin Norris​. This jives with what I was thinking. The second bullet point to support running this from the CRM: "you really need sales ops to look at the reports and help enforce, and they will prefer to do that in the CRM" - boom! Exactly what we want to drive. We don't currently have SLAs in place with the sales team - monitoring this info is one of the data points we're going to bring to the 'We need to have SLAs' conversations.