Wait on Program

[Anonymous]

On program flows I would love to see an option added in the wait step that waits until an external Marketo program finishes running in addition to just durations/times.

For example, many of our programs start by adding the lead to a list which triggers a separate program to assign the lead owner (this was our lead owner assignment splits happen in one place as opposed to individually in each program). After adding it to the list we have a wait step to make sure the lead owner assignments finish before the rest of the program's flow continues. Currently we have the wait step set to 3 minutes just to be safe, but that obviously delays the rest of the program. A great solution would be instead of telling the wait step to hold off a specific amount of time, if you could tell it to just wait until "Program X" is done running. That way it will wait just the amount of time it needs and then continue through the flow.

[Anonymous]

I like this idea, as I've had many headaches dealing with "race conditions" or campaigns whose conditions were not met because other steps occurred a few seconds too late. 

Are you using SFDC as your CRM? 

If so why not tell Marketo to use Salesforce's lead owner assignment rules then set up your assignment rules in SFDC? Not sure what your subsequent steps are so it still may not be 100% safe for you but this method has been quite stable for me. 

[Anonymous]

We are using SFDC. We may be able to work something out in SFDC like we're currently doing in Marketo. We'll have to look in to that. It would still be nice though, like you said, to have the "wait on program" step to avoid "race conditions" in other scenarios.

Thanks for your advice!