What to do with MQLs on accounts with current opportunities

[Anonymous]

I have a theoretical question.

I am currently routing MQLs to my sales team, and they have an SLA to follow up within 2 days. What would you suggest they do with MQLs that are on accounts that they are currently working (i.e. have current opportunities)?

Do you suggest to your teams that they follow up anyway? Or tell them to push the lead to a certain status? Or perhaps hold these leads back in the first place (doesn't seem like the right route...)?

Opening up the floor to suggestions and ideas. I'm curious how others are dealing with these types of scenarios, and what "rules" you have in place at your organizations. Thanks!

[Chris_Willis1]

Our Sales are fairly complex (as are the organizations we sell into) so we run into this issue a lot.  For MQLs belonging to accounts with opportunities, we do prescribe the same SLA for follow up and disposition, and encourage the Sales rep to add the contact as a Contact Role on any opportunity that they would be affiliated with. 

I hope this helps. 

[Dan_Stevens_]

We do the same thing in our global B2B business.  We're on MS Dynamics, so they are instructed to add the lead as a relationship onto the Opportunity.  From a marketing metrics perspective, this would be considered a "Marketing Influenced Opportunity".  Now we also run into similar situations - especially given our account-centric approach and the fact that we sell to existing customers - where we may get a lead that is related to a completely separate/new opportunity.  We have a "duplicate leads" partition/workspace to handle this so that these "new" leads can be synced to CRM and proceed through the sales pipeline.  Interested to see how Engagio (John Miller's new startup) would enable us to do this more efficiently.

[Josh_Hill13]

Totally agree. For some reason sales people are either resistant to this and ignore the leads, or they just Convert to Contact and ignore them.

Every MQL that matches an existing Account should be seen by Sales as an opportunity to sell more, connect more dots, and be seen as helpful, even if that particular lead can't sign a check.

They should be followed up on and set to Recycled or attached to the Account within the SLA period.

[Anonymous]

If the lead is related to the current opp, we use a status of "already engaged" and associated it in order to keep the touchpoint in the metrics. But the lead could be related to a different potential opp - it might depend on what you sell and who you sell to...

[Anonymous]

Same here - most Marketo/SFDC instances I've worked with do a variation of what's been described here, ie:

• SLA still stands
• A human has to identify the lead as belonging to an existing Opp/Account
• Have a status on the lead that indicate the the scenario as such
  • Bonus points for converting the lead into the account and opp w/o creating a new opp
    • Extra bonus points if in your SFDC you have two "converted statuses" - one for a new opp, and one covering this scenario "converted to existing opp" - thus forcing the choice on conversion every time.