Hi Stacy,
I personally do not like "Closed" status, or anything else that would imply that the lead has come to an end-of-life. I fell that this "closed" reason comes from an age where the leads that were not sales ready were just let down.
There are, IMHO, 4 or 5 outcomes to a lead that is assigned to sales:
- Sales accepted / Opportunity (the good one)
- Not a Lead : the lead is not for sales, but you still want to keep it in your DB, although you will stop scoring them and pushing them to sales in the future. Journalists, influencers, ... will fall in this box
- Out of scope: the lead really should not be there. They will eventually be discarded, but once the FY is over, so that we can count them for statistics.
- Recycled. This is a temporary stage, before flowing back to nurturing. When a lead is recycled, the sales person needs to be prompted for a recycling reason (No budget, No decision made, Equipped with competition, ... you name it). Based on the reason, we will compute the recycling duration. As long as the lead is recycled, it will be "marketing suspended
- Sometimes, we use a 5th one, "long term project" which a temporary status used by the sales to indicate they want to keep the leads with them for a while to try to make a project become reality through sales action. This stage is only set up on the system is the sales organization is mature enough to avoid turning this into a dead end in which all the leads end up. To avoid this, we set up strict rule by which the lead needs to be regularly appended some sales activities (meetings) and cannot stay there more than 2 or 3 months, after which it has to be moved to "Sales Accepted" or to "Recycled".
-Greg
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