Best Practices for Utilizing Lead Sources

Thanks to Vanessa Shayan for creating this post.

Lead Source answers the question “how did this contact come to us?” For example, “Tradeshow”. Many marketers use Lead Sources incorrectly in their CRM, making campaign management, reporting and lead scoring difficult.  While best to define lead sources prior to  the provisioning of your Eloqua instance, it’s never too late to start! Creating lead sources as a picklist in the CRM is best practice for data consistency, particularly important is mapping any kind of list import into Eloqua.

Think of this picklist as the “bucket” for which individual campaigns will be nestled and from which reports will be built (this is why we recommend that clients define lead source values that will map appropriately to their campaigns for tracking and reporting purposes).  The Lead Source field in Eloqua also should be synced  to the CRM and is maintained as the lead transitions through all stages of the buying cycle.