End-to-end lead lifecycle

Develop an end-to-end lead management process, technical infrastructure, campaign attribution and effective dashboard reporting to accelerate marketing performance.

For the commercial side of a $9 billion tech company, we were charged to:

• Develop an end-to-end lead management process to support aggressive marketing and sales objectives.
• Enable the effective nurture then handover of leads between marketing and sales at the point of ‘marketing qualified’.
• Implement and/or optimise the technical infrastructure to support these efforts.
• Establish marketing performance reporting, campaign attribution and enhanced dashboards for improved visibility and decision making.

What we did

To tackle this broad challenge, we engaged stakeholders across all customer-facing functions, by region, to ensure holistic requirements captured:

• Marketing / marketing operations
• Sales / sales operations
• Inside sales / BDRs

Next we defined a phased approach to establish base functionality. Since the initial rollout, we continue to evaluate, optimise and expand, in ongoing cycles based on key marketing and business priorities.

Outcomes

Through this work we:

• Integrated Salesforce and Pardot to enable seamless management of customer journey with assignment rules to allow for complex global sales structure
• Defined a ‘2-track’ approach to MQLs - Scored and fast track
• Created field-based mechanisms to enable ‘MQL detail’ to inform action for Sales
• Established feedback loop for rejected and recycled leads
• Designed, implemented, and evolved holistic scoring and grading model
• Created revised form strategy to map form type / field values / gating approach in single matrix to drive consistent use
• Guided the technical optimisation across Pardot / Salesforce including establishment of governance approach
• Developed automated processes to segment, enrich, and progress leads
• Introduced campaign structures, attribution model and reporting capabilities
• Created a layered approach to reporting to for the first time connect marketing effort to revenue; established executive, marketing and sales dashboards providing relevant business KPI and operational level reporting
• Marketing able to ‘prove’ impact on pipeline and revenue, engagement within accounts, ROI for marketing investment