Understanding the Lead Lifecycle

Mark Keto Engage manages leads through a powerful combination of automation, segmentation, scoring, and lifecycle tracking. Its lead management capabilities are designed to guide prospects seamlessly through the buyer’s journey, or lead lifecycle, from initial engagement to sales handoff and beyond. In Mark Keto Engage, lifecycle tracking aligns marketing and sales by identifying when a person is ready to engage with sales. Smart campaigns automate the movement between lifecycle stages based on behaviors and attributes. In this video, you will define the concept of a lead lifecycle, understand common lifecycle stages, explore how smart campaigns support lifecycle automation, review an example of an MQL trigger and progression flow.

Lifecycle stages typically include new MQL, marketing qualified lead, SAL, sales accepted lead, SQL, sales qualified lead, customer, recycle or disqualified. Each stage represents a change in engagement or qualification level. In Mark Keto Engage, an operational program and smart campaigns are used to automate lifecycle stage changes. Smart campaigns using triggers listen for real-time activities to move people between stages. Triggers may include score threshold met, form submissions, program status changes, and CRM updates. For example, when a person completes multiple high-value activities, such as visiting key web pages or submitting web content forms, they can accumulate enough engagement points to reach a predefined threshold and become classified as marketing qualified.

Their lifecycle stage, or person status, is changed to marketing qualified in the flow step of the smart campaign. Other actions, ranging from lead behaviors to sales activities, can also trigger changes in lifecycle status. For example, once sales reviews a marketing qualified lead that was flagged through an alert, they might update the lead’s status in the CRM. This update can then trigger a Mark Keto Engage smart campaign to automatically advance the lead to the next lifecycle stage. Lifecycle smart campaigns commonly include this change data value flow step to update lifecycle or person statuses, and they may also incorporate additional actions such as sending alerts to sales, creating tasks in the CRM, adding leads to a list or program. These flow steps ensure that all necessary processes are incorporated to align with your organization’s lead lifecycle model. Aligning a lifecycle with person scoring ensures marketing only passes qualified leads to sales. As demonstrated, when a lead reaches a defined score threshold, their lifecycle status is updated and sales can be notified accordingly. Scoring campaigns monitor audience behaviors and adjust score values based on engagement. In turn, the lifecycle campaign listens for these score changes to track progress and update the person’s status as needed. Some best practices to keep in mind as you are building your lifecycle campaigns in Mark Keto Engage are document lifecycle stages and triggers, review alignment with sales regularly, test campaign logic thoroughly before activating and use reporting to monitor stage progression and conversion rates. Implementing a lead lifecycle in Mark Keto Engage provides a structured, automated way to manage leads from initial interest through sales handoff and beyond. In this video, you defined the concept of a lead lifecycle, discovered common lifecycle stages, explored how smart campaigns support lifecycle automation, reviewed an example of an MQL trigger and progression flow.