There are many things to take into consideration when designing a lead lifecycle in salesforce.com, but understanding the reports you ultimately want to deliver should always be the first 
step in the process. This doesn’t have to be a fancy requirements document or a well designed PowerPoint slide. It can be as simple as a sketch on a piece of paper or screenshots from existing dashboards with your new fields pasted on top.
Some things to consider when designing a lead lifecycle may be:
- Are we interested in tracking lead volume by rep?
- Are reps compensated on how many leads they pass? If so, do we have the mechanisms in place to track when they have passed a lead?
- Do we have SLA’s that we are measuring against? How will I know if a rep is out of compliance?
- Are we measuring the % of Marketing Qualified responses that turn in to Sales Accepted? If so, can we accurate capture those stages?
- Are we tracking engagement on the contact database? If so, how will we know when a rep follows up with a contact?
Starting with the end game in mind guarantees that your process supports capturing all of the data you need. And of course, you shouldn’t define your reporting requirements in a vacuum. Engaging key stakeholders and management in this part of the process is a great way to create alignment across Marketing & Sales to ensure successful adoption of the data post launch. 