5 Tips for Navigating the Marketo Renewal Process

Anonymous
Not applicable

The Marketo renewal is a process the majority of us have to deal with every year. Usually we dread it, and with luck get through it without any tears (or punches thrown). It's time to navigate that renewal with dignity!

Based on my experience, user feedback and a bit of insider information, here are 5 tips to successfully navigate your Marketo renewal.

1. Begin your renewal discussions early

Make sure you reach out to your rep at least three months prior to your renewal. Get on the phone to understand what the increases are this year, what upgrades you may need and how your budget aligns with your renewal cost. Depending on your internal process, you may be asked to provide competitive pricing to ensure you are within an industry benchmark. Plus, if your database is out of compliance, you will need time to remedy it.

2. Know your database Tier

Marketo Lead Management is structured in a tiered pricing system based on the number of leads in your database. You will need to check your current contract to see the Tier you are paying for. The definition of "leads" according to Marketo is any lead in your system that has an email, phone number or address. How do you find this information? It's on the Lead Database dashboard, but you need to hover over the component to see your entire database that you are billed on, instead of just Marketable Leads. If you are above your Tier, expect a hefty increase for your renewal and limited negotiation power until you can get your database into compliance. If you start your renewal early enough, you should be able to get the database down.

Known Database Tiers:

  • Spark:
    • 50K
    • 50K-100K (increments of 10K)
  • Standard:
    • 100K-250K
    • 250K-500K
  • Select
    • 500K-750K
  • Enterprise Edition beyond 750K

3. Dealing with your brand new Account Manager

As is typical with a growing technology company, your account rep from year to year is ever changing. It's hard to keep a rapport going when your account rep at every renewal cycle has only been with Marketo a month or two.

3 tips for the revolving Account Manager door:

Use the Contact Us form on Marketo.com if you don't know who your rep is or are getting 0 response from what you thought was your current rep. There is an SLA around their Contact Us form, so you will get a phone call from someone at Marketo within a couple hours and they will be able to look up your current Account Manager.

Keep all your communication records from your past renewals. Since reps change each year, they may or may not have access to the notes you discussed 10 months ago about getting more training sessions included in your renewal this year. If you have a record of these communications, you can easily discuss them with your current rep.

There is hope! Word on the street is that the renewals team has a new leader in place and is looking to make this process a much better and more customer focused experience.

4. Bring in a Negotiator

Not everyone will need this, but it can be very difficult to negotiate your Marketo renewal. Many people have described the process at "take it or leave it" because Marketo knows it's painful to switch systems. For me, I'm deeply invested in Marketo personally. I have no interest in moving to another system and it can feel as though the Account Managers know this and give you little concessions for your renewal. Perhaps that's an overly emotional way of looking at it, but I have other systems that I can negotiate easily because the threat of replacing their system is real.

Luckily, I have an IT team that handle hundreds of technology renewals each year and know how to negotiate with Account Managers. Sometimes a little push back is all that's needed, but other times it has to do with getting add-ons or a lower year-over-year increase %. Bottom line is that if you're not very good at being bad cop, bring in backup. This could be your co-worker or your boss, as long as they can play that part for you.

5. Read the Contract

Yes, the last tip is to read the contract. It's not the most exciting read but make sure you do go over the contract before signing. Especially if you have been out of compliance on you database tier, check that there's nothing in the contract about automatically increasing your subscription.

As a final box to check off, ensure the contract has the list price, discount and quantity information by line item. It's nearly impossible to compare year over year if you don't have that information included.

Signing Off

Even though it seems painful, this is typical of any renewal process. There's usually a yearly increase that can be minimized with multi-year contracts and there's always a bit of room to negotiate. Going back and forth is important though, as it will save you money overall. Keep track of money savings for your records to provide to key internal stakeholders. You never know when you can use that bargaining chip to get a Marketo add-on!

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6 Comments
Joe_Reitz
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

Great post, Emily!

One thing I'd add to the "Know Your Database" point is that it's also really an often-overlooked best practice to regularly trim the fat that ends up in there. In my own experience, I've seen cross-functional teams import large lists with no email addresses (), create thousands of leads without acquisition programs, jealously guard large lists of deader-than-dead leads that aren't planned for re-nurture, and other weird examples of how sloth or lack of know-how have contributed to an over-inflated database size. This obviously impacts the tier size you'll be negotiating for!

One tip that can help you get non-marketable leads out of there and keep from re-syncing back in is to have your CRM admin create a field for "Exclude from Sync," and create a smart campaign that makes sure Marketo doesn't import any leads that have this field set to "true."

The other tip is to publicly shame anyone that uploads large lead lists with no email addresses

Jenn_DiMaria2
Level 10

All of the above! I know in our database, a big problem is (and always has been) potential duplicates due to the way our industry operates (ie: lots of people at a company with the same email address). What works for others doesn't work for us in this regard, so we really have to stay on top of dupes and merge as necessary; dupes have historically eaten up a good percentage of our tier, so it's definitely important to pay attention to those - time consuming as it is.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Completely agree! I was thinking of doing another post just about this topic. It seems to be the biggest issue for renewal discussions right now.

Joe_Reitz
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

That's a fantastic idea for a post and would be one heck of a reference doc! A lot of people do it a lot of different ways, and many don't have the option of just pawning off a new field on their SFDC admin... You should do a Nation Talk about it, lest I steal your great ideas and take credit

Anonymous
Not applicable

Quick update. Database Tiers now go up in increments of 100K and number of users have been added to bundles.

30K

50K

100K

200K

etc.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Just received an update from Marketo that database tiers are in increments of 250k once over 1M records, has anyone else found this to be the case in their experience?