ABM in Core Marketo

[Brett_Carpenter]

Hi everyone!

I'm trying to do a version of ABM by only using the core Marketo platform. I'm basing my strategy off this article by Micheline Farah at DemandSpring: Getting started with ABM using Core Marketo - Demand Spring

I'm interested to know if anyone here has done something similar? I'm running into a problem where I can only have 20 active segments so, based off Micheline's suggestions, I can't have all my target accounts created as segmentations. Would it be better to use Smart Lists for each target account? Or have the segmentations be the territories and the segments be the target accounts?

I can't wait to hear what you do.

Thanks!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Hi Brett,

That article, brief though it is, I think is quite misleading.

First, if membership in key accounts is mutually exclusive (one lead can only belong to one key account) then there's no reason to create a different Segmentation for each account, you want a different Segment within the same Segmentation.  It would be crazy to use up all your allowed Segmentations on key accounts. Don't see how that could work.

Second, while the concept of "Update your lead scoring program to increase the demographic score for each lead within a targeted account," no guidance is given about how this kind of cross-lead communication would be possible. Marketo doesn't share state or counters across leads -- heck, even leads that have exactly the same email address will not both both be updated by the same triggered lead scoring methodology. 

To do any of this poor man's ABM properly at least requires a webhook to coordinate state/score across leads.

[Brett_Carpenter]

Thanks for the response Sanford Whiteman !

So it would make sense to create segmentations based on the larger picture (sales territories for example), then dive into the named accounts within the segments? The scoring side of things makes sense to me, as we'd just update the scores using a trigger when a lead is added to a smart list or segment. Unless I'm misinterpreting it?

What do you mean by the "state/score across leads" statement? If the Named Accounts are only a small subset of the database, why would we have to have cross-lead communication?

[SanfordWhiteman]

What do you mean by the "state/score across leads" statement? If the Named Accounts are only a small subset of the database, why would we have to have cross-lead communication?

Because an "account" does not exist in this design. It's an abstraction that only exists in Smart List form in a Segment definition.  If somebody increases their lead score, that isn't going to increase the lead score for anyone else, in or out of their "account."

[Brett_Carpenter]

Ah, ok. Gotcha.

So the only scoring available in this poor-man's ABM would be the Smart List membership trigger.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

So the only scoring available in this poor-man's ABM would be the Smart List membership trigger.

There's no such thing as a Smart List membership trigger.

Segment Changes will tell you when someone meets the SL qualifications for a Segment. That trigger could be used to score them based on other field values/activity history that are present at that time they qualify.  It won't help with ongoing scoring.

To restate the logical gap here: if you want updates to one lead to update all leads with something in common with that lead, the only way to do this is to mediate/distribute the updates via a webhook.  That webhook could (for one example) call Schedule Campaign via the REST API, for a pre-existing Smart Campaign that targets only the related leads.  Or the 'hook could queue up all updates in a remote database (this is the way I do it) and then you run a scheduled batch across the whole db and every lead gets their necessary updates.

As you can see, while this poor man's ABM can be tremendously useful, to make it actually be functional requires custom development. So it's surprising to see a blog post that acts like it's just a few clicks away.

[Brett_Carpenter]

Ah, bummer. Excuse my newbieness

Thanks for all your help! It is certainly an intensive process.

[SanfordWhiteman]

No problem!

That blog post is frustrating, as the author can't have accomplished what's sketched out... it's theoretically fine, but doesn't take Marketo realities into account.

If you can mark one of my answers as Correct, that would help future searches.