Show your Impact on the Customer Journey: Leverage Marketo Engage’s Lifecycle Management and Analytics

Transcript

Hi, I’m Lydia. Hi, I’m Cynthia. And we’re so excited to talk to you today about how you can show your impact on the customer journey by leveraging Marketo and Gage’s native reporting functionalities. In our session today, we’ll start with some introductions so you can get to know us. And then we’ll get into how you can have a lifecycle blueprint showing you how you can build your own customer lifecycle with your organization. Then we’ll get into our lifecycle management best practices so you can do tracking and reporting in Marketo and Gage.

Once your setup is complete, we’ll talk about the exciting part, lifecycle reports, and how you can answer questions that everyone wants to know from the CMO to the marketers. Then we’ll dive into the takeaways so you can get started on this with your organization as soon as the presentation ends. And finally, we’ll follow up with a Q&A to answer all your other questions. I’ll pass it over to you, Cynthia, to do your introduction.

Thank you, Lydia. Hello, everyone. My name is Cynthia Chung, and I’m a member of Business Advisory Team Adobe. My team provides advisory service to customers on their MarTech strategy and instance utilization. Prior to this role, I spent about six to seven years in Adobe Consulting Service working with Marketo customers on their implementation projects. And before that, in my past life, I was also a Marketo customer. Like many of you, I was the admin of the Marketo instance and working with my CRM counterpart to ensure marketing and sales alignment. Super excited to be here today to show you how you can leverage Marketo’s native reporting features to support customer lifecycle management. A fun fact about me, I really love to travel. I’ve traveled to more than 50 countries. Most recently, I visited Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria.

Thanks, Cynthia. As I mentioned, I’m Lydia Miller. I’m a senior business consultant at Adobe.

I work on Marketo Engage, Marketo Manager, and HIO B2B. I work with enterprises and small businesses, helping them realize the value of marketing automation. But before that actually came from the customer side where I was a Marketo admin myself and helped implement Marketo from a previous organization. So I know firsthand how powerful marketing automation can be for marketers when it’s optimized for your business. So hopefully today our presentation will help you get into this for your organization. And my fun fact is that I love to read and actually collect library cards on my travels so I can add a greater plethora of books to my reading library. I’ve plugged in nine so far.

Thank you, Lydia. But before we dive into things, let’s first start by understanding what’s a lifecycle and how it defines the customer journey.

You might have heard similar terminology such as buyer journey, customer journey, the buying funnel, or the marketing funnel, etc. A lifecycle is really an end-to-end system that monitors, tracks, and records where your buyers are in their purchasing journey.

Understanding where your buyers are in their journey and the velocity in which they move through that journey can provide valuable insight to drive business success.

Here’s the lifecycle in a funnel view, where the top of funnel or the top fill represents the size of the prospects that you want to target and raise awareness of your product. The middle funnel represents the size of the population who are engaged and qualified for sales pursuit. The bottom of funnel or both are typically people who are in your sales cycle that has potential to turn into business.

Understanding the size, the balance of the people in each stage of the funnel allows you to calculate your funnel stage conversion rate and measure the effectiveness of the funnel. Are people moving through to the bottom of the funnel in a tiny manner or are they dropping out in the middle, which might indicate a leaky funnel? We can also join in on the top fill, mofo, and boful part of funnel to break them into more granular stages in the buying journey. In this example, Market All tracks all anonymous web visitors by default. Once they make an inquiry and provide their email address to us, we can track how many known records will generate in the database. That is our lead generation. And how many of those have become engaged with this? As more engagement happens, we want to track the number of people that meet the marketing qualified criteria that should be handed off to sales for follow up. And in turns, how many MQOs are actually accepted by sales team to work on and are moving through the sales pipeline all the way till they become a customer.

I want to point out that these are just an example of common lifecycle stages that a company might track. There are not fixed models or fixed stages that you have to follow. In fact, Market All allows you to customize your buyers journey and the stages that you care about so you can track and measure your own custom stage inventory and conversion rate.

