Hey @PMelkonian nice challenge here!!
A lot of the answers here will be “it depends” it will be up too you and your company to set the framework that best fits your reporting needs but anyway here’s my suggestion.
Things to solve:
1. Be sure no lead is forgotten;
2. Set the best prospect journey framework;
1. Be sure no lead is forgotten:
[1.1] First conversion: Here I suggest you to use sequences and a property to track the status of prospects on this “stage” (qualified, qualifying, unqualified, dormant).
Everytime a prospect raises their hands you’ll set an MQL Date stamp and change the status to qualifying and enrolling on a qualification sequence that will be sent to a specific SDR.
On that qualification sequence the SDR will have several tasks and it needs to end up on 1 of this status.
- Qualified (SQL) if they are able to qualify them (automatically set when the SDR sets the SQL date)
- Unqualified if it’s a trashy email or any other reason that will reject that prospect (manually set by the SDR)
- Dormant when the SDR is not able to reach the prospect (automatically set when the sequence ends without success).
As soon a prospects has dormant as their status another workflow should set a future task - on the date of that future tasks the prospect should pass from Dormant to Qualifying.
[1.2] Cold Deal:
Now let’s imagine that the prospect was actually qualified, passed to an AE and had a deal created but than got out because was desengaged, it was not the right time or selected other vendor.
The deal should be set as lost, one of those categories should be selected and the prospect should pass to dormant. Than depending on the lost category it should set a closer or longer date to try to re-engage.
[Extra] Pro Tip:
If a a dormant prospect re-engages with your brand on a way you know it shows high buying intent (like going back to your pricing, integrations or features page several times) your workflows should ignore the future date and alert the SDRs to reach that prospect ASAP.
2. Set the best prospect journey framework:
[2.1] Your framework:
Ok on this example, similar to what you’ve mentioned we are saying that a prospect can have several buying cycles and that is a mess to track.
My advice would be to work on a attribution model that only allows 1 MQL and 1 SQL moment but than could have several sales cycles with diferent end points.
i.e: John asked for a demo in Jan 2023 (MQL Date: Jan 2023), was qualified within the sequence (SQL Date: Jan 2023) and a deal was created and handoff to an AE. The sales didn’t went through since we selected other vendor - deal was set as lost (Closed Lost Date: March 2023) a task to re-activate this prospect was set to Sep 2023 but in the meantime John showed high intent behaviour - your SDR got an alert and reached him. John’s company is now a customer.
On your reports you will be able to see that an MQL/SQL converted from channel X had their first sales cycle in Jan 2023 but didn’t went though, than it had a second sales cycle and closed.
This way you’ll be able to attribute the deal to the right channel, have the real deal velocity (from first conversion) and understand in average how many sales cycle each one of your prospects needs to have to become a customer.
As said at the beginning a lot of what you asked depends on how you want to manage your pipeline but I hope this fits your needs 