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Transcript

All right, everyone. Thank you so much for joining today and being interested in the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Marketo engaged champion deep dive series. We’re so excited to have you today and we’re going to talk all about lead life cycles. Make sure that you are signed up in the deep dive mug because our next one is coming in a little over two weeks and it’s going to be all about APIs. So if you are signed up to that group and you’ve joined it, you will make sure to get all of the notifications for these great deep dives that we have planned and are launching. My name is Carissa Russell. I’m a senior marketing operations analyst at McGraw Hill and I’m here today with Jenny Robertson, who’s going to walk us through the strategy behind building competent lead life cycles for your business. And I will turn it over to her to get the agenda. Great. Nice to meet everybody. So today we’re going to cover lead life cycle strategy and why it’s important. We’re going to go through some different considerations you should think about when looking at and deciding about your revenue cycle model and lead life cycle journey. We’ll talk about how you can make that a circular journey and talk about more considerations when it comes to stages and key tips and tricks when it comes to launching your RCM and monitoring and optimization you can be doing on your either new or established life cycle journey. So a little bit about me, why I’m here today. I’m the chief technology officer at Annuitus. I’m a demand gen agency I’ve been working for for almost 10 years, 9 and a half years, but I’ve been both client side and agency side. I’m nine time Marketo champion. I’ve been in the Marketo world for over 12 years and the technology world for 20 years. So I’ve seen a lot of different implementations and worked in a lot of different Marketo instances. So I’m excited to talk about lead life cycles today because I’ve lived through a lot different outside of work. I have two boys. I’m a proud boy mom. I coach both of their soccer teams, even though I know nothing about soccer. I know more now than I used to, but as all marketers, you know, do when you’re thrown with a challenge, you take it on and conquer it the best you can. And also outside of work, I think it’s keep me sane. I’m also a runner. I like to run a lot. So a little bit about me and we’ll dive in. So before we dive in though, what is a lead life cycle? I’m sure everybody here knows what a lead life cycle is. There’s a lot of different ways you can define it, but it’s the process in which leads are converted into customers. It’s the definitions of the stages a person goes through from the moment they enter your database until they’re a customer. So when it comes to the lead life cycles, the first stage or the first step is always strategy. And this starts with collaboration and stakeholder alignment. What team members should be involved in finalizing what your lead life cycle journey looks like for your company, what key people should be involved, what people should give opinions versus make decisions on what the life cycle journey is for your company. These details are really important and having a team, having the teams that should be involved is really key and making sure the right people are aligning and the right stakeholders are aligning. Marketing and sales should definitely be aligned in this journey and further sales stages should also be tracked. I’ve seen a lot of companies where for marketers especially, up to QL is really important and from there it’s sales problem, but really the life cycle stages and the life cycle strategy and the Marketo revenue cycle modeler should really be that full end-to-end journey and also be considering those later sales stages as well. So it includes a lot of collaboration, a lot of alignment, and it’s definitely not over after a QL. So strategy validation is also important. You’ve got alignment on what the stages are, but what about the definitions and what moves people in and out of those life cycle stages and is the model foolproof? This is an important step when thinking through the strategy. It’s really easy to think through like the stage names and what makes those stages and that, but you have to really think about the definitions of those stages in the model in order to make sure that it’s validated and it’s going to work for you.

And also of course along the way when you’re thinking through that strategy, making sure you document those definitions and those transition requirements is important.