For example, in the SMB model, instead of tracking opportunity creation, such as the case in a B2B use case, here you are tracking how many conversions and loyalty customer base you are able to build that will advocate for your product. You can also see the known and awareness stage make up the top of funnel and the middle of funnel consists of consideration and conversion. And the ultimate goal is to move them to loyalty and advocacy stage in the bottom of funnel.

In the credit union industry, the use case might be tracking the number of loan applications and how many of them were approved and resulted in more application referrals. You can see the middle of funnel stages correspond to when people start and complete the application. And the bottom of funnel represents the end goal of making referrals to other customers.

In the higher education scenario, we’re tracking the number of potential student applications gets elevated and how many of them actually graduated to become alumni and future donors to the school. The corresponding middle of funnel and bottom of funnel stages in this model have different goals compared to other industries.

And in the healthcare industry, the tracking needs or goals are very different. As you might want to see how many doctor seekers actually make treatment appointments and become active in the patient community. Again, these are just different examples to show you how you can define your own customer journey stages based on your organization’s tracking needs and your conversion metrics. It is very important to first define what conversion metrics your organization wants to measure. What is the definition of MQL or qualified lead for your organization so we can measure the volume and velocity through that customer journey. Next, Lydia will walk us through some best practices when it comes to lifecycle management.

With that grounding in the value of a lifecycle model and their variations, we want to share with you our best practices for how you can design this for your organization. When it comes to managing a lifecycle model, it all starts by establishing an agreed upon model across your organization by generating buy-in from your sales team, your executives, your CRN admins, all the way to the marketing team. The goal is to design the end-to-end customer journey with agreed upon stages that make sense to everyone. We recommend a whiteboarding exercise to really help get the creative ideas flowing and visualize that end-to-end journey.

For our second tip, we want to leverage Marketo’s ability to create custom fields to allow you to track more information about your lifecycle model. You can create a lifecycle stage or status field and create date fields to track stage changes for more granular reporting.

Thirdly, we recommend creating a dedicated lifecycle management program inside of Marketo that can hold all of your campaigns, stage transitions, lists, and reports to be easily managed all in one place.

Here is a sample lifecycle blueprint, a structure that you can use to record the stages of your lifecycle journey. Let’s walk through an example so you can see how to use it for your organization.

In the first column, we have the lifecycle stages from marketing captured lead all the way through customer. If we look at the MQL or the marketing qualified lead, we see that in the second column, we’ve recorded the definition for MQL, a person who meets a scoring threshold to send them from marketing to sales.

Then we recorded the system criteria. This is what we would use in a smart list in Marketo. In this case, we’ve chosen person score field is greater than 99. And then in the notes column, we explain any additional context that we might need. For example, in this case, the threshold for MQL is 100 points. You can imagine using this for your organization to document stages that make sense to you. We will provide a copy of the blueprint and a worksheet for you to dive deeper after the session.

Now let’s review custom fields that might be valuable for your marketo reporting in the marketo admin section. You can create new marketo only fields like these. The lifecycle status field is valuable to store to the stage of a per on the person profile, which increases usability in both reporting and smart lists. The lifecycle status state field would allow you to track the most recent date change within the journey. And then finally, the MQL date is an example of a strategy you could employ to track specific stage changes to give you even more granule reporting. And we’ll get into examples of how to use these in a few minutes.

This is an example of a dedicated lifecycle program. You would create this structure to hold all of your smart campaigns that would move records between stages as well as your smart lists and your reports.

Now we’re showing an example of a smart campaign that you would create using the system criteria that we outlined in the lifecycle blueprint. Continuing with the marketing qualified stage example, in our definition, the threshold for MQL is 100 points. So we’ve created a batch campaign that you can run to move people to that stage. The smart list is criteria matches our system criteria from the blueprint with the person score being greater than 99.

Then you can see we have two different options for your flow steps.

If you’re not using advanced journey analytics, you would use the flow steps on the left, where we are stamping the custom lifecycle status field with marketing qualified and then changing the lifecycle status date to the system date. If you are using advanced journey analytics, you would follow the flow steps on the right, using the change revenue stage filter to change the revenue stage to MQL, and then updating the lifecycle status and lifecycle state fields as well.

