Question re: adding additional stages onto our Revenue Model

[Anonymous]

We’re currently building additional stages onto the end of our Revenue Model, specifically adding stages after a lead becomes a customer, for tracking cross-sell, up-sell, renewals, etc.  However, we are having trouble connecting the end of our existing model (SAL, Won) to these new stages (Engaged Customer). Example of how it flows:

SAL (Sales Accepted Lead)  ->  Won  ->  Engaged Customer

To ensure all customer leads and contacts begin to flow through the new customer stages of the model, we want to put all customers into the “Won” stage.  However, this stage contains only customer contacts who’ve had a ‘role’ in the closed opportunity, and we don’t want to lose this information or dilute it by adding all customer contacts at an account (i.e. those who were not a contact role on the opportunity).  Therefore, our thoughts were to create an additional “Won” stage – perhaps called “Won (Non-Opportunity Roles)” and manually add all existing customers, who are not currently in the original “Won” stage, into this new bucket.  This new stage will be stemmed off of “SAL” and lead towards “Engaged Customer” just like the current “Won” stage does.  Example of our thoughts:

   SAL (Sales Accepted Lead)  ->  Won  ->  Engaged

                                            Or  -> Won (non Opp role)  -> Engaged

Does anyone see any issues that may arise from this?  Any better recommendations?

[Josh_Hill13]

Your solution sounds good to me.
 

What is your definition of Engaged Customer vs. Won?

[Anonymous]

Hi Josh,

Once an opprotunity is marked Closed-Won, contacts will be transfered to this initial "Won" stage.  Once these customers re-engage with us (i.e. download a whitepaper, attend a webinar, etc.) they will be moved into the "Engaged Customer" stage. If they're marketing qualified, they'll then flow to the "MQL (Customer)" Stage, and so on continuing down the funnel... Make sense to you?

Thanks for your feedback!

Jessica

[Rebecca_Llontop]

I'm curious about this idea of adding additional stages onto the Revenue Model/Lifecycle--is it considered best practice to have these additional stages as a way to distinguish marketing to new leads/prospects versus conducting customer retention marketing, which could include upselling? Right now, we're struggling a bit with how we separate and continue loyalty marketing initiatives to current customers within our Marketo database, in addition to doing the lead generation marketing efforts towards new prospects. Thoughts?

Jessica, have you had success (like improved tracking) with implementing your proposed stages? I'd love to hear about it!

Thanks!

-Rebecca