So looking at the stage definitions, this is just an example of a revenue cycle modeler snapshot from Marketo. So this shows clearly this particular model, somebody starts at known and then eventually hopefully becomes close one, right? So this is great start to stage definitions. We know the name of the stages, we’ve aligned with stakeholders, everyone’s agreed that this is the stages for us, but defining those is really key and having those defined in a way that other teams can understand is key. So just an example, something we did for ourselves is we have those stage definitions documented in a way that everybody understands. So everybody understands that an engaged lead is somebody who has responded to an initial offer or an initial marketing campaign or something on our website, right? So for us, when you’re known, you haven’t engaged with us, you’re just in our database. When you’re engaged, you’ve responded to one thing on our website, right? When you’re qualified engaged, you’ve now responded to a few things and we’ve learned more about you. We have more demographic information about you. For us, the definition between we have a couple of different qualified stages, a warm qualified lead is somebody who has been interacting heavily with our content on our website. A hot qualified lead is a hand raiser. So we’ve defined those a little bit differently. And I won’t go into all the definitions of this example model, but it’s just really key to make sure that you are defining what those stages mean so that everybody is aligned and has the same understanding. Not only is it important to define your definitions, but it’s also important to define your transitions and the requirements behind those transitions. So this is just a few examples. It was going to be too much to put on a slide of full revenue model transition definition and requirements. But this is an example of the first three stages of the revenue cycle model I just showed and what makes somebody transition into those stages for us. So a known is a record that is just created in your database. You don’t need any other details than that. When they first become a record in the database, they become known. And for us, when somebody becomes engaged, they actually need a lot of different things. We’re looking at lead score, we’re looking at behavior score, we’re making sure they have an email address, we’re making sure they’ve interacted with marketing, and we’re making sure they have a certain key, a demographic field for us. To become qualified engaged, the lead score and behavior score qualifications are higher. We want you to have a higher score to become qualified engaged. So we have different criteria that we’ve defined very clearly that shows that, hey, if you’re engaged, this is exactly what that means. And if you have your entire model documented in this way, you actually end up getting a lot less questions too. After you’ve launched a revenue cycle model, or if you’ve made updates to a revenue cycle model, you might get a lot of questions from sales or marketers. Why did this person qualify? Or why is this person engaged and not qualified engaged? And if you have it documented in this way, it’s very easy to say, oh, well, that person is not qualified engaged because their lead score is only 375. Or maybe it’s because their behavior score wasn’t high enough. But when you document it in this way, it makes it very clear what is going to push somebody in a certain stage so that it’s really easy to understand where people are in your model and why. But we also include the actions that are taken for each of those stages. So when somebody reaches the engaged stage or they reach the qualified engaged stage, it doesn’t just mean they’re in that stage. Maybe we need to update other fields to make it visible in Salesforce for sales to see that they’re in stage. Or depending on the stage, maybe we want to take action like send an alert. So we also, in the same document where we’re documenting the definitions of the transition and the requirements, we’re also documenting what happens at each stage so that it’s very clear as an alert being sent, is a field being updated. Just gives really good visibility into the model and then it allows multiple members of the team to understand how the model works. So next, let’s get into considerations. Before building or updating a revenue cycle model that tracks the lead lifecycle, there are a lot of considerations to keep in mind.

So first, we’ll talk about the funnel management framework. The funnel management framework is really key to enabling your lifecycle model and a strong RCM, which in case anybody, I don’t think I explained this earlier, doesn’t know RCM is short for revenue cycle modeler. So you really need to be thinking about your full funnel management framework when you’re thinking about your lead lifecycle. And that in and of itself is probably a whole nother webinar. So we won’t get into too many crazy details, but at a high level, your funnel management framework lead scoring obviously impacts your revenue cycle model. A lot of people qualify off of lead score, but if you’re only qualifying off your lead score, you might be missing opportunity to have a stronger model. For us, we look at key fields that are populated. We have a progressive model. An example of that progressive model is here where we ask different questions depending on how many times and what form you’re on. If you visited our website and you’ve downloaded two pieces of content, then you’re going to hit our form three and we have a different field on that. Then we have another forms. So we actually do look at demographic fields in addition to scoring and knowing how far you’ve made it through our progressive model will also help progress you through our RCM. So for us, that looking at those key demographic fields and fields that we gather from progressive form and how far along you are in your form journey also impact our RCM. Also, obviously marketing and sales qualification processes are going to impact your RCM. The definition of what’s a qualified lead and what makes a qualified lead and how do you handle a qualified lead and when do you turn it back or when do you move to an opportunity. Those processes are really key and impact your model. So making sure you’re thinking through and talking about those things is really going to be key as well because if you just keep an old funnel management framework in place and you want to revamp your revenue model, you might find, or your lead lifecycle model, you might find that you really need to revamp your scoring model too. So you kind of do need to consider your funnel management framework when you’re thinking about your lead lifecycle model. And the last piece of that is opportunity stage management. Again, I said earlier, it’s very important, yes, to track through qualified lead, but you really want to track through the entire sales process. So figuring out what opportunity stage management you need in your revenue cycle model is also key. And I think I’ll talk about that a little bit more detail later, but depending how granular you need to report on and get, you may be able to simplify that in Marketo, but there’s a lot of different ways to look at it. But that being said, just make sure when you’re revamping or thinking about your lead lifecycle model, you’re also thinking about these other funnel management pieces because they really do impact your lead lifecycle model. Also interaction tracking, how are you tracking form fills? How are you tracking marketing interactions that aren’t maybe non-digital interactions? It could be webinar registrations that are integrated into your website, whatever it may be. Understanding those and making sure those are accounted for in your lead lifecycle model is also key. I’ve seen companies that have lead scoring in place and they’ve got their revenue cycle model in place, but they’ve got these marketing activities that are happening that aren’t recorded in a way that are getting scored and thus is not impacting the revenue model. So making sure you’re thinking about impacts there too is also important. And then also thinking about field progression and holds. So for us, we know that on your first form, you tell us your main pain points. So we know if we want to make you engage, that might be a field we want to use. Or we know on our third form, you tell us your barrier to change. So we could use those in strategic ways in our model, but you also have to be careful. You’re not putting in field criteria that might be holding somebody back that you want to progress forward. I’ve seen revenue cycle models that are asking for a field to be populated to progress somebody forward, but you would never get the information for that field in time to progress them forward. So thinking through those kinds of things is really key, really key in things to be thinking about.