Now that we’ve set up for lifecycle management, let’s get into how you can leverage this all for reporting.

In this next section, we want to show you how to apply Marketo’s native reporting features to answer key questions about your customer lifecycle and provide insights to your business.

By having a lifecycle tracking and reporting in place, we can answer many important business questions your team might be asking. We’ve listed a few common questions here, such as how many people in each stage today? What is the size of my funnel? How much pipeline revenue is created from my sales qualified stage or any specific stage in my funnel? How do I identify MQLs for segmentation and nurturing them to the next stage? How many MQLs were generated in May or specific timeframe? How many MQLs are from our ideal customer industries? And most importantly, how do I measure my stage conversion rate? And even better, here we map out the native Marketo reporting tools you can leverage to answer these questions. We will dive into each of the questions here and show you which of the Marketo reports can be used to provide answer. We will cover different report types, such as people by revenue stage report and people performance report, as well as the success path analyzer to answer different questions. We will also show you how to add opportunity data to a report to provide more insights and how spotless can be used for reporting purposes.

Let’s start with the first one. How many people are in each of my lifecycle stage today? In other words, what’s the inventory and balance for my lifecycle stages? What is the size of my funnel? If you are using the events journey and a leg modeler, your Marketo instance already comes with this people by revenue stage report. You can access this report from your Marketo’s analytics section. This report shows the balance of the leads in each stage in a select timeframe. You can also subscribe to this report to get updates on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This report offers a snapshot of your audience distribution by stage and is a great way to monitor your funnel size.

And if you don’t have that events journey analytics modeler, you can still leverage the out of box people performance report to show balance of the leads in each stage. You can access this report from your Marketo’s analytics section as well. When creating this report, make sure to navigate to the setup tab and group people by lifecycle status custom field, which indicates the person’s lifecycle stage. This is why earlier Lydia recommended setting up this custom field as part of the lifecycle tracking to offer more flexibility in reporting.

The next question we want to answer is how much pipeline revenue is created from my sales qualified stage or any specific stage in my lifecycle funnel? The same lifecycle stage balance report that we saw earlier, you have the option to layer in opportunity data from your CRM to see how many people in the stage have opportunity associated to them and the opportunity amount they carry. To do this, you need to go to the setup tab again and update the opportunity column from hidden to shown. By default, it’s usually hidden.

Once the opportunity column are shown, you can also adjust which specific opportunity data column you want to expose on the report.

The opportunity column feature is available on both the people performance report and the people by revenue stage report.

Lydia is going to take us through the next questions.

Thanks, Cynthia. Now we’re going to get into how we can identify MQLs or any specific stage for segmentation, allowing us to then nurture them to the next stage. We’ll also dig into how we can identify a stage by a certain date range. One of the benefits of the lifecycle model is that you can identify customers in their journey stage for personalization and right time messaging. You can use Marketo’s smart lists as inventory reports to identify the audience that is in a specific stage and then use that smart list for targeting in your emails and nurture programs. So how do you identify how many MQLs you have today? We would create a smart list using the filter of either lifecycle status as MQL, so that custom field that we created, or using revenue stage as MQL, depending on your setup.

When you pull this list, you would have all of your MQLs pictured on the left.

Now you can use this for targeting, or you could create a smart list subscription, so you would have it sent to a colleague at a regular cadence. For even more granular analysis, you could add a custom date filter. For example, that MQL date field that we created, you could set it to between the date range, such as May 1st through May 31st. This would give you an inventory of the people who entered the MQL stage in May. The value of this would be it allows people to assess the campaign attribution or lead flow in a certain time period, or to talk about SLAs with sales.

Now that we’re digging into the audiences by lifecycle stage, we want to know how people can get more context on additional details such as customer industries. So we’re going to show you how to report on MQLs by industry.

To do this, we’ll create a people performance report.

In the settings, we’ll group by industry, and then we’ll add a custom column using that MQL stage smart list that we just created.

