Probably one of the most arguable points of contention for any company. When does marketing hand off a lead to sales? Do we have enough intel or what are our criteria as a company to know when that transition should occur? In addition, what are we doing with the other 50-65% of contacts or existing leads in our database that are not getting any attention? What happens when someone re-engages with us that is already a lead or a contact in our database?
In this session, we explore both strategic and tactical options to help align your sales & marketing hand-off process. We will explore Salesforce Path. A native feature to the Sales Cloud platform that you may or may not be using today. We then circle back to why it is so important for marketing to be a part of the sales process and the configuration of your Path on the Lead, Contact, and Opportunity Objects. Lastly, we highlight why you all should be intimate with the fields that support it and that both the marketer and sales are aware of what each status means to use in automation and flow.
Overall, We showcase reinforcing your business process by configuring your CRM to enable adoption and visibility across departments.
Overview of Speaker – Jennifer Schneider – and Presentation
My name is Jennifer Schneider and I’m here with you to talk a little bit about the hand-off between marketing and sales, powered by Process, Salesforce and Pardot. So let’s talk about our agenda.
In today’s session, we explore a few tactical options to help align this process specific to leads and contacts. We’ll explore Path, a native feature to the Sales Cloud platform, that you may or may not be using today. We then circle back to why it is so important for marketing to be a part of the sales process, and the configuration of your Lead Path, the fields that support it, and both the marketer and sales are aware of what each status means and who is responsible during each.
This is what I like to call, reinforcing your business process, by configuring your CRM to enable option and visibility across departments.
Importance of Lead Statuses
Understanding how your Salesforce lead, contact and opportunity objects are configured, and what role they play into the business process should be a foundational part of your process. Since you are often the first touch of net new, as well as the first touch after re-engagement, the journey to sale starts and is controlled by you.
So you ask, how do I coordinate with sales? All right, well, let’s talk a little bit about net new and existing leads. First, your company needs to meet as a team to determine the most appropriate Lead Statuses for your business and understand what they mean. So let’s walk through a few together.
Net new marketing queue nurture:
Now these are net new leads that we need more information on. At this point, we may only have a name and an email address. These leads are actually assigned to a queue, so that marketing can report on the engagement of their assets on the platform. They’re also searchable.
So sales could see if the lead exists, but they are living in their own area until we gather the required information for them to get them to the next status.
Re-engage:
This is when you have a slew of old leads, just chilling in your Salesforce org that have re-engaged over a period of time. Don’t ever create duplicate leads on purpose.
MQL sales working:
At this point, we have enough information to hand-off to our sales team, or our inside sales team, to work. They have a particular cadence that they need to follow to gather more data and determine next steps.
SQL opportunity on conversion:
This status is selected once an opportunity has been established, right before conversion. Some companies may use this status to hand-off to field sales, where they view the SQL leads on a daily basis and then the director converts the lead to a contact and creates an opportunity at the same time while tying that contact to the contact role-related list on the opportunity object.
Converted:
This is a status that you may want to use when you convert a lead to a contact, but there’s not really an opportunity present. Some companies find this useful when a lead is part of a top account, or part of their EBM strategy. They might find it more valuable to convert that to a contact and add them to that account for marketing and tracking purposes of all engagement for that particular account.
Importance of Queues
I love queues. When I talk to my clients, I talk about queues all the time. If you have an inside sales team that works your contacts under MQL or MQC status, assigning those related tasks, they can share those in a queue. So we’re relating those queues to either leads or contacts as an owner, but you can also store your tasks there, so that a group of inside sales folks can work those tasks.
Benefits of Using Contact Statuses
All right, so let’s talk about those new and existing contacts. We have to always think about someone who’s net-new and someone who also lives within our database.
New:
This represents new contacts in your Salesforce org and most likely this is gonna be your default status. Now with the new status, at this point, we may still only have a name company and E-mail, these contacts are actually assigned to a sales rep. And if they have not gone through the process of being a lead first. In case of a legacy contact that’s been sitting in your system for a while, you may find some of these contacts have this new status.
Re-engaged:
This represents legacy contacts that have re-engaged with your website, your forms, your digital marketing, this status can be utilized for that.
MQC sales working:
So at this point, we have enough information to hand-off to our inside sales team to work. They might have a particular cadence, like SalesLoft or High Velocity Sales, and they now know what they need to do to gather more information and engagement.
SQC:
This status is tied to an opportunity. So we talk a lot about the contact role. It’s really neat to be able to also pull those contacts that are currently tied to an opportunity, to possibly use that as a suppression list, or put into a specific nurture of those that are in the opportunity process with your company.
Marketing nurture:
This status gives the power back to your sales team to say: “You know what? They’re just not really ready yet, but I want to stay top of mind, can you guys take over for a while?” Marketing knows they might have a dynamic list that can pull that in and say, we’re gonna go ahead and nurture these guys until they’re ready.
Comparing Lead Statuses to Contact Statuses
All right, so let’s compare the two. Notice, these are pretty much the same, right? We want to have similar processes for our net new leads and conversion, as we do with our regular contacts and leads. When we create processes that are similar and are step-by-step approved, people are able to adapt faster and learn more quickly.
