Best Practice Tip – Lead Stage / Lead Status Field Value:
Most clients start out with a lead bucket and an opportunity bucket. Marketing works with leads, sales works with opportunities. However, as you move toward an integrated marketing funnel, it is important to incorporate additional lead stages in the buying cycle. This process — collapsing leads and opportunities into a single category — can help marketers calcualte program effectiveness based on conversion from one stage to another. It also helps marketers understand which group can be included or exclude in a marketing program, based on where the prospect is in the buying cycle.
Here are the Lead Stage fields I recommend and a description for each:
- Suspect = list purchase, unknown web visitors, pre-show registration lists, raw names
- Inquiry = prospect raised their hand, responds to a campaign
- Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) = meets marketing qualification criteria (Note: In order to prioritize which MQLs should go to sales, Lead Scoring can be incorporated.)
- Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) = sales determines the lead meets their acceptance criteria, this lead is not yet in an active pipeline
- Sales Rejected / Recycled Lead (SRL) = sales determines the leads is not sales ready and recycles this lead back to marketing (Note: Some organizations opt to have sales change the Lead Status field back to MQL. However, in order to get better reporting and have a dialogue with sales, it might be easier to incorporate this additional Lead Status.)
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) = meets specific sales stages and sales converts to Opportunity and adds to their pipeline. [Note: Typically sales uses sales stages during SQL (e.g. proposal, pricing, negotiation, pending signatures, etc.), usually following a sales methodology. Marketing can choose to add these to their funnel and report based o the stages as well.]
- Customer = purchase