Now in the report view, you can see the total people in each industry, and then the number that are currently MQLs. This allows you to see the ratio of MQLs that you’ve generated per industry. With this insight, you could use this report to advocate for nurturing leads to the MQL stage in specific ideal customer industries by layering in your industry and lifecycle data for your targeting.

Now on to the key metric of journey tracking that everyone wants to know, how to measure stage conversion or your movement between stages. This is important because it indicates how productive your marketing and sales efforts are at moving prospects through your funnel towards customer.

The first way to track this is by creating a stage transition smart list.

In this example, we’re looking at records who have transitioned from MQL to SL stage this month. To do this, we would use the data value change filter for the attribute of lifecycle status. Then we would add constraints to set the previous value to marketing qualified and the new value to sales accepted.

Then we would add a date of activity in the timeframe of this month.

This would show you the count and the names of records that have transitioned. And this is a key metric when marketing because when marketing qualifies a record, that means that it’s interested and ready to talk to sales. So you’d want to understand how successful your sales handoff was by looking at a report like this.

Once you create the transition smart list, you can also layer it into a people performance report as a custom column similar to what we did before.

So now you would create a people performance report, group the people by industry, and then add the custom column smart list we created for MQL to SL transition.

This would show you for each industry how many people transitioned from MQL to SL this month out of your total per industry. This gives your marketing team a granular view of the velocity in your stages.

It might be helpful if you’re not seeing the stage conversion that you’re looking for, and then you could use this report to partner more closely with sales to make changes.

Lastly, if you have advanced journey analytics, the success path analyzer is included and it provides a more detailed stage transition reporting. It shows the balance of each stage today, as well as the inflows and outflows in the time period that you set.

It shows your stage conversion rate and the average days per stage. This can be helpful to review with your sales team to see how you can improve the speed to customer.

And now Cynthia will wrap us up with some key takeaways and next steps. Thank you, Lydia. We talked about how a lifecycle model really defines what you want to track and measure in your customer journey. And you should really customize the stages based on your company’s reporting needs. In other words, what conversion metrics do you want to track and report on? It is crucial to establish an agree upon lifecycle model and blueprint with clear definition, so the model and reporting will make sense to everyone. To manage the lifecycle, we recommend setting up a dedicated program and smart campaigns to track the movement of your customer lifecycle. And consider adding custom fields to additional tracking and reporting possibilities. The example we reviewed today are lifecycle status and the status related date fields.

From a reporting perspective, don’t forget to leverage Smart List as a reporting tool. Smart List is not just a segmentation and targeting tool. You can also use them as custom columns in addition to opportunity columns on the People Performance Report to gain additional insights.

Here we leave you a blank lifecycle blueprint that you and your team can use to document your lifecycle stage and definition. As well as the actual system criteria or the technical requirement to qualify for each stage. You can use this in a whiteboarding exercise with your team to define the desired customer journey stages. Or use this blank sheet to document your existing lifecycle model stages. You will get a copy of this presentation and the recording after today.

So to put things into action in the next steps, this slide serves as an activity sheet for you and your team. And you will get a recording slide after this. If you are new to lifecycle tracking, use the blueprint we provided in the previous slide to whiteboard and document your desired lifecycle tracking stages as your starting point. And if you already have a lifecycle in place, you want to first evaluate and confirm the existing lifecycle still serves the current business reporting needs. And use the blueprint to document the existing lifecycle if you don’t already have a documentation in place. Oftentimes we work with customers who have a lifecycle running in the instance but nobody has any idea what it’s doing because there is never a documentation. So it’s really important to document, document, and document.

Once you have a documentation in place with a clear definition, you can build or enhance your reporting with the best practice we shared today. We also have some documentation resource from Experience League to guide you through the how-to use of each of the reports that we reviewed today. Thank you again for joining us today and now we’ll get into Q&A.

Thank you Cynthia and Lydia. So many learnings on how marketers can answer key reporting questions and gain actionable insights. We have time for a few questions so let’s get started with the live Q&A.

