Speaker 0: Alrighty. Alright. Welcome, everyone. Mike, can you hear me?

Speaker 1: Yep. You’re fine.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Sorry. I’m having some issues with my camera, um, but no big deal. Welcome, everyone, um, to this session, customize and automate your lead life cycle in Salesforce. Um, happy to be here. My name is Nick Loescher from Sercante, and I’m gonna be moderating today’s session. Uh, before we get started, just a few quick housekeeping items. Yes, the session is being recorded, um, and will be available on demand afterwards. Um, if you do have a question, I’m going to be moderating and keeping track of those questions. So please just throw those in chat. We will address them. Um, and let’s go ahead and get started. Mike, I’m gonna let you introduce yourself.

Speaker 1: Awesome. Thanks, Nick. So, uh, I’m Mike Morris. I’m also with Circante. I’m a senior, um, engagement manager at Circante. Been there about six years. Background is is marketing, and, uh, it’s been really fun to take that marketing background and apply it to Salesforce ecosystem. So today, we’re gonna kinda walk through how we can use automate how we can use Salesforce to customize and automate our lead life cycles, and, uh, hope you enjoy it. So before we get started, I do wanna say thanks to our sponsors. Without our sponsors, we couldn’t have great events like this. So Circante, Salesforce, Stencil, the Spot, Storylane, we appreciate all of you. And, uh, if you have time, check those sponsors out. Please be sure to do that.

So today, we’re gonna talk about we’re gonna start talk by talking about the importance of life cycle statuses. We’re gonna talk about several different options for updating statuses. I’m gonna do a demo of an option that I use using Flow. We’re also gonna talk about closing the feedback loop between sales and marketing. To me, this is one of the most important things, and it’s really often overlooked. Um, marketers will always, you know, send a lead over to sales, but never hear back what hack usually happened with that lead. So closing that feedback loop to me is really critical. And then lastly, we’re gonna do a quick summary and hopefully have some q and a. About that, with further ado, we’ll get moving.

So life cycle statuses. So why are they important? So just for a moment here, put your shoes put yourself in the shoes of a BDR and s d or an SDR, and say you get these two leads. You see the lead on the left here, no. There’s no account engagement grade, but a score of one sixty two. You see the lead on the right? You have a b plus score of 72. What does that mean?

Speaker 0: We are having people say

Speaker 1: Sorry, Nick?

Speaker 0: Uh, Yeah. I’m sorry. We we’re we’re having, um, people say that they cannot hear us, so I’m just trying to figure out, um, what’s going on. Oh, and now they can hear us. So I’m sorry, Mike. We had a bunch of people saying so Yeah. Apologize for the interruption. Go ahead.

Speaker 1: Alright. Sorry, everyone. Alright. Perfect. So getting back to the slide here. So the situation here is, you know, you’re an SDR or a BDR. You have this lead pop in at Salesforce. You look at this, you could really easily make the assumption that the lead on the left is the better lead based on the score alone. Without knowing the context of what that grade and score mean, it’s hard for, you know, someone who’s not in this day to day like we are to actually understand what this what this means.

So this is where life cycle statuses come in into play. The sales team really needs context. So when you think about that data coming into Salesforce, regardless of where it’s coming from, the marketing team, the marketing ops team, whoever is generating that lead has the context, and, really, it’s their responsibility in my eyes to provide that to sales teams. And this can be done by translating those things, those letters, those numbers, those codes that we’re getting into statuses or you know, you don’t even need to call it life cycle status. You call it whatever you want, a lead rating, whatever you wanna call this so your sales teams really understand what you’re talking about. And when you’re doing this, there are some best practices to follow. We wanna talk about working with the sales teams to develop these these contexts. So we wanna work in collaboration with the sales leadership. We don’t want marketing or another group in a vacuum to design these statuses and just push them down to sales. It needs to be a collaborative process. SLAs are also really critical. So if we’re sending this lead over to sales team, we need to set an expectation of how quickly it can be followed up on based on the actual priority of that lead and make sure that this is agreed to by both parties. And very similar to as we do with scoring inside account engagement right now, life cycle statuses should be reviewed regularly and updated based on feedback from the sales teams. You know, if we say, uh, a hot lead is a score over a 100 and we send it over to sales, we need sales to tell us, hey, Mike. That really wasn’t that hot. So I know to go back in the future to adjust my score, maybe my hot is now one twenty five or one fifty. So that’s really important that we have that back and forth. Otherwise, we’re gonna really lead to a sales team that’s gonna not take those marketing leads with much credence, and they’re gonna, you know, just kind of ignore them.

