A revenue team had unclear lifecycle stages and inconsistent routing between Marketo and Salesforce. The same lead would show one stage in Marketo and a different one in Salesforce. Lead routing fired on partial data, MQLs landed on the wrong owners, and SDR follow-up times were unreliable.
Reviewed the sync logic, campaign member flows, lead statuses, and operational handoff process. Rewrote lifecycle stage definitions with marketing and sales sign-off. Moved routing into a single declarative path in Salesforce Flow with a documented territory model. Added a short enrichment hold so routing fired on complete data.
Adobe Marketo Engage, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Flow, LeanData, Slack alerting
Lifecycle stages read the same in both systems. Routing logic moved out of one person's head and into documented, declarative rules. The SDR team had clearer ownership of new MQLs, and SLA breaches became visible in a dashboard the team actually opened.
When marketing and sales can't agree on what stage a lead is in, the whole funnel feels broken — even when scoring and content are healthy. Aligning the two systems removed the daily 'why did this lead show up here' conversation.
The starting point
Routing logic lived in three places: a legacy Apex trigger, a Process Builder, and one rep's mental model. Territory definitions had not been updated since the previous fiscal year's sales reorg. SLA tracking existed in a spreadsheet.
The design
We consolidated routing into Salesforce Flow with a single source of truth, mapped to a territory object that sales operations could update declaratively. Lifecycle stages were redrawn on one page and signed off by both marketing and sales.
The rollout
Shipped in two phases — read-only shadow mode first, then cut over once shadow mode matched legacy behavior for two weeks. Documentation went into a shared README so the logic stopped living in one person's head.
What changed
Routing became predictable. The SDR team trusted lead assignments. SLA dashboards surfaced breaches in real time. The MOPs team stopped being the routing escalation queue.