Our first question coming in for you Lydia. We use smart campaigns to track customer journeys. What advantages are there to switching to using advanced journey analytics? That’s a great question. So yeah, a lot of our customers do make that transition because the success path analyzer is a great dashboard that allows you to automatically in one place view all of your success stages and then the velocity between those stages. The starting counts and the ending counts per time period. So for example, we have a lot of customers that like to look at this month over month. So you would potentially pull this report. You have one report to pull instead of multiple reports. It shows your team a beautiful snapshot that you can send across the organization, maybe even up to leadership levels and show are you increasing your velocity between your stages. That idea of speed to lead or speed to opportunity is something that we commonly see customers use as a KPI so that you can better understand can we improve upon how we’re moving people through our lifecycle model. And so that report is just a great way to reduce the effort on your team to do the reporting and increase your use of the automation.

Yeah. Thank you for explaining the benefits of advanced journey analytics. Our next question coming in for you, Cynthia. These customer lifecycle fields will be static or it can be updated via automation. So data updates of customers from webinars, etc. Definitely great question. So yeah, the custom lifecycle status or lifecycle field is definitely designed to be live.

So what we want to do is why we set up those smart campaigns to update as things happen. So maybe when a person attended a webinar, that would up their lead score to whatever points and then they should become MQL or become whatever statuses. People might often set up either trigger campaigns to react in real time to update the status or maybe it’s a daily batch campaign. So you’ll be able to update the status as you go and keep that as the light for you to understand where people are in their lifecycle.

Awesome. Our next question coming in over to you, Lydia. What are the benefits of using advanced journey analytics versus just tracking stages and timestamps in Salesforce.com? Yeah, so that’s another, you know, pretty related to the question we had before. So the benefit of having those tracking in Marketo as well as your Salesforce system is that marketers can leverage the fields for marketing purposes. So, you know, we want to make sure that marketing and sales are aligned and connected about where your leads are in their journey. So marketing might want to react, especially to later stages of the lifecycle. So potentially, you know, you want to be able to say we want to market specifically to people that are in open opportunities or in a specific opportunity stage. And having those lifecycle stages in Marketo enables you to do that. And then as we talked about before, if you do get advanced journey analytics, it even adds additional layer of the visualization and the success path reporting so that you can do faster reporting in an automated way.

Thank you, Lydia. Looks like we have another question about Salesforce. So over to you, Cynthia. Do you, and if so, how, align Marketo lifecycle with Salesforce statuses and stages? Yeah, that is a great question. So definitely, so this is why when we talk about creating that blueprint, you want to make sure you include all the stakeholders, including your Salesforce admin, your sales team, sales ops. You want everybody in the room so everybody can agree upon the lifecycle stage that you want to use for your organization and what it means. You want to create that clear definition. What would the lead status be? What would the contact status be? And how does it align to lifecycle status? And typically, ideally, the best practice recommendation is if you can, you want to align lifecycle status to your lead and contact status. Oftentimes, it may not always be possible because maybe your CRM has legacy status that you cannot easily change. So what you want to do at that time is kind of creating maybe data dictionary or whatever definition you want to say. Okay, if the contact status is XYZ, then the lifecycle status in Marketo should be ABC. So for example, maybe the contact status is sales outreach, then maybe in Marketo lifecycle status that you define, it should align to say SQL or SAO.

So you want to make sure there’s some sort of alignment. If not, literally align on the status, but maybe on the backend, the definition, there’s some alignment in there.

Yeah, thank you for explaining, Cynthia. Lydia, do you have anything additional to add? I was just gonna say, I think, you know, Cynthia and I both work with customers who use Salesforce. And the big kind of component there is like, you could see your Salesforce statuses as one of the definition points for your lifecycle stages. So that’s kind of what Cynthia was saying was that, you know, you don’t want to have re recreate the exact system that you’re already using in Salesforce, we want to take it to the next level with the lifecycle stages. So basically, you have your lead and contact statuses, and those could be trigger points for changing a stage, if it was relevant. So that example that you gave Cynthia was, you know, perfect for that. But there’s also other trigger points you’d want to use in addition to the just the lead and contact statuses like opportunity data, or Marketo engagement data, for example, like we talked about, like building your behavior scoring model could funnel into your MQL triggers.

