Planning and Communicating About Your Marketo Onboarding

[Meghana_Rao1]

While there's no perfect recipe for success for your Marketo implementation, most Marketo users can agree on two things that'll make the process a whole lot smoother:

1. Plan ahead of time: It's always a good idea to keep a plan or timeline around your implementation so you can make sure you're hitting your goals and pulling together the resources you'll need well in advance. Remember that implementation is an ongoing process and building some flexibility into your plans will help you stay realistic about your plan.

2. Get your leadership involved: Leadership buy-in and support is a huge differentiator for long-term Marketo success. Keeping your internal stakeholders aware of your goals and up to date on your onboarding process will make sure they feel invested in the process and in Marketo. Whether you're scheduling regular meetings with them or sending out an update email each week, maintaining regular contact will make sure they're on the same page as you and will help them manage their expectations around your organization's Marketo onboarding.

Check out the attached resources to help you get started:

1. Onboarding Milestones Template: Use this template to outline some specific milestones during your onboarding and identify the teams and resources you'll need to engage before you go live.

2. Internal Communications Guide and Template: Once you have your milestones laid out, use this guide to draft regular updates to your key stakeholders.

Have a couple tips or implementation advice of your own? Help your peers out and share them in the comments below!

[Amy_Goldfine]

If you are brand new to marketing automation and haven't thought about your lead lifecycle, lead sources, lead statuses, and UTM strategy this is a good time to do that. You need to have that all agreed-upon by both Marketing and Sales before you can implement Marketo. Having a good foundation is key to success!

It's also really important to communicate and build a good relationship with your CRM Admin. They will be a major partner in your success.

Once specific tip: Plan to be thoughtful about the Marketo Sync User profile. Not every field that is in your CRM needs to sync down to Marketo. Once a field is in Marketo, you can't delete it! Especially if you have lots of packages installed in your CRM, there could be hundreds of fields that are irrelevant to Marketo. And going forward, your CRM Admin should be thoughtful about which new fields are exposed to Marketo. Having only necessary fields syncing means a) faster sync, b) easier auditing of a person's activity record, c) faster setup of smart lists because you don't have to scroll through irrelevant, confusing fields!

[Meghana_Rao1]

Absolutely, Amy! I love how specific this advice is and re CRMs it really makes a huge difference if you're thoughtful about which fields you're integrating into Marketo and plan it out beforehand. For anyone working on that process, the lovely Juli James​ has made this helpful template to map your CRM fields to Marketo.