Sales Generated Channel?

[Anonymous]

Our team often is provided lists from our reps of contacts that they have that they would like imported into the database. In the past we have captured these with lead source only. I was thinking that realistically we should have a channel for Sales Generated so that the acquisition program for the lead is accurate & we have better insight on our program analysis. 

Does anyone use a Sales Generated Channel? If so, what progression statuses do you use? If not, how do you capture Sales Generated leads within Marketo? 
 

[Adam_Vavrek1]

Hi Leah - not a bad idea. We just capture this in the Lead Source field only - Sales Prospecting. I'm interested to hear how other marketers treat these leads.

[Anonymous]

Hi Leah, 
We just created a Sales channel for one of our clients. Our progression statuses are simply "member" and "engaged" (engaged is the success step). 

This allows list uploads and leads generated in SFDC by the sales team themeselves (with a trigger campaign listening for leads created from salesforce.com) to have the appropreate acuqisition program. 

[Anonymous]

We use a Sales Gen channel. Here's the statuses, somewhat specific to our business but you can see the point. 



This is useful both for consistency in reporting on channels and because we run some programs in Marketo to automate teleprospecting and follow up and this is our channel for it. 

[Nicole_Mossinge]

Hi Justin:

Basically, you are using program statuses to track the progress in the buying cycle instead of engagement and program influence.

This makes me wonder how you handle this on the Analytics end. Are you hiding this channel from RCA, or exclude this channel from your Multi-Touch (MT) Analysis?

If not, it would skew your program influence reporting.

Just wondering...

[Nicole_Mossinge]

Hi Leah:

I generally recommend not to import any lists directly into the database, but rather use Programs and import under the Membership tab.

This will prompt you to specify a status for the imported leads in the program, and they would all become members. Newly generated leads would automatically be flagged with the program name as the "Acquisition Program". This allows you to include the List Program into your First-Touch (FT) Analysis reports.

As to the channels - you can create yourself a generic "List Import" channel, or a special "Sales Generated" channel - it depends on how you want to filter your Analytics reports.

These channels would have a basc "Member", or "On List" status for all the newly imported leads.

Some clients insist on tracking when these leads engage with any marketing activity, and set a success status when that happens. The idea is to gauge the quality of the list.

However, I caution you that this skews your Multi-Touch (MT) Analysis, as the leads would reach succes in two programs at the same time: The Marketing Activity Program that they engaged with, and the LIst Import Program, which has acquired the lead but not contributed anything to the influence.

Hope this helps.

[Anonymous]

Hey Nicole, 

It's a good question. What I posted could be a bit misleading so I should clarify. 

We have a very transactional business with a short sales cycle (often ~1 day). 

We have found so far that the recommended usage of Marketo's analytics module has not worked for us to answer the questions we need to answer. So I have used progression statuses in an unorthodox way to help us compare programs on an apples to apples basis.  

I am basically encoding my attribution rules into the triggered campaign that moves leads into the "Purchased" category. 

It still could be improved, and also we do most of our reporting using a separate BI tool attached to our data warehouse (we don't use RCA). But this is why the implementation doesn't conform to Marketo best practices.