Task Creation - Is it required?

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

How may of you out there are using / creating task's in Marketo for Marketing Qulaified Leads (MQL's) to be worked / followed -up on either by Tele Prospecting or Inside Sales team in SFDC.

We are currelty using this process and I personally think that we should move away this process from a report point of view.

It would be great if any of of you guys out there share some process flows which is different to the above process.

Thanks in Advance.

Chris

[Edward_Masson]

we use tasks to monitor existing leads/contacts for our trial downloads. These are new inquiries we want sales to follow up on.
We use a BI tool to bring all net new and existing inqueries (tasks) to monitor lead flow.

Tasks will generate when leads and contacts become MQL or fill out a Trial download/Contact Us form.

Don't understand your reasons from moving away from using said process/report.

[Anonymous]

Hey Edward - what BI tool are you using for task reporting? How comprehensive is it?

[Anonymous]

Hey Edward,

Thanks for replying. Which BI tool are you using to report tasks?

Most of our reporting is done via SFDC since we had some issues with our RCM. Task's hang of objects in SFDC and are a pain to report.

I was thinking of a workflow which could avoid tasks i.e. When a lead reaches MQL status they will be auto assigned to appropraite lead owners and then create a workflow in SFDC to intimate the lead owners vis email etc. This is to make sure they work on the lead record and not in the tasks.

Chris

[Anonymous]

Hi Christopher,

I would also recommend moving away from assigning tasks in SFDC as a way for the qualificaiton team to follow up on leads. Tasks tend to clog the system, especially when the team gets behind (and they will) and generally speaking it's annoying to both work with and report on.

Instead, I use a combination of Views, scheduled dashboards and workflow rules to make sure leads are being processed following SLA's and that nothing is getting left behind.

The MQL's are assigned to the appropriate rep, and then the rep can go to "My MQL's" and follow up appropriately.

Most people start with using Lead Status of MQL or equivalent to initiate follow up, but I've worked on several implementations where we wanted deeper analytics about time to follow-up, subsequent follow ups (ie # of touches) and created a dedicated "Follow Up Status" field, accompanied by a "Follow Up Reason" text field that was all populated through Marketo.

The reps had two views: one for Leads and one for Contacts, and they would see the reasons they are following up, as well as the history of past efforts - all on my screen, without the need to review a record before making the call (reps love to stall those calls, the excuse always being that they are doing research before calling!).

So depending on the granulariy of reporting that you're looking for, you can build the appropriate process and a way to track it in SFDC - all controlled by Marketo.

Hope that helps!

[Anonymous]

Hi Grant,

Thanks for the suggestion. I will certainly look into that.

Chris

[Anonymous]

Grant - Could you share a screenshot of the view / dashboards you use? I follow you with the creating views based on status, just not sure how you're counting # of touches or follow up reason? Are these just drop downs that are populated? Or are they populated based off specific activity being logged?

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Sherrie,

To answer your questions:

1. How are you counting the # of touches?

I have a field called "Follow Up Status", and it has fields like these:

• Follow Up Requred
• 1st Touch Complete
• 2nd Touch Complete
• 3rd Touch Complete
• 4thTouch Complete
• Follow Up Complete

I also have another field called "# of touches" that adds a "+1" everytime the follow status is change to 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th Touch.

I believe this is how Marketo counts (or used to do this a couple of years ago when I saw a presentation about it) # of touches internally for their sales team.

2. How do you do Follow Up Reason?

The Follow Up Reason is a text field that gets populated by different campaigns. For example, if someone fills out a specific form, there is a campaign flow that sets the Follow Up Reason that's appropriate to that form "Downloaded Whitepaper XYZ." Others are set by the lead score flows ("Crossed Lead Score Threshold of 100"), or specific program ("Attended Tradeshow XYZ").


I hope that makes sense 🙂

[Anonymous]

Grant -- Thanks for the quick reply. I can't get my team to update status now... I really dont see them updating Follow up  status, unfortunately. I was hoping you had a fancy workflow that counted automatically based on stage + activities logged.