How do you handle opportunities?

Are you using RCA? That would be the easiest way to see where all your leads with opportunities are.

If you use RCA, once they become an opportunity in SFDC, you could set the stream cadence or the amount of content in the stream to a minimal amount. IE one or two emails vs. 4-5. When you send out all other emails, you can select whether or not you want it to override the nurture or not. 

In your situation, I would recommend onboarding RCA so you can see where all the leads with opportunities are and how many you have. Then, I would set a much longer cadence to your stream (or add the ad hoc content to the stream) and have them receive it based on your sales cycle. 

For our company, we have a very fast sales cycle. For leads in the late stage, we tend to continue to push them content through our nurtures but remove them from all the other net new outgoing emails to ensure the messages they are receiving are not going to disrupt the sales cycle. We worked with our sales team to ensure this content was approved and beneficial to closing deals.

I hope that helps!

Caitlin,

Why not use the Added to Opportunity trigger or the Has Opportunity filter? These will easily tell you when a lead is now an Opp.

If you are using a non standard SFDC setup, then Lead Status=Opportunity could make sense as well. But how do you ensure that is flagged properly?

When the lead is Added to an Opp, you can have a trigger campaign that tells Marketo to remove the lead from Nurturing or to Pause the lead in Engagement. Without knowing more, I couldn't build a whole system for you.

I do not believe you need RCA to manage leads in the way you want - just a carefully thought out system that can listen for Opps and manage the leads in/out of nurturing and to throttle content as suggested above.

True, you probably don't NEED RCA, as the above solution definitely works. However, you might want it eventually because it's awesome and makes your life super fun. :)