This week our VP of Consulting Services, Andrea Lechner-Becker busted through the content marketing dept. door, fired this post onto the desk and was gone in a flash of brilliance. For those who don't know Andrea, she crushes faces so we happily obliged. So, without further ado, here are Andrea's top best practices from over 2500 Marketo implementations.
If I had a dollar for every time a client said to me, “What are your best practices? I just don’t know what to ask. I don’t know what I don’t know,” I would have a nice little stack of Benjamins on my desk.
Well… let me cut to the chase and tell you what you SHOULD be asking.
Program Channels are, like, the MOST important thing!
Remember those two slides in Foundation class talking about channels? Yeah — turns out if you want to report on your marketing activities, they’re like the most important thing you can focus on when you start (or improve) with Marketo. The best part — it’s just a matter of thinking about what you’re already doing. It doesn’t require ANY Marketo knowledge to do it.
Program Statuses are like the SECOND most important thing
Ugh… why do I have to build all of these campaigns? Because we’re SMART damn it! We don’t just want to know that we sent an email, we want to know that that email send was actually successful! Looking to report on campaign success? Well, then you need to befriend program statuses quickly and consistently.
Program Cost
Also super important — my favorite line… "How can you understand campaign ROI without the I" – That’s investment, people. I'm always surprised by the number of marketers who state that they "aren't tracking ROI on that initiative" or "it's not that important". Your CMO is tracking the ROI weather you know it or not. BTW they are tracking the ROI on YOU as well. Be in the profit column and track your program costs.
SFDC Campaigns
SFDC users have the magic of the Marketo Program to SFDC campaign sync. If you’re not using it, I’m going to offend you… you are a straight up fool. Ask someone how and why, or maybe I’ll post on that next.
Lead Lifecycle
Have lots of campaigns that sync leads over to your CRM and not any that track how, when and why they flow back? You’re missing a lead lifecycle program.
Sales Insight RSS Feed
The most uncommonly talked about part of Sales Insight is the ability for reps to choose their own destiny to notification-land. Some reps want no alert, some want to know every time one of their leads signs up for a white paper — teach them how to do this in Sales Insight. Having trouble getting consistent sales ops process in CRM? Guess where your reps spend their day - in their email. Gmail and Outlook support RSS so this will be a huge help.
Revenue Cycle Model
If you have Spark Edition, this feature is literally worth the investment to upgrade. Want to be able to say how many days it took for someone to move from MQL to SQL? Really tough without RCM. Plus… segmentation. RCM is also the most helpful interface when we are trying to get executives to map out their marketing to sales funnel, simply from a visualization perspective. Pro Tip: Don't draw the connectors when you are doing this, wait until you get some alone time after everyone is bought in - it will only conclude the alignment conversation.
There you have it. Now that you know what you ask, you won't have to worry about any of what Donald Rumsfeld called "unknown unknowns."
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