Tracking time between stages in the sales cycle

This is the primary use case of the Revenue Cycle modeler. If you set up your transitions in your model to fit the business processes, you can track conversion rate/velocity through the success path. So you could identify a transition between a contacted lead (let's call them a Sales Accepted Lead), and have it trigger the lead to move to the next stage (let's call it Sales Qualified Lead) when they change the lead status, or convert the lead to an account/opportunity. Then, you could use your Success Path Analyzer to see how many leads moved from SAL to SQL, the overall conversion rate, and the time spent in each stage. 

The workflows function very similarly to how a smart campaign works, but you get to use all the fancy analyzers to visualize the movement between stages.

It's probably possible to do this through some custom fields and reports in SFDC too, but if you have the RCA activated, I'd recommend starting there. 

To avoid overly complicating your Revenue Model in Marketo by adding every sales stage (you might have 5 or even more stages that sales reps update at opportunity level), you could create time stamp fields in Salesforce which automatically shows up in Marketo. That way you still can track and measure time spent in each stage when needed without loosing high level view in Success Path analyzer.

For a heavyweight solution, you might consider C9: http://www.c9inc.com/products/c9-active-pipeline-sales/

Thanks for the response!

Birute, will the creation of the field and flow require any kind of development work in SFDC? I'd like to set up the RCM in Marketo, but I think for a short-term solution, simply creating the field may our best bet.

I'm not sure if Marketo allows you to create fields at an opportunity level. The problem you will run into using Marketo only is that you will lose visibility for opts that sales don't associate contacts with + Marketo doesn't update oppr info. If possible, I'd do this in SFDC, set time stamp as a workflow in sfdc - which you will need to do only once. And then pull tht data to RCA. To be able to use these custom fields in RCA, don't forget to Enable them in RCA settings under Admin.

Wondering if someone has solved it using Marketo only. We chose to do such time stamps in SFDC.

We have the professional edition of SFDC so I cannot set up workflow rules. I reached out to SFDC in the meantime to see if there is anything else I can do.

Birute, thats a good question. Can we just use Marketo to track the time spent in each lead status? Also, does SFDC need to have the time stamp and workflow set up in order for it to work in Marketo?

You mention you you are looking at lead status. If you want to track the time for each individual, then you can add a time stamp for a contact that is triggered by Data Value Changes  related to opportunity stage value. 
It would depend if you want to measure how long each individual spends in different stages or how long it takes to move a deal from stage to stage, in which case you would track at opportunity and not contact level.

Hi Birute,

I was wondering if you could provide a little more detail with how you developed the time-stamp "method" of tracking time within each Lead Status state? Do I need to create a custom SFDC field for each state?
For example:
MQL Time-Stamp
SAL Time-Stamp
SQL Time-Stamp
etc...

So the workflow in SFDC should control the time-stamp update, yes?

We don't have RCE/RCA, so I'm just trying to make this work using Standard Marketo/SFDC.

Thanks!