Some marketing folks get very hung up on identifying the best lead source. I would much rather know the sequence of all the marketing touches and responses, to all of the contacts, at an account where an opportunity closed won. Be that as it may, I want to discuss the connection of lead source to opportunities in a CRM such as Salesforce.com. The marketing automation system can certainly help this process but since many leads are entered by Sales (CSO Insights figures it is up to 52% in 2008) into the SFA/CRM, the Lead Management process has to be defined in such a way that it plugs the holes and helps marketing get credit for opportunity dollars they helped put in the funnel.
So what is the problem you may be wondering? Lead comes in to website, registers for something; hot lead that marketing passes to Sales as a marketing qualified lead, sales likes it, moves it to sales accepted lead status, and later on after a few calls they become a sales qualified lead (Using the Sirius Decisions vernacular here as it seems to be getting wide acceptance). At this point the lead has been converted into a contact, and the lead source value passed along to the contact object in your SFA. IF you do not choose to force the creation of an opportunity at the time of conversion because you recognize that although the person is qualified (they and their company could represent an opportunity at some future time) but isn't actively in their buying cycle, then you have no guarantee that your lovely lead source value will ever get attached to the opportunity at some future date. The sales guys goes out to the account meets 5 more people, enters them into the SFA with a lead source of "sales prospecting" and when the opportunity comes along 6 months from now the chances are 5/6 that she will pick one of those 5 as the primary contact for the opportunity - that is if you are lucky enough to have them attach at least one person to the opportunity. As a result the opportunity lead source = "Sales Prospecting". Marketing gets no credit for bringing in the new account!
Yes, you tell me, 'that is why my company insists that an opportunity has to be created when you convert a lead to a contact/account. QED problem solved. Kevin, get a life.' Not so fast...What you have now done is forced Sales folks to put crap data into the system. Most of the time when they are excited enough to convert the lead (because contacts/accounts are simply easier to handle than leads) they really don't know enough to put anything intelligent in about opportunities. So you end up with Sales folks putting in very small opportunity values so management won't look over their shoulders, and pushing the expected close dates way out into the future. Your opportunity funnel will fill up with junk that seems to take forever to close - strange that, and you'll notice that the deals that do close are the ones that have only been in the system a short while. You'll look at your opportunity funnel for the quarter and say, 'wow we have 3x our required revenues for the quarter in here, are we in good shape or what', and then wonder why 90% of them are fossils that didn't close this quarter...either.
And what happens when the first opportunity is closed lost but there is a second and a third opportunity added? How do those get connected back to marketing investments? Forcing the creation of an opportunity during conversion can work in some situations but you still need to think this through in your lead management process... that is if you still believe knowing the original lead source is important. At market2lead our Client Services chaps have come up with some novel ways to help solve this issue and give marketing credit when it is due, but we are always interested in hearing more if you care to share.
-Kevin
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