One of the ways I like doing this is by making I call it the life cycle matrix here, um, but you can call it whatever you’d like here. It’s Rosetta Stone. It’s another term I was playing with. But, essentially, what I’m doing here is I’m defining my life cycle statuses based on my account engagement grades and scores. So what I’m doing here is you can see in the in the left column is I’m giving the a grade a little bit of a bump, a little bit of a prioritization. So if you’ve met my grade criteria, you know, you’re you’re my perfect ICP, I’m gonna give you a little bit of leeway and say, even if your score is a little bit less than a 100 between seventy five and ninety nine, you’re still a hot MQL. But if you’re any other, um, grade, you’re gonna have to score up higher to hit the high MQL status. So I’m giving a little bit more of a of a bump to that grade because that person is beating both criteria points. So, hopefully, it all makes sense so far. Um, I think it’s pretty cool. I I really like how this works out.

So now once you get have that figured out, you have a couple options for updating this information inside Salesforce. The first option is probably the most simple and what most people who are using account engagement would default to. Um, I’ve done this myself many times, so, um, not passing any judgment there. But it’s a simple solution just using an engagement studio program, and you can use a complex rule logic and essentially say, if a person meets this criteria, grade score combo, change their life cycle status, syncs over to Salesforce, you’re good to go. The only issues with this process are account engagement studio programs only run once per day. So think of a situation where, you know, Nick might come to your website, you know, at ten this ten this morning. He completes a, um, a form on the site. His score goes up, triggers the engagement studio program, his status is updated. Later in the day, he comes back and says, man, that that that document was great. I wanna talk to their sales team now. Complete the contact us form. Well, that second, um, entry, that second submission, the grade’s gonna get updated. It’s gonna, you know, be inside account engagement, but that account that engagement speed of program is not gonna run till tomorrow, so you’re not gonna see that bump inside Salesforce for the next day. So that’s a key consideration because it could really impact your speed to lead process. The other issue is complex rule logic. You can go usually five layers deep on complex rule logic. In a lot of cases, that’s gonna work fine for you. But if you refer back to that little matrix I showed on the previous slide, that gets kind of technical when you start looking at the criteria, and you can’t cons you can’t, um, accommodate for all that with inside that those five rules. Next way you could do this is you could get around that by using dynamic list, but that introduces a whole another level of of issues because dynamic lists do have to refresh. So if you’re relying on dynamic lists as a decision point inside an engagement studio program, there’s a high likelihood that prospect could pass that point prior to the the dynamic list being refreshed if it’s not done properly. So there’s some other issues that kinda come with the engagement studio program approach, which is why I prefer the flow approach.

So the thing that’s great about flow is actions are triggered on a field value change, there are no limitations on run frequency. So if Nick filled out that form at 10:00, filled out another form at 10:05, another one at 10:15, that flows in a fire three times. We can do mathematical calculations if we need to. Um, formula fields are another key area that really help with this. We can cut also customize user user notifications. We’ve all seen notifications from account engagement before, and if you know what you’re looking for, they’re great, but sometimes sales teams are kinda confused by them. So, Flow, you can really customize that. You can also update information on related objects and inject data and custom objects as well. So it gives you a lot more flexibility on the flow side.

Now there are some considerations we need to consider as well. So in order for the flow to run, obviously, the prospect has to be inside account engagement. So when you’re I’m sorry. Inside Salesforce. So when you’re creating that record inside account engagement, you do have to have an assignment process so those records sync over. The way I like doing this is if I’m not assigned to a specific person, you know, based on a lead being super qualified, I generally just assign to it, like, a marketing queue or an MQL queue just so I can get it into Salesforce. In that way, I can still trigger the assignment trigger the, uh, flows. Flows are also object specific. So for those working inside account engagement exclusively, this is a a key consideration. We’re used to, you know, prospects inside account engagement, and engagement studio program impacts both. Inside Salesforce, flows are object specific. So if we build a flow on this on a lead object, it’s only going to update records on lead object. If we wanna also look at contacts, we have to have a flow running on the contact object as well. So that’s, um, really, really important here. And the last thing to keep in mind is that account engagement scores can only be updated inside account engagement. It’s kinda deceiving because if you build if you create a flow, you can actually change the score of the account engagement you can actually change the score inside a flow. However, when the records sync, it’s gonna revert back to the account engagement score. So that’s really important, um, because, you know, if you wanna change those scores, you have to go back to account engagement.

So with that said now let’s take a look at this flow. We’re gonna kinda walk through some design elements of the flow first, and I’m gonna actually show the flow inside, um, my org, and we’ll do some testing, some debugging, and kinda play around with it a little bit. It can keep me honest on time here.

