Last Updated Date: July 14, 2023
Onboarding Challenges: Time, Resources, and Scope
When you have 6 months to get a Marketo Engage instance up and running before your previous solution’s contract expires, your onboarding team has to move quickly but thoughtfully. This can be a real challenge when you’re a global, enterprise company and your team must coordinate needs and requirements across several business units to ensure Marketo Engage is properly set up by the fast-approaching go-live date, all while continuing to keep the lights on with all your other projects. These were the challenges @Naomi_Liu, the Director of Marketing Operations at Electronics for Imaging, Inc.(EFI), faced as she brought Marketo Engage on for her company. Her small but mighty team of four were tasked with standing up their new instance within 6 months while accommodating their global business units’ requirements and learning Marketo Engage as they worked.
While onboarding Marketo Engage itself is a significant project, Naomi’s team had a few additional directives:
- Align objectives and goals for Marketo Engage globally across several business units
- Provide customization for each team, while also ensuring the implementation is completed in a timely manner.
- Allow each business unit ownership over the project while still maintaining an efficient, centralized process.
Steering Committee: Balancing Control and Customization
Her solution is to create a steering committee with her team at the helm. Naomi established a weekly touch base meeting with her team’s Marketing Business Partners which included a representative from each business unit and regional corporate marketing lead. At each weekly meeting, she would share a 3-part deck:
- A review of progress since the previous week’s meeting
- Feedback items needed for the next week’s meeting
- “Show and Tell” to showcase new features of Marketo Engage that were new to the business. Some examples included: Marketo Engage <> Webex integration, flexible landing pages, and a revamped lead management process
These leaders would then leave each meeting with “homework” to take back to their teams and fill out before the next meeting. These assignments varied based on the implementation’s focus for that week, including worksheets on which roles or titles to include in a global form picklist or lists asking which modules each team would like to see included in the Marketo Engage email templates. This format helped individual teams own key decisions that affected their business units while ensuring the project could move forward with regular deadlines and a centralized decision-making team.
Marketo Engage Launch and Beyond
At the 4-week countdown to go-live, Naomi and her team began working backward through their processes and integrations to disable the old platform and turn Marketo Engage on. Partnering closely with IT on their Salesforce and middleware integrations, with Sales Ops on their lead management flow and sales enablement, and with great support from their implementation partner DemandGen, the Marketing Ops team successfully transitioned over to Marketo Engage as scheduled! To test and monitor for any potential gaps, Naomi had a “soft” go-live date for their Marketo Engage instance a week before they had to officially turn off their old platform. By the time the process was complete, the team had:
- Rebuilt 218 unique audience segmentations.
- Audited 5,500 campaigns, consolidated and migrated 115 campaigns without impact to the business.
- Audited 3,500 forms, consolidated, and migrated 360 forms without loss of data!
What’s next for the EFI Marketing Ops team? After their successful migration, they’re moving forward on training their teams in Marketo and developing training materials for their marketing business partners to showcase the “art of the possible”, featuring 20 new capabilities available to the team now that they have Marketo Engage. Read more about how Naomi and the EFI Marketing Ops team train new users on Marketo Engage HERE.
Onboarding Tips
Here are a few of Naomi’s tips to maintain a clear, forward-moving process:
- Determine beforehand which topics are worth bringing forward to the steering committee and which should be decided by the centralized Marketing Ops team. Keeping the topics straightforward and prioritizing which decisions go out to the larger teams will help you keep this process moving
- Don’t try to do everything at once because you won’t end up doing anything well. Prioritize your task list and focus on a few items at a time.
- Don’t implement something halfway that you think you’ll go back to later because it’s unlikely that you’ll have time to get back to it. It’s important to get it as close to final as you can right from the start.
- Without clear boundaries, decisions that need to be made during the implementation process can be quickly de-railed. Open ended, “decision-by-committee” questions can slow down forward-moving progress. To streamline your decision-making, come prepared with a suggestion that brings the team 80% of the way there and have them fill in the blanks.
Next Steps
Prepare your own onboarding for your organization by doing the following:
- Create a steering committee for Marketo Engage implementation and include a representative from each business unit and regional corporate marketing lead.
- Come prepared with a proposal and have the stakeholders fill in the blanks.
- Align objectives and goals for Marketo Engage globally across several business units to provide customization for each team.
- Assign each business unit a role with clear ownership over the implementation.
Your Turn
How have you aligned internally around your Marketo Engage instance? What advice do you have for other new Marketo Engage customers beginning their implementation? Share your tips and comments with your peers below!
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