SDRs using Opportunities

Josh - 

Only the sales team and SDRs are using opps. 

What do you mean by "contact roles"? Does that tie in with RCA?

Yes, we use opportunities with our SDR team.

When one of the SDRs has a MQL, they create a Stage 0 opportunity in CRM. Sales then reviews the opportunity, connects with the prospect and decides whether to accept the lead, which they do by changing the opportunity to Stage 1, or rejecting the lead, which they do by closing the Stage 0 opportunity as lost.

Only SDRs can create Stage 0 opportunities, so we don't have any issues with confusion. If I'm a sales rep, I only see Stage 1 when I go to create an opportunity.

This works well for us for a few reasons:

1. It provides excellent visibility for sales. They spend their time in opportunities, not leads.
2. It provides easy reporting for our SDR performance -- any opp that goes from stage 0 to 1 is a bonus payment for them.
3. We designate every opportunity that the SDRs create in a custom field, so it is very easy to track the progress of SDR-created opportunities vs. sales-created opportunities.

The only downside we've seen is that some sales reps are reluctant to accept an MQL into a stage 1 opportunity unless they are sure there's a real opportunity in the account. Although our stage 1 definition is basically "prospect has a pulse and has expressed interest in one of our products," some sales reps don't want anything in their pipe unless better qualified. It is something we've been able to manage, however.

Hope this helps. Feel free to reply back with questions.

Carl - that is helpful. Thanks.

We have a field that signifies that the opportunity was secured by an SDR and accepted by sales - so that will help with reporitng. 

We have a field called "Touch Stage" too, so we can tell how long it took our SDRs to connect with a lead.

Thanks for the insight!

Carl your process is interesting and I like it... I'm in a unique position where I can rewrite the process so ignoring how we do things today, I'm researching ideals and trying to map my process back to the Lifecycle stages. Curious how you map your process back to MQL,  SAL and SQL? I'm curious about whether I could have an SAL be a 0 stage opportunity and an SQL be a stage 1 opportunity if I were to use a process similar to yours above. I didn't really want to do SAL on lead to contact converstion for two reasons -- Marketo doesn't seem to support that trigger wtih Microsoft Dyanmics CRM and I think our sales team thinks of 0 stage opportunities as leads. Any thoughts about if it's possible to map the lifecycle status SAL to a new opportunity and save SQL for a later stage opporunity? Or do you or anyone else think it's best to stick to SAL being pre-opportunity with active/working/contacting status fields (since conversion isn't an option). Thanks!

Kelly what kind of stages would SDRs track in opportunities? I"m curious about what you were thinking and when the handoff is...Just curious if what you were thinking was in line with what Carl outlined with only 1-2 stages being SDR world or if you were imaging something more extensvie. Just curious since I'm re-thinking things along these lines too : ) Great question! 

Hi Lauren - 

Here's what we've been doing (for about 2 months and it's working well). 

These are the SDR stages in our opportunities:

SDR: Targeted (Still trying to get ahold of this person. Would be a "zero" stage. Doesn't count for reporting)
SDR: Engaged (Have engaged with the lead. Ideally moves to SQL next)
SDR: Recycled (Need more nurturing)
SDR: Lost

Hope this helps. Let me know if you need something else.