So next we talk about making your revenue cycle model a circular journey. So the linear journey, everybody has it. It’s very nice. And it’s the journey we want everybody to take known to closed one. That is the journey we care about. But there is opportunity to make your revenue cycle model more of a circular journey. And there’s a lot of ways to do this. This is just an example of a model we have today. We have our track that gets you from known to engaged to qualified engaged. You can’t see it says qualified engaged because the RCM doesn’t wrap the text very well, but then we have our QLs and then we have eventually closed one. But for us, we do have QL turnbacks. So when you become warm or you become hot, we can turn you back to engaged. If sales works the lead and decides that it’s not ready, we will turn back to engaged. We also have organic turnbacks. So when somebody becomes closed, lost after they sit in the closed loss stage for 90 days, we’re going to organically turn them back. And depending on their interactions with us, we’ll set them back to known or engaged. They can start over in the model. And for us, for closed one, there’s a couple of different ways. And this depends on your business model for closed one, depending on what your product and your sales cycle is. That might be something where they’re a client till they’re not a client. So they stay in closed one until you close them back. It might be they’ve purchased a product and you need them to purchase again. So after 90 days, you want to turn that back. Or it might be you have a client life cycle model, which we have done. So depending on your needs, there’s also opportunity for life cycle resets once somebody becomes a closed one. But that being said, it’s just really important to know you don’t need to make your life cycle journey linear. You can definitely make it more circular and granular so that you can report on those different things. So there’s different ways to track and report on both linear and non-linear journeys. So date stamps, I have here that they’re good for linear tracking. I’m not the biggest fan of having to use date stamp fields, but they definitely work for linear tracking. So if you’ve got a model where people are just going to be hitting through each stage one time, then a date stamp field is a great way to just capture that history so that you can use it for extra reporting if you need it. Or historical reporting down the road doesn’t hurt to have those date stamp fields. Date stamp fields don’t work as well when you have a circular journey where people are going to be going through stages multiple times, and then you’re going to be overwriting that data. So things to think about if you want to use date stamp fields or use those for historical reporting or reasons. For non-linear tracking, the revenue cycle analyzer does show you all those different stage movements. Revenue Cycle Analytics has some really great reporting that allows you to see the different movements and the different stages. You can use JSON data fields. An example of that is in that blue top box right here. JSON data fields, there’s pros and cons to this approach too. They’re really great because they can be exported out and used by a data science team in reporting. You can just keep adding in stage transitions in a JSON format to that data field and you can have your entire revenue cycle linear or non-linear journey there.

The caveat there, you have to be careful, is if you have a database where you’re merging a lot of records and things of that nature, you can lose data that way. So that’s not necessarily going to be a really great method if you’re one of those companies that has duplicates and is constantly merging and cleaning your database. Another way is you can use revenue stage transition exports from the Marketo Engage Activity Log. So every time the revenue stage changes, there is a transition in the activity log that tells you the daytime of that stage change. It tells you the stage it came from, the stage it went to. That stuff is exportable via API and it’s available for 24 months via API. So you can, if you have a data science team, export that data out via API and use that for your reporting, which is actually what we do today. It’s a really great way. If you have a data science team and you have that capability, it’s a really great way to get those stage transitions out into data warehouse and then use for reporting. Not to say there’s not other ways you can do it, but these are some ways you can look at non-linear tracking. So if you’re not lucky enough to have a data science team, definitely revenue cyber analytics has some strong reporting functionality there you can use.