Alright. So the first thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna use a record triggered flow in this case. We’re gonna use this flow, and we’re gonna basically trigger any time a new record’s created, the p r dot score changes, or the p r dot grade changes. So, again, this is giving me that flexibility that we mentioned earlier, where if a person interacts or engages with you multiple times in the same day, we are gonna trigger the flow multiple times in the same day. The next area is the decision element. This is kinda where the magic comes in on this flow. This is where we’re going to really choose the paths that people go down. And this is kinda where I was talking about with the complex rule logic, we run into issues. As you can see here, this path I have for it’s highlighted right now for inquiry. Is pretty deep. We’re looking at scores, we’re looking at grades, we’re looking at different criteria. And if you tried baking all that into just those, um, complex rule logic, it simply wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t have the flexibility you need. And we’ll look at this in a bit more detail in the the actual flow. And then resource, um, flow flow also has formulas, which are really cool. So in this case, we can use flows we can use formulas to set values like dates example here. But what I’m doing here is I’m not just saying, you know, set this first MQL date regardless. I’m basically saying if the date is already blank, then set the date. If I was using account engagement, it would get a little bit more complicated in terms of doing that. I’d have to have multiple nodes to make it, um, a bit little bit more challenging. Could accomplish it, but this is a much cleaner interface. And this is kind of what the whole beast looks like when we get it all built out here. Yeah. It’s not too bad, but we’ll take a look at it in more detail here because this will let you see exactly what it’s doing.

So this is the flow itself. If you’re not familiar with flow here, this is your toolbox on the on the left here, kind of shows you the elements that you’re working with, the resources, and some of our formula fields we’re dealing with as well. At the top here, this is our, um, entry criteria. And, again, we’re we’re using a formula here. You could use, um, regular regular logic, but I just prefer the formula. It gives me a little bit more flexibility. And then this is really it’s kinda magic element here. This is where we’re controlling all the criteria within our little matrix. The thing that’s nice here is we can add additional paths as needed by just by clicking the plus button. So if we had a a fifth path we need to add, we could just add another one. And the real magic is this conditional logic. It’s very similar to a Salesforce report where you can say if if one and two or three or four and define your criteria to make it really work for you. The elements below here, the pink elements, these are where we’re actually updating our records. So in this element here, we’re basically setting our first MQL date. We’re setting this record to hot, and we’re also incrementing an MQL counter. The MQL counter is kinda interesting too. This is another formula field here where we can, um, go in here. And what we’re doing is basically saying, if the counter is blank, set to one, if it already has a value, add one to it. So this way, we can track how many times a a prospect or lead has gone through our processes over and over. So Let’s take a look at how

Speaker 0: Yes. I wanted to interrupt you before you got out of this section. We did have a question come through and I assume that this is in the entry criteria, but the question was, what should happen when the lead score threshold um, is reached? Does that does the score stay, especially if the lead object is not in use? So I’m not sure exactly what they meant by the second part of that question. But

Speaker 1: Well, the first part, I’m gonna I’m gonna actually, it’s it’s a really good question. I’m gonna show you right now. So let’s look at this. You’re kinda reading ahead in my slides there, whoever asked that question, so I appreciate it. So we’re gonna debug right here. It’s I wanna back out of this for a second. It think it thinks I saved some it thinks I changed something, so it’s wanting me to save again. Let’s go in that flow again real quick. I didn’t change anything, but we’ll go into it anyway. So what we’re gonna do here is we’re gonna do a quick debug so you can kinda see how the process works. In this case here, I’m gonna debug based on an individual who has this high score already. So this individual here already has a grade of a, already has a score of 76. So by default on our matrix, that record is already a hot MQL. Let’s say this individual then does something else and interacts and their score goes to, you know, one zero five, just pick a number. What’s gonna happen in this case here is they’re gonna follow this path here, but what I wanna do here is I because this person was already a hot MQL, I don’t wanna increment them again. I don’t they can’t become hotter, for example. So what I’m doing is I’m using an additional node here, and I’m saying, if that previous records value was already a hot MQL, don’t even bother making any updates. Just leave them as is. So that kind of addresses that question you were saying about, you know, do you keep processing the same record over and over? Now let’s look at another, um, record here. Hopefully, it’s not gonna ask me to save again. Good. One to my person here. Now this individual here has a score of 63 and a b, so by default, this person’s an inquiry. So now let’s say they do something on your website, they complete a website form, they jump up to a 100 points. I’m gonna do one zero one just to make sure. Go jump up to a 100 points. At this point, they’re gonna go back through the process again. It’s gonna identify them as qualifying for as a hot MQL. Because they weren’t previously hot MQL, we’re going to upset their status to hot MQL, and we’re going to also increment their MQL counter. So it’s a nice way of just kind of making sure this is happening in real time, getting sales information they need, and really, um, translating those those codes and those things that we deal with on a on a regular basis to terms that are understandable and relatable so they know the quality of the lead and they know what they should be following up with. Any questions related to that before I jump to the next section about, um, how we can look at those in the feedback loop?