All right, before we talk about how these work with marketing and business processes, I want to point out that this is something that is really scalable and easy to do, and you can do it right with the Path. Just remember that as a marketer your job is never done. As your business processes change and you add or subtract items from your tech stack, you’re going to think of new ideas. You’re going to uncover new use cases and when you do take that internal audit of all the things that are affected and the changes that need to be made.
Benefits of Paths
Now that we’ve dove into such detail around these particular statuses, your next question could probably be, “well how does this fit together?” So we’re gonna introduce the Contact and Lead Paths.
Now, if you do not currently use Path for the Lead and Contact objects, this feature is available in Sales Cloud, at no extra cost. A lot of you might be already utilizing this on the
Opportunity object. But Path allows your team to create instructions, call out key fields for each that need to be completed prior to the next status, and it helps you streamlining training for both sales and marketing. It also allows you to understand and automate when the all mighty hand-off occurs.
Now, since this feature is on the platform, you guessed it, you’re going to want to meet with sales, your Salesforce admin and your marketing team, to build this out collectively with everyone’s input. And more than likely your team is going to build this out in Sandbox prior to creating it in live production. So plan for those steps and that change management.
So let’s take a look at what Lead Path looks like. Now as you can see you’re gonna match up some of those key fields on the lead object and align them with each status. So the gist of it here is within a particular status, that salesperson and that marketer know which fields of information need to be gathered prior to the next step.
We’re gonna talk a little bit later on in the session on how this applies specific to marketing, but I think you can start to see the pattern. Now for this example, I’ve chosen the following fields as key fields to my MQL sales working status; industry, product or products of interest, lead source, last touch, lead source, and description. This would mean that prior to creating an opportunity, we would need to have these fields completed. Now you may have some custom fields and criteria, and this is why it’s so important to get your team and admin all in the same room. Marketers need to take heed of what these fields are.
Similar to the Lead Path, we’re also looking at the Contact Path side. Now for this example in the Contact, we’re gonna use that same process. I’ve chosen fields as key fields to my MQC sales working status:
- Lead source
- Last touch
- Lead source
- Pardot score
- Pardot grade
- Description
Now again, this would mean that prior to creating an opportunity, we would need to have these fields completed. Again, you might have some custom fields that are specific to your company, or your process. Make sure that those get into the right status.
Lastly, determine who’s going to own the Path process. Quarterly reviews of adoption and reporting should help define the updates. Usually an admin should understand those who are using the Path and provide them a process for giving their feedback for change and improvement. That’s the knowledge that’s gonna drive those changes.
So you want your sales team to go through this process and give feedback. You want marketing to utilize these fields. We need that information from the end user to continuously update and make those changes. So schedule that, make that a priority, just know that it’s not a set it and forget it type of situation.
How Does This Affect Marketing
Let’s go back to our net-new marketing queue, nurture status, and talk a little bit through this. So if the key fields that we selected are:
- first name
- last name
- Company
- email address
- Title
- business unit
- Pardot score of 150
- and Pardot grade of A or B
Then as a marketer, we know that we need to have all this information prior to moving to the next status. So that means we need all these fields represented on our forms, represented in completion actions or automation rules, or possibly items in our Engagement Studio programs as well.
How can I use the statuses we set with Marketing? So one way I love to use these types of statuses is in my dynamic lists. You can create powerful segmentation. The example I used earlier is that if a contact is part of an opportunity and they have the SQC status, those might be in a suppression list, or we might have a particular nurture program that we send out to those that are part of our opportunity process. Think about onboarding. If you have onboarding or client services, perhaps there’s a status that would allow you to make sure that you, as a marketer, are contributing to the onboarding process of a new client.
Engagement Studio Programs
Another way I’d love to use these status is creating dynamic lists for unique Engagement Studio programs. So we talked a little bit about that. For someone that has engaged with your content, or maybe your chatbot experiences, we have an idea of maybe what their product of interest is. Use those dynamic lists, along with statuses, to move them from one program to another.
So as we start to gather more information from those forms, from those fields, we can then move them from one program to another and track what they’re engaging in at what status. This is also gonna allow us to have a much bigger view on their journey, from net-new to opportunity.
Website Forms
Another way I love to use this is our website forms. So each one of your website forms should be a one-to-one experience. Be sure to use progressive profiling on new web forms, because you might not want to ask all those questions on the very first form. Progressive profiling is one of the most underutilized features of Pardot so do not forget about it.
Now, each time they come, they’re gonna download more content. You can ask them a new question, these questions are then gonna fill in those fields within that particular status. Of course, once those fields are complete, they’re ready to move on to the next status. You are enriching the lead and contact records in Salesforce, as a marketer, and now you and the sales team are working together to move this lead, this contact, this account along.
All right, another way is to have completion actions on every form and your landing pages. So maybe some of these questions, we don’t want to ask them, but we know the answers based on their activity or their engagement. And so we can utilize the completion actions to fill in these customer default fields, based on their engagement with us. Do not forget about those completion actions.
Conversational Marketing
Lastly, another way that we can utilize these statuses is for all of you out there utilizing conversational marketing, many of you use this type of chat tools, Qualified.com or Drift. Many of you are not using it to enrich your Salesforce records. I’ve seen so many people create experiences with questions in their chat, and all of that information ends up in a conversation. Those should be tied to those fields, ask those questions, change the labels, make it more conversational, but then push that information to your Salesforce fields. All right, so now that you know what key fields are, you can rework your experiences to support your overall process.