Okay, so some considerations when it comes to RCM stages. Just something to be aware of in case you’re not already. Records are automatically added to the first stage when they become known. So the second record enters your database, out of the box Marketo is going to put them into that very first stage. You can see as an example in the snapshot here, you cannot define those rules that put somebody to known. Something even my CEO nine years ago wanted to do is he wanted only people with email address to be known. And I said, no, email or not, everyone who gets created is going to go into the first stage. So we had to talk through like those things and the pros and cons, but everybody does get entered into that first stage. There are transition rules that you can set up that I have a snapshot of later. If you want to have people skip that first stage, you can use different criteria to have them start somewhere else. But at the end of the day, when somebody first gets created, they do get added to the model and you may or may not see that first stage transition in the activity log. So to back up to the previous slide where I was saying, you can use those revenue stage changes to identify when somebody moves status stage. You can use those when they move stage to stage, but they’re not always going to see that very first entry into known. But the way we look at it is we know you became known when you got created in the database, but just something to be aware of. And then there is account level tracking and Facebook and AdWords conversions. I just have a snapshot here in this sandbox wasn’t connected to AdWords, but it is really key to make sure that when you set up your revenue cycle modeler, I always recommend you make sure you’re tracking by account, which is that little red box at the bottom there. Every stage after known allows you to track by account. So in revenue cycle analytics, you can run reports based on accounts and not just people. So it’s really important to just make sure you have the setting checked. It doesn’t do anything to your instance to check it. So definitely something we just always make sure we do. You can also set up Facebook conversions and AdWords conversions too. So you’re sending that data into Facebook and into Google ads to be able to see the revenue cycle transitions there as well and how it impacts those things. So a few integrations you can easily set up just to be aware of. There’s different types of stages that you can set up in your revenue cycle model as you’re tracking your life cycle stages. The snapshots I’ve shown are all inventory stages, which basically holds records. There is also an SLA stage type and a gate stage type. We do not use the SLA stage type because our SLAs are too complex. But if you wanted to use an SLA stage, let’s say for QL warm or QL hot, you would just change the transition types to the SLA stage and you could choose the amount of days that you expect sales to work that QL. And if it’s still in that stage after it hits that threshold, then you’re going to be able to see that in Marketo reporting that, hey, this person is in that SLA revenue stage and they’ve been in it too long. The reason we don’t use it is we have SLAs that are in hours and days, and we use dispensation and conversion SLAs. So the SLA stage just doesn’t work for us. But if your model is simpler and hey, if somebody is a QL, they need to move stages in seven days and that’s it, then that could be an option for you. But that is there and something to be aware of if you wanted to use it.

The gate stage is really a stage that just, I would say, flows people through. So it’s like a deciding stage. So people are going to pass through a gate stage. So a good example of that would be like you can see here, we have a qualified warm and a qualified hot. If we wanted to, we could have put a gate stage before that to say QL and flow everybody through this QL gates and then move them to, are they a warm QL or are they a hot QL, as an example. So a gate stage doesn’t hold people. They just hit it before they go on to one or two or even more stages after that. So we don’t use gate stages in our model because we don’t have a need for it. But as an example, it is there. If you have a use case for it, it’s definitely something that can be used. So just wanted to make sure everyone was aware of the different stages and stage types that is.

And then when you are looking at an existing model or building a new model, it’s important to just be aware of phases and validation as you set up your model. And you can see where those are located here. When you click on phases, it takes you to this snapshot on the left, where basically you just have sliders to move pre-qualified, marketing qualified, sales accepted, et cetera, through your model. And you assign your detour stages to a qualification or close one opportunity. It’s just asking you to set this up. So if you wanted to use the revenue cycle reporting, you could report on those stages in this way. So a lot of people actually miss this because it’s not commonly used in reporting. But even though we don’t use it, but we still make sure we set it up. So it’s just something to be aware of for phases. If you don’t touch it and you don’t update it, it’s not going to break anything. But it just makes sense to go ahead and set it up if you haven’t. So if you have an existing model, it might be something to go check on. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were to find that the phases needed some adjustment. Also, if I go back, if you see on the right side here, it says validate. If you click on validate, it is checking your model to make sure there’s no issues before you make it live. So if all the transitions are set up correctly and everything looks good, it’s going to tell you you have a successful validation. In our sandbox, I have an example here on the right, in the right blue box, to show you an example of what the validation is going to tell you if you have an issue. So in this example, in the model in our sandbox, it tells me that we’re missing a smart list rule for our QL hot to engaged transition. So it’s going to help you catch any issues or flaws in your revenue cycle modeler before you launch. So it’s really important to make sure you’re aware of what that validate button is for. And then when it comes to transitions, every single arrow you see in the model, on the right here, I’ve got an example of what that transition looks like when you click on the arrow. You have two options for all of these arrows and transitions. When you click on the transition, you can bring in a trigger that says manual stage change. And this means I’m going to change the stage in a smart campaign instead of in the modeler itself. Or you can change the stage or you can bring in all the triggers and filters into each transition in your revenue cycle modeler and you can set it up that way. When Marketo originally launched revenue cycle modeler, gosh, I think it was 10 years ago at this point, it’s been a long time.

