Many Enterprise clients implementing Marketo struggle to define which fields need to be created in CRM to help sales. And sometimes there is a lot of pressure to get it right from the start as it is often a long and complicated process to have CRM administrators create new fields – and an even bigger battle to facilitate change management processes with a large and distributed sales team.
Here are the top 5 fields my clients find valuable and their use case:
- Acquisition Date – this is useful if you are holding records back from syncing with CRM until they are auto-qualified. The acquisition date gives more insight into when the name was acquired by marketing and when the nurturing relationship likely began.
- Most Recent Campaign – since people can be members in many different programs, having a field to track what the most recent Marketo program someone was a part of helps sales understand what the person has been doing lately and what that last marketing touch is.
- Most Recent Product Interest – this is especially important if you have many different solution areas or products. Like Most Recent Campaign, this field allows sales to understand what area of interest someone has either through visits to specific web pages or by downloading product specific content. While this may not be the only area of interest for the person, it is an extremely relevant touchpoint that will help sales to start a conversation with the person.
- Lead Score – while each business varies on the intention of scoring leads and the value that is populated, creating a score field in CRM is valuable – even more so if you are immediately synching records upon creation in Marketo. The key when creating this field is to clearly communicate how sales should interpret and use the data in it.
- Lifecycle Status – this field is used to show sales as to what buyers stage someone is in. This is a mirror field of Marketo’s revenue stage field which is a field that cannot be exposed through the API. Values in this field are typically read-only for sales and will map to the stages in your lifecycle such as MQL, SQL, and Recycled.
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