Sunday, August 19, 2012

On Today's Program - Catch 22


Since Marketo programs launched, it has provided a easier way to manage campaign flows and assets into a single structure. Campaign reporting has also been simplified since programs consolidate multiple campaigns and provide success metrics through member progression statuses.

For the past few weeks, I've been converting most of our marketing activities into Marketo Programs and also looking into the past few years to properly associated acquisition programs for all of our leads. However, I've also ran into a catch 22 in a few scenarios.

The fundamental issue is that any lead added to a Marketo program will automatically sync to a SFDC campaign if the SFDC campaign is linked. Here are a few scenarios where this is causing problems.

1. Lists - When lists are added to a program, all the members are automatically synced to the campaign. In cases where you only want members who responded to the campaign to actually be in the program, they have to be outside of the program (in the lead database). Here's the catch.

In the list load process, if the Acquisition Program is selected you run into the syncing issue since all members would get associated to the program thus the issue above. If you don't select the Acquisition Program by selecting "none" new leads would not have any Acquisition Program assigned. Acquisition is only attributed to net new leads so they remain empty.




2. Campaign flows - As part of our email campaigns we have instrumented a couple of scenarios where if the lead is a member of our Bad Data list or Email is Bounced, they are removed from flow. This is the first flow step to ensure data quality. This rule is ignored if this is a flow within the program an you'll get all leads synced to the SFDC campaign.


3. Lead assignment race conditions - For many reason, our lead assignment are done in Marketo. The sync between SFDC and Marketo is through a license just for Marketo. The assignments are setup with a single entry point called "sync master" where the lead is evaluated based on the global territory and flows through a series of sub request campaigns that ultimately assigns the lead based on product interest and specific territory to the rep that the lead belongs. However, by default all leads end up assigned to the sync license when leads are uploaded before they have the chance to be assigned. And since there's no way to mass reassign leads once an owner is established, it's a process to get owner's changed.

4. Old leads - If you have a set of leads that are not in a Program (older leads, inactive leads, etc.) and want to add them to a program, they will also sync to SFDc when they are added to these campaigns. Depending on the number of these leads, it can get ugly.

Please support this idea by voting for it in the community: https://community.marketo.com/MarketoIdeaDetail?id=08750000000HnEkAAK

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Ryan Vong – Marketo Jedi Knight

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet the ReveStar team in their Palo Alto office. I have to admit, they had me at "revenue." There are some things you can tell right away and the conversations just flowed. It felt like I found a long lost relative and decided to jump in. This is a repost of the blog announcement. Although Star Wars never came up in our conversations, I'm a big fan and the chosen theme was perfect.


Continuing on the “Mad Skills” theme, Ryan Vong has joined ReveStar as Technical Consultant, Special Projects. Like Patricia and George, Ryan has an unbelievably deep knowledge of various marketing automation tool sets, and in particular Marketo and SFDC. Like many in the Marketo user community in the Silicon Valley, I have witnessed first hand Ryan’s ability to deconstruct new “bleeding edge” business processes and layer in marketing automation practices to ensure strong demand gen and pipeline development.
If your company is implemeting advanced new business processes and looking to generate revenue from it (all this by the end of the next fiscal quarter), contact ReveStar and we’ll hook you up with the marketing automation Jedi Knight.