A lot of people were setting up transitions inside the modeler. So for example, you saw earlier for our model to become engaged, you need a lead score of, I think it was 140. So I would pull in here that the lead score changed and it was 140, or I would pull in the behavior score change and it was at least 40. So I pull in all my triggers and all my filters in this smart list inside the revenue cycle modeler and set it up here. So that brings up the question, do you set up transitions inside your revenue cycle modeler or do you do it outside of your revenue cycle modeler in a smart campaign? For us, we definitely, definitely recommend doing it outside of your revenue cycle modeler. It really allows you for easy visibility. It allows for more customization and flexibility and for easy optimization.

On the right here, you’ll see an example of all the smart campaigns we have in our revenue cycle model. So we’ve got a smart campaign for each stage that’s defining when somebody should go to that stage. The reason we want to do this outside the model is if we want to optimize, we don’t have to update the transitionables and the revenue cycle model itself. And every time you make an update to revenue cycle model itself, you have to re-approve it and then you have versioning control. But it also allows you to do much more than update the revenue stage. In here, if you were to update the revenue stage through these transitions, all it’s going to do is update the revenue stage. When you have smart campaigns, you can update a lead status field, you can send an alert, you can take other actions based on that stage change. So it really just allows you a lot more control of what happens when somebody moves to that new life cycle stage as compared to just setting the revenue stage in Marketo. So definitely setting up the RCM transitions outside of the revenue cycle modeler is really definitely something I would recommend.

Also, you have to be careful when you are setting up the transitions outside of the revenue cycle model that you’re not accidentally setting up transitions in a way they shouldn’t be set up. So if I go back to, this will show a little bit. If I go back to this model, you can see like when you’re known, you should be able to transition to engaged or we have that you should be able to go to an opportunity. But the way our model is set up, you should not skip from known to qualified engaged. We have our transition set up in a way that if you suddenly have a huge score increase in demographics, you should transition from known to engaged to qualified engaged. We have it set up in that way. When you set it up inside the revenue cycle modeler itself, it kind of self-controls that for you because you can’t transition the stage until you’re in a stage. When you’re setting it up in smart campaigns, you kind of have to think that through. If you want somebody to not be able to move from known to say qualified engaged, you need to make sure your smart campaign smart lists are listening for that so that it doesn’t happen. So there are some nuances you have to think through when you’re setting it up this way. But once you’ve got it in a good place and you’ve tweaked it a little bit, you’ll see it’s really not hard to do.

Okay, so next we talked a little bit about assignment rules earlier.

But initially when somebody first enters your database, this is what it looks like. It says your initial stage is your first stage. In this example, it was prospect. You can add choice steps here. If you have certain fields, that means somebody should start in a different stage or whatever it may be. You can add choice steps and control that a little more. So this is just an example of what that looks like. You can also use RCM to control when records sync to salesforce.com. And our RCM, we’ve got a sync to Salesforce campaign. And we’re basically saying, hey, if somebody is created and they’re not in Salesforce, we want a full sync, we will sync them. But we also request this campaign when somebody is an accelerator, which is a QL. So we control when they sync to Salesforce from our RCM program. And when somebody becomes a qualified lead, our qualified RCM smart campaign will then request they sync to Salesforce so that they get that QL quickly. So you can control when records sync to Salesforce through your RCM. And then you definitely also want to create visibility in Salesforce for sales and marketers of what revenue stage they’re in. So it’s definitely recommended you create a field in Salesforce that you can also tie the revenue stage to. The revenue stage does not automatically sync to a field in Salesforce. So the revenue stage is a Marketo only field you can look at. So for us, the field in Salesforce is called lead qualification stage. So every time we change the revenue stage, we’re also changing the lead qualification stage. Up to you what you want to name the Salesforce field, but for us, it’s lead qualification stage. So we make sure anytime we change the revenue stage in Marketo, we’re also changing the lead qualification stage in Salesforce.

And then with testing, never launched anything in Marketo without testing. Test to make sure your transitions move as expected, testing to make sure they don’t move when not expected, regression testing to make sure if you make updates that it didn’t break something else that was existing. Testing is really, really key and really, really important.

