How to Design a D365 Lead-to-SQL Process for B2B

I know, it is not a catchy headline but what can you do. That is what I am going to write about and I don’t want to mislead you in any way. There is enough of that in this world already.

DISCLAIMER: The company is fictional. Its sole purpose is to make the process and steps easier to understand.

We just ran a project in which we designed a lead-to-SQL process for a B2B company. This company uses Microsoft Dynamics D365 Sales and Marketing.

1. A visitor fills an embedded D365 Marketing form in the 3rd party CMS landing page.
2. D365 Marketing creates a Lead with a Company name. Company name in D365 is a field in the Lead record.
3. D365 Marketing checks whether the Lead has an associated Contact using the email address for contact matching.
4. If the email address doesn’t match D365 creates a new Contact record.
5. D365 checks whether the Company can be automatically matched to an existing Account using company matching rules (name, email address etc.). If not D365 can automatically create a new Account. In this case, we decided to trigger an Account Approval Process at this stage because the Company wanted to keep the list of Accounts as “clean” as possible.
6. At this stage, we have a Lead with a specific product, topic and/or business interest. We decided to use the Marketing form name to indicate the interest. (This Company had a structured naming scheme for marketing programs, customer journeys, and forms).
7. The next step is a manual checkpoint. This company wanted to make absolutely sure that the Lead is interesting and thus has a team that checks whether the Lead meets the MQL criteria.
8. After this, the system checks the marketing consent level. This is required in order to be able to use D365 Marketing’s Lead scoring -feature. In D365 Marketing there is a field which defines the minimum consent level. Lead scoring requires the highest level called Profiling (out-of-the-box D365 Marketing consent levels).
9. Once the Lead score reaches the SQL threshold, it is tagged accordingly and visible in D365 Sales to the salesperson who is responsible for the Account in question. If the salesperson deems the Lead unworthy, she declines it and it is automatically forwarded back to the team that verifies Leads (Step 7.).

As this is an academic excercise I am not sure whether this will work in real life. If you find flaws in my thinking or understanding of D365 Marketing, please let me know.