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Advanced Sales Alerts

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Anonymous
Not applicable

Advanced Sales Alerts

Hey Everyone,

      I am seeking some help to find a sustainable solution to advanced sales alerts in Marketo. I'd like to find out if anyone has a similar situation to what I am experiencing and if you have found a solution. Any help that could be offered is greatly appreciated!

Here is our situation:

Right now, our sales reps are split across multiple regions in the US as well as throughout various countries globally. There are many situations that have several reps assigned to the same region that all want to receive alerts for new leads or for certain lead activity. The problem is, there are hundreds of sales reps and many layers that want to receive certain alerts. Meaning alerts are not just based on Lead Owner.

The way the alerts are set up right now is: IF lead is in territory X, send alert to Jon, Joe, Anne, Stacy, etc. <-- and these IF statements go on and on to include all regions.

The issue I am finding with this setup, is it will become very cumbersome as we expand our Marketo deployment to new countries and new regions. Sales reps will come and go, region assignments may change, and there will be hundreds of territories with hundreds of reps within them--All with different email alerts and languages. Does anyone know of a sustainable approach to manage alerts in this scenario within Marketo? I don't want to end up with dozens of smart campaigns with dozens of IF statements that need to be manually updated and checked every time a sales rep changes.

Again, thanks in advance for any input that you can provide!

- Jason

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Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: Advanced Sales Alerts

One thing I like to do that might help is to folder all the alert programs in Marketo, then use folder or program tokens to populate who receives the alert. For example, we have a roadshow tour we host, and we have dozens of events across dozens of cities every year. For each registration, there are program owners who need to be alerted. We handle this by creating a token at the folder level above these programs which looks like this:

Text token: Internal Alert Distro

Values: johndoe@company.com;janedoe@company.com;jilldoe@company.com

Then the alert step looks like this:

Send Alert: To: none. Other emails: {{my.Internal Alert Distro}}

This works well because you can build it at the folder level, override it at the program level if needed, and have as few changes as possible when recipients change. Might not fully address your challenge, but hopefully it helps.

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8 REPLIES 8
Brigid_Greenwa2
Level 4

Re: Advanced Sales Alerts

Hi Jason-

Couple of questions - how are the team members shown in your CRM today?  Are they lookup fields beyond native ownership fields?  Contact Team members? 

You could set up some sort of email distribution email alias that you could send the alert/email to - but if you represent these folks as values on the record in your CRM, you could setup a secondary field to reflect their email address of the secondary "owner" and using tokens, do alerts to them as well as the Primary Lead or Account Owner.

If you are using MSI, I would almost suggest that people learn to "follow" content that they don't own which would then show up in My Watch List of for them - and it is totally controlled by them (instead of trying to build some systematically which sounds pretty complicated).

If you need to build it in MKTO, you could always daisy-chain it in terms of logic:

Decision point in original smart campaign Flow: Send Alert becomes REQUEST SMART CAMPAIGN (1st IF BREAKDOWN)

Enter Send Alert stream - 1st IF breakdown: Major Region; Answer: NORAM, EMEA, APAC, LATAM - split into one of four next smart campaigns

Enter 2nd IF breakdown: NORAM-CHOICE 1, EMEA-CHOICE 1, APAC-CHOICE 1, LATAM-CHOICE 1, NORAM-CHOICE 2, EMEA-CHOICE 2 etc - which splits into one of 16 smart campaigns

Enter 3rd IF breakdown: etc etc

Depending on how many permutations you have, you control the update at the last point of the daisy-chain versus trying to put all the IF statements into one smart campaign which can become unwieldy to update.

Hope this helps give you some ideas - good luck!

Brigid

Josh_Hill13
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

Re: Advanced Sales Alerts

Drew and Brigid have good suggestions.

But if your complexity is high, you may find it better to manage this in SFDC with Apex code that can handle this more easily. Perhaps a good first step is to map it all out on a white board or process chart to see just how complex it is and if you can condense steps or email chains as suggested. If not, then it needs to be managed out of SFDC.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: Advanced Sales Alerts

One thing I like to do that might help is to folder all the alert programs in Marketo, then use folder or program tokens to populate who receives the alert. For example, we have a roadshow tour we host, and we have dozens of events across dozens of cities every year. For each registration, there are program owners who need to be alerted. We handle this by creating a token at the folder level above these programs which looks like this:

Text token: Internal Alert Distro

Values: johndoe@company.com;janedoe@company.com;jilldoe@company.com

Then the alert step looks like this:

Send Alert: To: none. Other emails: {{my.Internal Alert Distro}}

This works well because you can build it at the folder level, override it at the program level if needed, and have as few changes as possible when recipients change. Might not fully address your challenge, but hopefully it helps.

Justin_Norris1
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

Re: Advanced Sales Alerts

Jason Martin​, lots of very good ideas from Drew, Josh, and Brigid.

Of all of them, the simplest solution to my mind is using regional distribution lists as Brigid Greenway​ first suggested. 

Have your email admin set these lists up, and then it should be part of new user onboarding to add users to the right distribution lists.

This is something that almost certainly happens already since a user is probably part of other distribution lists. This way you piggyback on existing process and ensure your lists are always up to date, relieving yourself of a tedious maintenance requirement as well!

Then just include the new regional distribution emails on the alert.

Honestly that's way simpler then building out the complex stuff. I'd only go there if you have an non-helpful IT person.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: Advanced Sales Alerts

Thank you Brigid Greenway​, Drew Sollberger​, Josh Hill​, and Justin Norris​! These are all great suggestions. I'll sit down with my team and look at a few of the options to see which will work best for our situation. Appreciate the help!

- Jason

Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: Advanced Sales Alerts

Jason - I have a similar requirement for our sales teams and would be interested in hearing which approach you used/what ended up working for you.  Thanks in advance!

- Alison

Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: Advanced Sales Alerts

Hi Alison,

    We ended up following Josh's suggestion by using folder level tokens for the sales alerts. I have one top-level folder that is utilized for all sales alerts for a particular region. Within that folder, I have set up custom tokens with each token representing a particular sales territory. So a token might look similar to the following:

3B20 Territory - JonDoe@email.com, JaneDoe@email.com,....

Then in each of my various email alerts, I just specify: IF lead falls into Territory 3B20, send email X to {{my.3B20 Territory}}.

This makes things much easier because instead of having to go into each of the different smart campaigns for the alert emails to make changes, I can just go into one location where the tokens are, and make a single change that affects all emails.

Hope that helps!

Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: Advanced Sales Alerts

Thanks Jason!  Very helpful.