And because a lot of us don’t have Marketo sandboxes, you can test in production by using test filters. An example snapshot of that is right here. You can just add email address contains at test.com to any smart campaign in production. And then you can test successfully in production without having real records flow through. So it’s definitely key to document testing steps and scenarios and results and make sure your model is good to go before you actually launch it. You’ll hear me anytime I speak anywhere for ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Marketo engaged, I’m always talking about testing. It’s so, so important. So let’s talk about launching your RCM. And I think we’re starting to get close to time. So I’m going to start talking a little faster now. Definitely important to create a launch plan before you launch. That way you’ve thought through the impacts and the steps you need to take and hopefully we’ll have a smooth and successful launch. And this is whether you’re, if you’re implementing a new revenue cycle model to track the lead lifecycle journey, or if you are making updates to an existing one. If it’s a new RCM, the first step is always going to be approving the model, making sure all your smart campaigns are activated and making sure your testing is completed. Before you launch an RCM, you want to make sure anything else in your funnel management framework has been accounted for and taken care of. If your scoring model is starting over or you’re doing resets to your scoring field or whatever it may be, those need to happen before you launch your revenue cycle model. And you need to make sure your existing database won’t roll into unexpected stages. I’ve seen this happen where somebody had a scoring, they changed their scoring model thresholds and they wanted to launch this RCM, but they didn’t reset the score fields. So if they had launched the RCM as is, suddenly they were going to have this huge influx of QLs when they shouldn’t. So making sure you’re kind of looking at those things before you launch is really important.

And then you should run batch smart campaigns to get people into the right starting stages. So if you are launching a brand new RCM, you might not want to start everybody off of that first known stage. Maybe some people are already in an opportunity stage, or maybe you want to preserve some QLs. So you should have smart campaigns ready to get people into the right stages. And sometimes they should request the existing, the new smart campaigns you have set up, because a lot, you got to think through like, should this person run through this stage one time? Should this smart campaign be set to run through flow every time? So you want to think through those things too. And then once you remove your test filters from the live RCM smart campaigns, you’re live. So, but you’re not done. You got to monitor, you got to look, you got to make sure everything’s working correctly and making sure no tweaks or fixes are needed after the fact.

