Best practice for a multi-touch prospecting program

[Anonymous]

We have a transactional sale with a heavy outbound element to our prospecting. I am looking for best practice advice on how to implement this as a engagement program or some other approach in Marketo. We use a combination of outbound calling, emailing and potentially other touch methods. 

What we want to achieve:

Day 1 – AM: Send email #1.  PM: afternoon – call #1, leave voicemail if we get that. 
Day 2 – Anytime: Call #2, don’t leave a voicemail
Day 3 – AM: Call #3, no voicemail
Day 3 – PM: Call #4, Leave voicemail #2
Day 4 – Anytime: Send email #2
Day 5 – Do Nothing
Day 6 – Call #5
Day 7 – Send a “break up" email #3

It may be helpful to think of the above 7 days of prospecting as taking place through a series of touch stages, wherein days 1-2 are introduction, days 3-5 are persisting, and days 6-7 are all aboard / last call. 

Our outbound calls, which are made using InsideSales.com, can be made to Leads who are members of a Salesforce Campaign. So, maybe we should have a campaign hierarchy in Salesforce with a parent campaign for this overall engagement program and child Campaigns for the tactics of Call 1, Call 2, Call 3, Call 4, and Call 5. Looking for advice on best pratices here.  We distinguish our call scripts on Call 1 vs. Call 2 so even though they are both calls, they are not the same -- no different from how email #1 and email #2 would have distinct messages.

Would we need to setup some parallel streams since we do nothing on day 5? My undertsanding is the cadence is very rigid, so skipping a day is not possible. Also, the Marketo system seems good at firing off emails, but what is the best practice to tell the user to perform some other action, such as make an outbound phone call or post something to the prospect's social media, etc.? These non-email activities can be an effective part of a balanced multi-touch prospecting strategy. Any advice is welcome. 

Also, once a Lead exhausts all the steps in the the 7-day call + email strategy outlined above, if we have not achieved our goal of setting an appointment for sales, we want to kick the Lead to a different Engagement program that has a low-cadence drip email and/or direct mail program. I am looking for best practice to personalize the content delivered through the slow drip. If we want to deliver targeted content, do folks recommend we implement distinct engagement programs (e.g. one for healthcare prospects and one for retail prospects, each with its own collection of targeted content relevant to that industry), or do folks recommend conditioning the content delivery within a single engagement program, and simply decide which email to send using some if/then process against the lead's industry within the program itself?

Thanks in advance for any feedback here. I am stronger on Salesforce than I am on Marketo so appreciate your guidance. The above multi-touch prospecting strategy is common to outbound, transactional, inside sales teams, so I am hoping there are some folks here with experience doing the above in Marketo. 

[Anonymous]

Hey Angus, 

This is a super interesting question. My company has a very short-cycle transactional sale as well so I can relate to many of the questions you are asking. 

High-level, I personally think engagement programs are not the best fit for the activities you describe. You could make it work technically, but it is a bit square peg/round hole. 

My onboarding program (which is also 7 days BTW) is a similar pattern of emails and calls with different email streams that are behaviourally triggered. I have it as part of a single program in Marketo. 

I think your idea of synching each of the outbound activities to a child campaign in SFDC is a great one (wish I'd thought of that). You could synch the parent program in Marketo to the parent program in SFDC, then have child campaigns for each activity and use a controller within the Marketo program to assign leads to the relevant child campaign in SFDC as they progress through the steps. You would need to include Marketo smart campaigns to update member statuses in the SFDC child campaigns based on the outcomes to ensure they are marked as responded etc. 

For triggering phone calls or other tasks, you can use the "Create Task in SFDC" flow step. I make heavy use of that one and it is the way you can coordinate your automated and human-executed activities into a tight multi-stream nurture. 

E.g.,





In terms of the longer-term drip, whether you have a single or multiple engagement programs would likely depend upon a number of factor, including how different the content pieces are (for instance, could you just use segmentations and dynamic content within a single email? or are they entirely divergent streams?). 

For tracking and reporting the segments separately it's probably a lot easier to have them in separate programs so you can see the metrics for each. But if the changes for each industry are minor then the overhead on maintaining separate programs could be greater. Hopefully others will chime in who have tackled this problem with what they have done, as we don't use engagement programs for that either. 

[Josh_Hill13]

I agree with Justin that a series of campaigns work best for the first call series.

You could trigger off of Task Creation or SFDC Campaign Membership. This probably needs to be thought out more because Marketo doesn't have a lot of customizations for Tasks.

As for personalization and nurturing, yes, move people from the 7 day program to the appropriate Engagement with Streams. I'd probably have each vertical as a separate Engagement. That way I can use the Streams with different cadences or content progression.

If you have a nurturing Goal, be sure to have an exit system that pushes the lead back to a 7 day process (if you want) or something like that.