Hi all - looking for some opinions on the ever relevant closed loop marketing in the context of salesforce.com leads and contacts.
We have a funnel. It starts with a suspect, and then, as you might imagine, turns into a lead (in SFDC), then converts into a contact/account/opportunity. If the opportunity doesn't close, then the contact stage is reset back to suspect. Sounds straightforward, right? My question is - for those of you who have similar funnels, how do you truck the SFDC contacts that got converted back to suspects - and what do you do if they turn into leads again? Few thoughts that I have are:
1. Track stage on both Lead and Contact record in SFDC. Update contact if the contact already exists in SFDC and do not create a new lead when it becomes re-qualified. This is what we currently do. This way, it's easy to report on your funnel from Eloqua, but the SFDC process becomes a bit tricky as you would need to run two sets of reports that replicates funnel across leads and contacts, and then add the two numbers to get the final one. The other tricky part (and a bigger problem) with this is that once Suspect becomes a lead that is requalified, Sales have to continuously check their contacts view to make sure the leads don't get missed.
2. Use the "point of interest" model and create new lead each time something gets qualified. This makes it easier for tracking new leads, but creates a few other problems:
- Duplicates across leads and contacts (I personally have anxiety over duplicates so this is my biggest con of this solution).
- Suspects that are in SFDC will still have to be tracked across leads and contacts - although the rest of the funnel will be easier to manage/report on.
- All the previous history of the contact (sales touches, reasons it was converted or lost, opportunity info, etc.) will NOT be present on the newly created lead - which is valuable info sales would like to have.
- Sales will have to remember every time they convert a lead to check if there is an existing contact and merge into it (which will most likely not happen and therefore create more duplicates).
- This solution will have duplicate records across contacts and leads (and yes I can't stand duplicates).
What are your thoughts on this? Had anyone solved it and how? Did I miss anything in either of the two cases that can solve the cons of each?
Thank you!