And then it’s important when you are launching a new RCM that you define your starting stages. So this is an example of when we launched RCM, where we started everybody. So we basically defined in the same way, here are all the revenue stages in our model, and here is what is going to move each person in our database to each stage when we first kick it off. So if somebody had an open opportunity, we wanted to move them into the open opportunity stage, as long as they didn’t have a recent loss or a recent win. So we define these things very clearly to make sure everyone understood where people were starting. And for us, if somebody had QL’d before, we did not want to start them in the QL stage. We wanted them to start at known. So depending on your business cases, this could be a little different, but you do want to think it through and think and define where people should start in your database. And then things to think about when it comes to monitoring and optimizing your RCM, and this applies for people with new or existing lead lifecycle stages. There are things that can wreak havoc on your RCM. Merges is one of them. When you merge two records in Salesforce, it adds their lead scores together in Marketo. That’s one of the reasons we use behavior score as well, not just lead score. When you keep the wrong record, it keeps their stage. So if I have a prospect, somebody in the prospect stage, and I have somebody in the QL stage and they’re merged and the prospect is the main record kept, then that record is now in the prospect stage and I’ve lost my QL. So definitely merges can wreak havoc on your RCM. It’s important if you’re a company with a lot of duplicates doing a lot of merges, you’ve thought through like the best way to merge those records in a way that’s going to impact your RCM the least. We have a hierarchy. We give our sales team or whoever’s cleaning up the database that’s like, hey, if you have two records and these are their two stages, this is the stage that needs to be the master record and things of that nature. So definitely when it comes to merging, that’s things that can wreak havoc on your RCM. Bugs of course can wreak havoc. Mismatched assignment rules can wreak havoc. In this example, I popped engaged into that initial assignment rule. Well then suddenly I’ll have nobody entering the known stage. So you just want to make sure these things are aligned. And then once you’re alive, monitoring will help you keep tab on your RCM. You can make monitoring smart lists and monitoring reports. Just an example, this is a snapshot taken from an old sandbox. On the left, you can see lead qualification stage. And on the top, we’ve got smart list columns that show the revenue stage. So if somebody is in the known revenue stage, we would expect them to be in the known lead qualification stage. And this snapshot was taken from an RCM that hadn’t launched yet. So you can see here, we have 76 people in the known stage, which was from all the testing. And then once launched, those 52,000 people that are empty should be in the known stage. For prospect, you can see here, five people are in the prospect stage, but one person is in the known stage. So we’ve got a mismatch where we have one person who is in the prospect revenue stage, but they have a known lead qualification stage. So we need to look at that record, see what’s wrong with it. You might find it got updated in the Salesforce. You have to talk to your Salesforce admin about locking that field down, or you might find there was a merge done and now there’s a mismatch. So this report is my favorite. It really shows you the gaps you have in your revenue cycle model and the other areas. And it allows you to fix those gaps. And nine times out of 10, you’ll find it’s not a bug in your RCM, but it still helps you keep your database and your model clean. And there’s also other things you can run smart list wise. You can run smart list to say, hey, this person is a qualified engaged person. Their lead score is high, but they’re still stuck in the engaged stage. So you got to look at why. Why are they stuck in engaged? Or this person has all the qualification to be engaged, but they’re stuck in the known stage. So you can do a lot of different smart lists to look at your revenue cycle model to determine who’s maybe in the wrong space. And if they’re in the wrong space, is it a bug or is there other reasons? It’s really important to look at that after a launch. And then always, always optimize. Example of optimization considerations are looking for people getting stuck near thresholds. So for us, I think you had to be 400 points to be qualified engaged. If I see a lot of people in the engaged stage at 395 points, we might need to look at our scoring model. Maybe they should be qualified engaged, but maybe our scoring model is off. So I always run smart lists to look at my score thresholds and my stages. And if I see a big bunch of people that are near the next stage threshold, we start to look at them and figure out why is their score on the cusp? Why didn’t they get pushed over? Too many turnbacks or rejects from sales is important to look at. If you’re getting tons of rejects and no turnbacks for us, then that tells us, okay, these are bad QLs. If we’re getting a lot of turnbacks, like, okay, are we QLing them too early? Things like that you can look at. A lot of people getting siloed and lost opportunity is something to look back. Not everyone turns back lost opportunities, and you might want to turn them back in earlier in the stage. That could impact nurturing, depending on how you’re nurturing, set up and other things. And then lack of progression. If they’re just not moving through your model, it’s something you want to look at. Look at scoring engagement, overall other efforts. And then checklists you should be doing on your current RCM. Those four I just talked about, you should definitely already be doing. If you have a current RCM, you should be looking at the Salesforce field. If it’s different than a revenue stage field, it shouldn’t be. So if your Salesforce field is different, you’d be looking into that. If people are in the wrong stage, if interactions, somebody’s really heavily interacting, but they’re not moving through the RCM, then why? We have smart lists where we say, hey, who’s filled out five forms and isn’t a QL? And then we look at them, where are they? Why are they there? Why didn’t they QL? And then it’s also easy to look at people with opportunities that aren’t opportunity revenue stages. That’s an easy target for your revenue cycle model. So I know you went through the last part of that really quickly, but in general, those are just some key things to be thinking about with your revenue model. And I think we probably have questions, so I’ll turn it back over. We do have a lot of questions. Thank you so much, Jenny. I mean, I’ve been a Marketo user since 2013, and I learned new things today listening to you. I mean, the product has a lot of features, and this was such an awesome way to look at the strategy behind what a lead life cycle can really do for you. And with that, we do have a lot of questions. We have one from Helen, that she asked, how do you track life cycles for different or multiple products? So there’s a lot of different ways to do that, depending on your business model. I’ll go through a few really quickly. But if you have different products, so depending on your business model, sometimes you track that through Salesforce opportunities, not saying that’s right for every company, but sometimes when you have different products, really for marketers, you need to know, did they become a win? But the product tracking is really done from a Salesforce opportunity level. However, that doesn’t work for all companies. I’ve seen it done a lot of different ways. Sometimes you have a different revenue cycle model for different products.

