Hi Michael:
Your model covers some of the basics. However, there are a few things to consider:
1. Since you moved the Known stage downwards, you have no "Success Path" (as indicated by a thick green line). This means, none of these stages could be tracked in the Success Path Analyzer - only in custom reports in the Revenue Explorer
2. I generally discourage moving Recycled leads back into Engaged. Instead, I recommend keeping them in Recycling until they meet the requirements for a Marketing Qualified Lead again. This allows separate analysis of net new vs. recycled leads to Marketing Qualified Leads. If you mix them together in Engaged, you'll have difficulties separating the data later, and you don't really know how the two groups transition.
3. When you lose an Opportunity, will you ever talk to a Lead again? If so, where would it go? The most common scenarios are that they are attached to a new Opportunity via Contact Role (moving back into the Opportunity Stage of the Model), or they reach the Marketing Qualified Lead requirements and move back into the Marketing Qualified Lead stage for re-evaluation by an inside sales or BDR person.
4. Your model has many "dead-ends" - places where a lead will be stuck indefinitely. However, you should always consider how you can reactivate such leads, and offer them another chance at success (Think: "No Lead Left Behind"). Otherwise you will waste a lot of lead generation efforts and expenses. And when these leads do respond again, the model won't be able to track them because they are stuck with no path out..
5. You are using decision points for Sales Lead and Opportunity stages. This means, the leads cannot stay in those stages - they must move to any of the other stages right away. Given that sales needs time to evaluate the lead and then work through the opportunity phase, you should change these stages to inventory stages.
Here is our current Best Practice model for tracking Customer Acquisitions:
MCL = Marketing Captured Lead
MEL = Marketing Engaged Lead
Note that when a salesperson adds a contact role to an opportunity, he doesn't know the stage of the lead. Therefore you need to have transitionsn into SQL from any stage where a Contact can live.
When I build out a such model, I use a master status tracking field called "Lifecycle Status" to record the lead's process. This field would be a read-only field on the Salesforce Lead and Contact Objects (mapped to each other), and a Lead field in Marketo. I then populate this field with Lead Lifecycle Campaigns, and let the Modeler follow the changes in the Lifecycle Status field.
Why do I build it that way? Isnt't hat overly complicated?
Well, you can certainly build transitions in the model. However, each transitional arrow can only listen to one set of events to make a transition. If you have multiple possible transitions, you'd need two transition "arrows". If you have not drawn out a transition, the Modeler will stop tracking the lead's progress.
Another reason: The Modeler's transitions cannot execute flow steps, such as synching the lead, creating tasks, or sending alerts. So you need Lifecycle Campaigns to manage such tasks.
As a result, I like to keep the Model and its transitions simple, and do all the heavy lifting in one place: My Lead Lifecycle Program. It contains the Lead Lifecycle Campaigns that manage all aspects of the transition. The added bonus is transparency of where the lead is in the buying cycle, regardless of whether you look at it in Marketo or in Salesforce.
I could write a few more pages about it; we usually cover this in detail in our 2-day Business Process Workshops.
Hope this gives you a few ideas.
Best of luck!