Yeah, thank you so much, Lydia and Cynthia. I’m breaking down that alignment between Marketo and Salesforce that is so critical. Looks like we have another question coming in from Magna. And I’ll pass it over to you, Cynthia. If I were new to Marketo, where should I start, especially if I don’t use this at work? How does one start learning this tool? Great question that I’m so excited to hear that you’re eager to learn about Marketo. I would say we there’s an experience lead. Adobe.com that is open source, everybody can log in, you don’t even have to log in, everybody can get on the website and then get all the documentation. There’s a lot of educational video that that will be being created. I believe I also have created a few video. There are a lot of webinar resources on various different aspect of Marketo feature that you could learn. And actually, I think last year, Stephanie and I collaborated to create some a new user learning path. Maybe Stephanie, if you want to talk a little bit more about where people can find that resource.

Yeah, I’m happy to share. So we have a free learning course on experience league and I’m happy to share offline as well. That covers core concepts from building your first programs, breaking down the four core programs, how to get started with smart campaigns and key reports. And yes, Cynthia is featured in some of these tutorial videos as well.

Okay, so we have our next question coming in from Karina. This may be silly, and it’s not silly. Thank you for the humbleness on your question. But her question is, I don’t understand how a smart list created for a report can be added. Must a smart list live within the same folder or anywhere in Marketo’s data studio? And I’ll pass it over to Lydia, but feel free to chime in if wanted, Cynthia. Yeah, so I guess I’ll speak to kind of two parts to hopefully get to the answer of your question. So to the smart list, you know, you can create it either in the marketing activities area, the database, but then you can reference it inside of the analytics section in that report. So I think you might be referencing when we were talking about adding a smart list as a additional columns to your reports in the analytics section. So basically, you would either make your smart list in the database as a smart list, like globally shared with all of the workspace, or you would make it within your lifecycle management program. Either way, you’d be able to reference it in a report. So then that report could either live in a lifecycle management program or in your analytics section. And you would be able to then reference that list inside of the report. So it sometimes trips people up because the analytics section doesn’t hold lists. But if you make it elsewhere, you could reference it.

Yeah. Oh, go, Cynthia. And I’ll just add that, yeah, to Lydia’s point, we do recommend you to kind of organize things within the same program for easy management purposes. And just a reminder that when you create any assets underneath a program, when you search for that asset, it’s, it’s automatically going to be prepended with the program name. So if you put the smart list you created under the lifecycle management program, when you want to go and reference that, it will start with lifecycle management program dot whatever smart list name that you created. So there’s, but you could definitely reference any smart list that you created, either it’s in database or in marketing activity under any of the program. You could do that.

Yeah, thank you for adding that additional touch on organization and naming. Okay. Our next question coming in, after how many touch points should I pass the lead to sales? And I’ll pass this to you, Cynthia. Okay, great question. We get this a lot, really. And I want, honestly, I want to say there’s just not a one size fits all answer to this, because it also depends on how many, how many touch points that you offer to your, to your audience, right? Are you sending a lot of email campaigns? Are you doing a lot of events? In addition, not every touch point is equal. A few email clicks is, is great, but it’s not definitely doesn’t have the same way as attending events, right? So I would really recommend that, and this is a great opportunity for marketing sales alignment, work with your sales team to kind of identify, okay, in the past, what sort of behavior, what sort of touch point really indicate opportunity creation or will lead to opportunity creation? I would say probably, I mean, yeah, email click is great or fill out form is great, but I bet your sales team would say, hey, attending event really weights a lot. And this would really, you should really want to consider and work this into your lifecycle blueprint that we talked about, work that into the definition, right? What is your MQL definition? Do they need, is it behavioral driven? For example, they need to attend a minimum number of events, or maybe they, it’s least score based, or maybe in that case, your event attendance would drive, would, was more least score points than, say, email click or form submission. So taking everything into consideration, then you can determine, okay, it’s not always just how many number of touch points, it could be what is the least score that, that is your MQL definition. Sometimes maybe if you don’t have a least score base, you want to say, okay, they have to at least attend one event, live event, and maybe they have engaged with other activity for this to be a viable, these to be followed up by sales. And again, there is no one size fits all, every organization is different because you have different marketing activities. And really the best recommendation I have is to talk to your sales team, make sure this is a great opportunity to create that sales and marketing alignment.