If you have a different revenue cycle model for different products, you have to then determine funnel management-wise, how does that work? Do I need lead scoring for these products, or do I have a unified lead scoring, and then they break off into different revenue cycle models, maybe as they become opportunities. But there is definitely opportunity for different products and different BUs to have different revenue cycle models. Most Marketo instances have one. You can purchase extra models. They’re not very expensive if you need. I’ve had clients with three models. I’ve had clients with, I think, up to 12 models. So depending on your needs, it can really be done differently. You can also have your model break off at one point. If you have more of a unified funnel management until a certain point for the products, and then a different funnel management later, you could break your model off into a couple of different paths. So depending on your business model, there’s a lot of different ways it can be accomplished. Awesome. All right. And this next question, so we actually had three different people ask it, and it’s kind of two parts. So how do the stages in a life cycle model align to person status in the CRM, and what kind of best practices would you suggest for that sales handoff? So like when marketing passes it over, or sales needs to respond and say this person has been accepted or rejected. Yeah. Yeah. So for us, the status is interesting because really it’s only important once somebody QLs. So for us, the status, we didn’t want to leave it blank. So for us, the status follows the stage. So if you’re known, your status is known. If you’re engaged, your status is engaged. And sales doesn’t update the status until you become a QL. And once they’re a QL, that’s where the status starts to be different than the revenue stage. We send it over that it’s open, it’s ready for working. And from there, sales updates the status, and that allows us to track SLAs. It allows us to track what is it working? Is it turned back? Is it rejected? Or have they created an opportunity? And then we update the status to basically convert it to opportunity because from that point, it’s being managed on an opportunity level. So the difference I’d say between stage and status is really status is used for us to be able to tell where sales is in their working path with that QL. So we’ve got, if they update the status to turn back, there’s turn back reasons. If they update to reject, there’s reject reasons. So really, it’s a sales tool and a marketing tool. And that helps us understand the process of where they’re working it. But once it becomes an opportunity, that status is not used anymore for us. What was the second? I think I might have missed the second part of that question. Or did I answer both? Basically, just any best practices you would suggest around the handoff? Like what has worked in the past maybe? And what has worked for sales to be able to update those things in Salesforce? Yeah. So for us, for handoffs, we send a QL alert and we have QL reports in Salesforce. So anybody can see their queue anytime they want of their recent QLs, new to old, old to new depending. So we hand off with an alert and we have it all documented in a way that it can run reports in Salesforce. And at any time, see where somebody is, see their dispensations and SLA statuses, things of that nature.

We don’t send out of policy alerts as much as we used to because they tend to be ignored, if I’m honest. So we found reporting really works the best. So for us, Marketo is updating QL fields and SLA fields and Marketo and Salesforce kind of work together to be tracking SLAs. And there’s just a lot of power in the reporting and the alerting when they first QL.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I know for our business, we actually use alerts and tasks for the handoff for marketing. And then we also use very robust dashboards to kind of make sure to keep sales accountable and make sure those SLAs stay down. But it is really interesting to think about different ways you could also do that. Yeah. There’s a lot of different ways it can be done. There definitely is. All right. We’ve got two more. I think we’ve got time for one more question, but these are pretty similar. So Robert and Michelle have both asked about, when you’re thinking about building the RCM, what kind of gotchas would you want them to consider when they’re talking about leads being different from contacts and like a qualified lead versus like a qualified contact? Yeah, that’s a great question. So for me, I recommend this. This is how we do it. Again, every company’s different, but we consider leads and contacts that we work them the same way. They’re people. And we look at it like Marketo looks at it. It’s a record. It doesn’t matter to us whether you’re a lead or a contact. We have prospects that are leads and prospect that are contacts. And I know there’s some companies where contacts are more of the people and the QLs and leads are just prospects. But for us, it doesn’t matter lead or contact. We treat you the same way in the revenue cycle modeler and then the qualification journey. And even in our routing and SLA dispensations, it is the same, whether you’re a lead or contact. So for us, as far as the lead life cycle and the sales process, our sales team is trained that a QL could be a lead. It could be a contact. It’s the same thing. And the sales process and the SLA process is the same, regardless of whether you’re a lead or a contact. I’d say the only thing that differs is obviously a lead can’t be an opportunity. So a lead, we know that, hey, if the lead’s going to go somewhere, you need to convert it to an account, create an opportunity. But as far as the revenue cycle model goes and the lead life cycle goes, we work them the same way. Very cool. And it’s interesting too, because this is the first, my current role, we actually only use contacts. So even when we get leads, we end up converting them as contacts. So we don’t use leads as a business. So it’s really interesting the way you can tailor these things to make a solution for your individual business, as long as you understand what the product can do. So with that, I think we are at a wrap. And thank you so much, Jenny. This was amazing. It’s just incredible how much you can learn about this as time goes on. So thank you so much for giving such a thoughtful and great overview of lead life cycles. Yeah, absolutely. And if anybody has any other questions we didn’t get to, I’m happy, hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m happy to answer any other questions. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you guys. And make sure that you are signed up in the deep dive mug so you can get the next one, which is going to be around APIs and all of the future great content that we have for you. And again, if you have any questions in the meantime, we also run champion office hours, which is a great venue for any kind of question at any time. So thank you all so much for joining today. And I hope you have a great rest of your week. Thank you, everybody.