Speaker 0: Yep. I don’t see anything right now, Mike.

Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you.

Speaker 0: You’re doing great on time. We have about twelve minutes.

Speaker 1: Thanks. Alright. So the next thing we wanna talk about so now we’re we’re effectively have a process in place for elevating the the life cycle status of records of leads. But what happens when sales gets that lead and they say, you know, Mike, this really wasn’t that good. You know, how’s that feedback loop gonna come back to us? So, you know, this is my my quote here. You know, the these are hot leads that need to be called immediately, and I attribute this to every marketer, including myself. In the real world, we know not every lead’s gonna purchase. We know that some are gonna need to be nurtured, and we know that sales needs to has has ability to provide feedback to us.

So we’re gonna allow this by using life cycle statuses or lead statuses. So inside Salesforce, in most page layouts, you’re gonna have the, um, pass across the top of the screen where the sales teams are working, and they can, you know, move that lead from open to nurture to unqualified. So what we can do is we can use changes in these statuses to trigger flows that allow us to decrease our scores and also change our life cycle statuses. Now the key point to remember here is we did talk earlier about account engagement scores can only be modified inside account engagement, so we gotta kinda keep that in mind here because that’s part of the process. What we’re gonna do here is we’re actually gonna use a flow in an automation rule inside account engagement studio to make this work. We’re gonna create a custom checkbox inside Salesforce, and once a lead is moved to a nurture status or to a a a disqualified status, we’re gonna check that checkbox. That checkbox, when it syncs over to Salesforce it syncs over to account engagement is gonna trigger an automation rule. The automation rule will then degrade the score and uncheck the box, kinda resetting it for the next record, and the action of that score change inside account engagement will trigger our first flow, which will again change our life cycle status. So in this case, the way I have mine set up is if you change the status to nurture, I want their life cycle status to go to inquiry. If if I change them to unqualified, I want to go to suspect. So what I’m doing here is I basically have a single flow inside Salesforce, and it’s looking for either of those status changes. And then I have two different nodes here doing updates. So if the person was set to nurture, I’m gonna check this trigger score decay box to true. If they’re set to disqualified, I’m gonna trigger my zero out to true. And then these are what’s gonna trigger the records to change inside account engagement.

Let’s take a look at that. So that one is right sorry. I’m going back and forth. So this flow is right here. So in this case, I can you can see the decision element is really just looking at which, um, you know, if it’s nurture, it’s gonna go down one path. If not, it’s gonna go down the unqualified path. And let’s go inside account engagement and just look at one of these records, and we’ll play with one. So let me get this individual here. I’m gonna kinda simulate this one because I don’t wanna I don’t have enough time to wait for the, um, rules to sync back and forth between the systems sync between the systems. From this individual here. So right now, this individual has a score of 82, a grade of b. Let’s say they went through one of our reps changed this person to, um, nurture. So at this point, we we wanna degrade their score. So I’m gonna go in here. I’m gonna edit the score. I’m gonna set the score back down to 49 because I know that’s my minimum my minimum threshold for, um, inquiry. Save the prospect. And then when I sync with the CRM, you’re gonna see that my life cycle status is gonna change inside account engagement as well. So let’s find this here. And this is essentially what we’re doing with the the rules. So we set this person back to an inquiry where they were in MQL previously. And then if we look at them inside of Salesforce, we’re gonna see the same the same data points now. So what I did there is I really just simulated the process, but that was that’s what would happen naturally in my org. If someone would have gone from open or any other status and moved to nurture, it would have checked that checkbox. The checkbox would then synced over to Salesforce, which then would have triggered the automation rule to run, which would have taken the exact same actions that I just manually took. So I think this is a nice process to really keep the the channels open, keep the process working, and keep the communication the lines of channel communication between sales and marketing working, um, it really helps to make sure that sales can report back on what they’re seeing and not just, um, you know, go with what marketing is saying on everything. So at that point, um, I’ve kinda opened up for some q and a if we have any. If not, I’ll kinda run through a quick summary slide and then, uh, give you some time back.

