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Hank_Hansen
Hank_Hansen
Level 5
March 30, 2018
Question

Alternate CRM solutions for cold leads

  • March 30, 2018
  • 3 replies
  • 4435 views

We'd like to keep cold lead lists out of Salesforce/Marketo until they have been qualified at which point they would be eligible for Salesforce/Marketo. I'm curious what solutions other Sales/Marketing Ops folks are using for this approach. Services such as LiveHive seem to offer the feature set we'd need.

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3 replies

Grégoire_Miche2
Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10
April 1, 2018

Hi Hank,

on the contrary, we usually push these cold leads to the CRM, in order to keep Marketo and the CRM consistent for reporting and avoid the creation of duplicates by the sales when they make contact on their own (phone, customer meeting, etc...)

The trick is to set up lead queues in SFDC and assignment rules so that the cold leads are not pushed to sales. And whey the become MQL , you just have to change hteir owner.

-Greg

    Erik_Eaton
    Erik_Eaton
    Level 3
    April 2, 2018

    Agree with Greg,

    You should sync to avoid duplicates.

    Depending on how your SFDC is set up, you could assign all lead initially to a marketing user or into a "cold lead queue" when they initially sync over. Once a lead moves to a new status such as "Qualified - Hot" or "MQL" you can then process the lead to be routed to the rep based on territory or into a new lead queue.

    Grégoire_Miche2
    Grégoire_Miche2
    Level 10
    April 3, 2018

    HI Erik

    Always prefer queues to individual users. Individual users quit or change jobs, queues don't and it's easy to make a new user a member of a queue than reworking all your lead assignment campaigns.

    -Greg

      Hank_Hansen
      Hank_HansenAuthor
      Level 5
      April 3, 2018

      So my Marketo database would increase with lots of cold, unqualified leads that convert at a low rate, increasing my Marketo pricing tier. I don't the numbers would make sense. How do you guys justify the cost, presuming we're talking about the same thing - cold, unqualified leads.

        Erik_Eaton
        Erik_Eaton
        Level 3
        April 3, 2018

        Hank,

        How I built it out was.

        Cold, Unqualified Sales Leads Imported.

        • Full Sync (for interaction and scoring if they visited pricing page, etc)
        • Rigorous data hygiene, typically if lead didnt interact with any contact or fill a optin form I would scrub them out after the sales cadence / outreach.
        • If they did optin, I would wait until after the sale cadence and send them through a nurture program

        Cold, Unqualified Marketing imported leads.

        • Full Sync
        • Send to Salesforce under marketing user
        • Nurture Lead until it was "marketing qualified"
        • Send an alert to sales owner of the leads territory and add route the lead to the rep, plus use a list view with filters so the sales rep can easily identify.

        To us the cost was worth it, as long as we kept good data hygiene processes so it doesn't get out of hand and keeps us in our database limit.

        Grégoire_Miche2
        Grégoire_Miche2
        Level 10
        April 3, 2018

        Hi Hank,

        At the end of the day, this really depends on what you plan to do with these leads. If your do not intend to Market them anyway, you are right, it's not worth adding them to your Marketo database, and even less to SFDC. You can keep them in a separate, low cost storage, and use the data if they come back. On the contrary, if you intend to send them campaign to reactivate them or nurture them, you need to keep them in Marketo as long as you keep marketing them, since each time you delete them from Marketo you also loose all historical data about them.

        My first answer was, as soon as you have them in Marketo, you might want to have them in SFDC.

        Another consideration to have is the data attrition rate that is a about 30% per year. Meaning that after a year, 30% of the people data would have changed if they have not been updated. Best case is they have changed jobs and therefore belong to a different buyer persona. Worst case is they have left the company and their email address is invalid. Free email addresses are slightly (but only slightly) better, because people tend to keep their personal email address longer than their job, at least on good quality ESPs.

        -Greg

          Hank_Hansen
          Hank_HansenAuthor
          Level 5
          April 3, 2018

          Good insights all around - thanks for sharing!

          If we decide to keep them out of SFDC until they engage, I was hoping to find a sales acceleration service (along the lines of LiveHive) that would enable sales to pass a lead into SFDC & Marketo once the lead has engaged and is qualified for further nurturing.

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