Dynamics for Marketing and Lead Orphans

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Posted on by Debbie DeHart

Oh, the lessons we are learning in Dynamics for Marketing.

Does anyone have first-hand experience with creating and connecting contact records from leads for the purpose of tracking in Dynamics for Marketing (DM)?

For those of you unfamiliar with DM, the tracking feature works on contact records, so every lead must have an associated contact. This connection is outside the usual qualification process because there are times when we need to market to leads whom we have not yet qualified.

Microsoft offers the following morsels of unhelpful documentation:

docs.microsoft.com/.../market-to-leads
docs.microsoft.com/.../market-to-leads
docs.microsoft.com/.../market-to-leads

Despite the title of the first section above, the description reads as if the contact record already exists.
I know that a workflow or two is in my future (no thank you, Flow). I hope someone has worked through this scenario already and can provide some sage wisdom and pitfalls to avoid.

Categories:

Lead Management and LinkedIn

Marketing Pages Forms and Surveys

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makova 310 on at

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Hi Debbie,

Thank you for your question and feedback on the documentation regarding Market to Leads.

Dynamics 365 Marketing follows industry standard practice of marketing to contacts (as in reality you are really marketing to a person = contact) rather than to a umbrella object.

This approach has several business scenario benefits, as contact may have expressed interest for multiple products (contact relationship to multiple leads) as well as it better covers regulatory requirements such as GDPR consistency stored on contact, fosters focus on long term customer engagement etc.

I'd be happy to learn more about your specific qualification process you are currently using (presumably Lead to Contact&Opportunity) and help on aligning this with Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Fell free to reach out to us if you need any help.

Thank you

Best regards

Martin Kovac

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Jet25 20 on at

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Hi Martin,

It depens all about the lead definition between marketing and sales and how companies use their crm.

For example a cold lead stays within the marketing department to nurture it, when it becomes a hot lead it then becomes a contact in crm and a sales person gets a message.

When you look at this perspective it is strange in D365 for marketing that you first have to be a contact before you can be part of a customer journey.

A marketeer wants to send an follow up email when a unknown person submits a form on a website. For example when they download a whitepaper.

The submission form on the website must be so easy and quick as possible because most people when they are browsing for information do not want to fill in all their contact information.

Also a known issue is how longer the submission form is how bigger the bounces at the landing page and lesser leads.

Most companies I know have more required fields in crm for the contact entity because they want to have all information for the sales person.

For the marketeer only an Email address first name last name is good enough to be a lead.

To use the marketing module customer journey now all the required fields in the contact form must be ajusted.

So lead entity is a perfect step to use instead of contact entity

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CHK1970 562 on at

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Hi Martin, since every lead must have a associated contact, does this mean that our Default Matching Strategy MUST be set to both Leads & Contacts? So that a contact is always created when we receive a new lead form say a form submission?

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Jetj25 534 on at

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Hi CHK,

When you want to send an confirmation or thank you e-mail to the lead from the marketing application you have the following options

1. use the matching strategy

2. create a workflow to automatically generate and link a contact record for each new or existing unmatched lead record.

3. or manually

For a lead won't have the possibility to have insights like clicks, open rate and bounces.

docs.microsoft.com/.../market-to-leads

You can also filter this marketing contacts from sales if you use the marketing only flag

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d_radulova 2 User Group Leader on at

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Hi @CHK1970,

This is controlled on the marketing form level, rather than the matching strategy - see screenshot.

Thanks,

-DD

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JillianM 23 on at

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Its 2021 so I'm curious if anyone else has managed to work through this scenario of being able to automatically assign contacts to orphaned leads.

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