Hi all,
I’m looking for some experiences or best practices with setting goals for workflows.
Specifically, my company offers a lot of different ebook downloads. Each of these downloads has its own follow-up workflow. They mostly offer more content (ebooks, blogs, reading list, etc.) and it seems we’re just sending leads in a loop that way. I’d like to nurture them to become MQLs eventually.
In this situation, would it make sense to set lifecycle stage MQL as the workflow goal? Or do you use something more specific like visiting a conversion page on the sales website, or submitting an MQL conversion form?
I’d love to hear some examples of how others users set this up.
Hi @KayleighN,
What would be the next qualifying action in your sales process, the action that someone can take on your website after downloading content? Can they book a meeting, request to talk to sales, sign up for a demo or a consultation?
Once you’ve defined this qualifying action after the content download, that’s what you’d promote to your contacts in your nurturing workflows. Promoting ebook after ebook to them would indeed be circular. Depending on how complex your products or services are, you might want to nurture them with one or two more pieces of content before you try to get them to convert on a higher qualifying action – but at some point they got to move on 
This new action would then also be the goal criterion for your nurturing workflows. Let’s say your SQL action is “talk to sales” and this is set up as a workflow goal. Once a contact fills out a form to talk to sales, they’d be removed from your content nurturing workflows – because you’ve now achieved what you wanted, to get them qualified not only for marketing but sales.
If you’re using goals in follow-up workflows, make sure that you’re using separate workflows for a transactional follow-up (“Here’s your download”) and nurturing (“You might also be interested in” + “Talk to sales”). With both in one workflow and the goal set to a “talk to sales” form submission, contacts wouldn’t receive the regular follow-up if they’ve ever submitted the “talk to sales” form before.
Hope this helps!
Hi Karsten,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
For getting leads to the next lifecycle stage, we have 3 possible conversions (Request a free trial, request a personal pricing offer or request a demo by a sales rep). They can submit a form for each of these.
However, we are in B2B and the buyers journey takes a bit longer for us. Offering one of the above actions soon after a download might be too soon. I believe that’s the reason why our current longer workflows with lots of content were set up this way.
Would you still recommend setting one of those 3 conversions as the workflow goal?
Hi @KayleighN,
If you have clearly defined steps between the content offer and trial/offer/demo, then you could also use these as intermediary goals. It’s easy to fall into the trap of over-engineering however, and I wouldn’t recommend it.
Even if you don’t push your leads to a trial/offer/demo immediately after a content form submission, it is still the eventual goal. It could take a longer automated sequence of emails until you actually bring up the trial/offer/demo.
When they eventually sign up for that, they should also be removed from any nurturing workflows, so from a purely technical standpoint it would be the best option, too.
Does that answer your question?
Best regards!