Speaker 0: Yeah. I don’t have anything, uh, anything new right now, uh, Mike, but I do wanna just, uh, say, yeah, I really love that process. And those are those are conversations that, um, you and I both have with a lot of clients is is how to kind of bridge that gap between what’s going on in account engagement and what they’re seeing in Salesforce because we certainly don’t want we don’t want our our salespeople playing around in Pardot. So, um, I do have one comment here. Give me one second. So, um, our company does not have nurture as a lead stage. Are there workarounds for this? Or is it Yeah.

Speaker 1: The stages are completely customizable. So within Salesforce, your Salesforce admin can can configure that path to whatever your organization uses. So nurture is just what I use in my org. You could have it as, you know, working, active, inactive, whatever those stages might be in your system. You can certainly customize this process to work within the those confines.

Speaker 0: Yep.

Speaker 1: Alright. So the quick summary here. So at the end of the day, sales needs context to understand what leads should be prioritized. Um, If we’re just sending things over to them with codes and numbers, it doesn’t really help them very much. Salesforce is a really good way to to provide this context using flows. The thing I like about flow too is anything inside Salesforce can be used inside that criteria. So let’s say your company uses 6¢, for example. On 6¢ on on accounts, you have account level data. You could use that account level data to trigger very similar processes, Or if you have other processes or other, um, enhancements inside Salesforce that are updating your lead records or contact records with, say, um, qualification data from ZoomInfo or other sources, you can use that data to factor into the life cycle statuses just as I was using scores and grades. You could use scores, grades, and Zoom contact ID or whatever you wanted to do, so you can pull additional factors in which gives you more flexibility. Engagement studio, like I said, is a viable option. It works really good if speed delete isn’t an issue and you have simple use cases. But if you start getting beyond that, that’s where flow really comes into effect. And then last but not least, you know, feedback from sales is critical, so it shouldn’t be ignored. It really is is, you know, the basis for what we need. Because if the marketing team does isn’t getting that feedback, they’re not gonna know where to spend their money. They’re not gonna know where to focus their efforts. So having that feedback from sales and allowing sales to actually move that person back to a nurture status, which would get them back into your marketing nurture programs, is really, um, just helping move that lead through the funnel eventually. So it all works together. It’s very symbiotic, I guess, but, uh, it works works well.

Speaker 0: Mike, do you have do you see a lot of, um, the clients that you work with that don’t have this process at all that are just relying on, you know, kinda like, um, throwing it over the wall at sales and hoping hoping it works out? Or or do you see a lot of clients that have a good feedback loop?

Speaker 1: Feedback loop is is usually challenging, and it’s something I bring up quite often. And it’s funny. The process we just went through here was developed really closely with one of my clients. I mean, we’re we worked on this together for a very long time and built all this together, so it was a very collaborative process. And it just makes such great sense now. And whenever I’m working with clients, I always bring this up and say, this is a really cool process. You should check this out. And, you know, we’ve I’ve done full on implementations of this in some orgs. And in other orgs, we’ve adapted components of it. And the reality is it it might vary based on what you need in your unique situation, but but I think there are elements of this that can be used inside every organization.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Absolutely. Um, really quickly, we have a minute and a half, um, so this is gonna be a tough one. But, um, we did get a question. Do you have any advice or ideal amount of life cycle stages? What’s that sub stage you use between MQL and SQL? That’s an excellent question.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That is a great question. And, really, I think that varies quite a bit too. There you know, you can look out there and there’s all kinds of different models. Some will have um, let’s go back to that little matrix again because that it kinda leads into that. Oh, come on. I’m going too slow. So in this case, I’m just going four deep. So I’m going a suspect, which is this looks like somebody I might wanna talk to. Inquiry is someone who’s shown an interest in me. So they’ve they’ve filled out a form on my website. They’ve stopped on my booth at a trade show. They’ve taken some action. An MQL is a little bit more engaged, and an m and a hot MQL was the highest level. I’ve seen some organizations take the hot MQL and MQL and merge them into one. I’ve seen some organizations not use a hot MQL, but basically say it’s a it’s a hand raiser. So this person filled out a contact us form on their website. They’ve asked to talk to sales. So that’s prioritized different than a marketing lead. I’ve seen the others who will use the traditional MQL. And then once an MQL is created, then sales takes it to an SQL. So it really just depends on the process you need. And, again, this is a great area to experiment. It’s it’s relatively easy to tweak, so you can definitely do that. I’ve got five seconds, and I think we’ve made it.

Speaker 0: You know, I was just gonna say you better wrap it up. I want to thank everyone for joining. Mike, thanks so much. That was a great session. Thank you so much, everyone.

Speaker 1: Thank you.