Sales Prospecting Leads

We fight this battle too. :) Prospecting is vital to our sales team's success. We allow them to add the leads, and they have their own email platform for messaging.

We allow those leads to sync into Marketo, but we do not message leads in their ownership unless the rep has opted them in with their permission or the lead has opted themselves in.

You could also create a landing page or resource center for those specific prospects and have the sales team include a link to that page in their follow-up email or reference the page via phone conversation to opt them into marketing emails.. On the resource page, you can gate some of the assets so that the viewers would be obliged to fill out the form to download the asset. Prospects who fill out the form can be added to a separate smart list for nurturing.

The marketing suspend method sounds pretty workable. If you didn't want to work off some extra field though, you could simply watch for leads created from source=CRM or prospecting or whatever you use, and only open up email when the lead status goes to cold, or some other status that tells marketing it's time to engage.

We actually find more and more that once the leads are in our sales teams' hands, we are enabling them with published, marketing-approved templates more than we are messaging on their behalf. It takes some trust between Sales and Marketing to ensure leads aren't being left behind or neglected (and conversely that Marketing's messaging is good), but it's a very efficient and productive dynamic to reach for both sides of the table.

Thanks everyone! These are great suggestions - and I think we can incorporate sections from each :)