Yeah, I was going to follow up on that, Cynthia, because I think the other point is it’s also a living, breathing model. So like you would create something, decide on your best representation of your current sales processes, and then you want to assess. So, you know, typically we would see people updating this very regularly, like, you know, once a quarter, at least once a year to make sure it still matches the processes. So maybe you set your threshold is we want them to attend a certain number of events, like the example we just gave. But maybe you’re saying, actually, we’re not getting enough leads sent to sales. This is too high of a threshold. So maybe we need to adjust. Maybe we want a link related to specific content engagement. So if we have a specific team that needs to know, are people interested in a specific product, you could tag your content with the UTM strategy and then have that be a part of the trigger process. And additionally, when we layer in the lead scoring model, if you do have that or if you wanted to create that in conjunction with a lifecycle model, it also enables you to add together like the behavioral components as well as the fit or your demographic engagement. So you want to see, OK, are these the right business decision makers? We have the right titles. Or is this person in the region that we sell to? So having kind of data completeness on the profile record also be part of your MQL criteria really helps make sure that you have a better person to send a sale. So they actually have the contact information and the right fit for the sellers to actually make the sale.

Yeah, thank you both for sharing that and adding on to that layer of ensuring better collaboration and alignment. How would you go about preparing your team to do a whiteboarding session for the lifecycle blueprint? And I would love to hear from you both on this. Yeah, I can go first. So this is something that Cynthia and I both have led these before. So it’s a really great idea to maybe share out that lifecycle blueprint ahead of time so people know where you’re going. You know, begin with the end in mind. And a great way to start that conversation would be to have each of your stakeholders who show up. So having your sales team, your marketing team come with some ideas about definitions. So maybe pulling a report on what are your current lead sources. And so that could help you understand, like, how do we take into account maybe fast tracking leads from certain sources, for example, event attendees? Or you could have your sales team pull a report of what are the types of records that make it to opportunities currently? So what is the common denominator amongst all of these recent opportunity creations? And maybe that would help inform your MQL criteria as well. So having people get excited about the process by preparing by pulling the data you already have to help you build those definitions would really be beneficial. So everyone’s engaged on the day.

Yep. And I will also add that first I echo everything Lydia just said. As she mentioned, we both have worked with customers numerous times on lifecycle definition and setup.

I will also add that this is a great way to kind of understand the requirement from sales team to work on a lead, right? So also like just making sure you have the data points available before you process that MQL to sales for follow up. And also that whiteboarding exercise really help your team be on the same page and get, like Lydia mentioned, get everyone excited, be on the same page, have input, have a say on what are the ideal leads that they want to follow up. Because oftentimes we see marketing kind of drive this effort and marketing would make all the definition and we’ll say, okay, great. The person click on email 100 times, they have 100 points, they’re MQL, go follow up. But this doesn’t make any sense to the salesperson, right? It’s not a viable lead for them. So sitting to have the sales and marketing team both in the same room together and agree on that definition. So then when marketing team pass that lead to sales, sales has no excuse to not follow up because they have agreed on the definition. They have agreed on this are the ideal MQL that we will accept. So making sure like what are the sales accepted lead definition and what are the accepting, what are the criteria and the minimum requirement that a sales might accept that lead. You might pass a lead to a sales and without a phone number. How are they going to call and reach out to that person? So you want to make sure you get all that information, all the data requirements for the salesperson to be able to actually follow up.

Yeah, thank you so much. That is so important. Kind of bridging that collaboration between marketing and sales. Thank you so much, Lili and Cynthia. And that’s all the time we have. So big thank you to you both for teaching us about lifecycle management and analytics.

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks so much for spending time with us. Great talking with you all.