Best way/process to validate and update lead info?

[Anonymous]

Hi...

I have been thinking the best way for my team to validate and update new lead info in Marketo. I have a bunch of forms for different products and one main form for our corporate website. This general form gets a lot of info, daily, and usually we have all kinds of requests, from job applications to partnership invitations to real customers.

I want to get the best info from these leads, but I have found that many people don't like to leave their work email or their real phone. It's usually one or the another. I dont want to discard them, I rather to contact them by phone or email and ask for further information if they are really interested, which has been a constant case - anyway I would have a couple of guys on my team to check these new leads, but they are not very Marketo savvy, so I'm trying to think of an easy way for them to update the most basic lead info.

I though about a private form only for them that triggers a smart campaign to update certain details, has anybody done this? is it a good idea?

Obviously, the "easiest" option would be to teach them to use Marketo, but there are other issues - permissions, auto updates, different campaigns, etc. that I think would make it difficult for them.

Any other options?

[Anonymous]

Hi Zayra,

There are a few things you can do and a few ways to look at the data.

1) Make certain fields mandatory.

2) If email address is mandatory send a confirmation email to make sure it is their real email address. Whatever the asset is they are trying to get make a link in the email. So they wont get the assets without giving you correct information.

3) Make sure your lists are fresh. If anyone hasn't engaged (open or click) an email in the past 6 months send an email asking to update or confirm their information.

The data is only as good as what is entered. If they are filling out a form to get something make sure that whatever the want to get requires them to put in information that can be confirmed.

Andy 

[Anonymous]

All the fields are mandatory but still I get some weird info, from actual potential clients.

My target are IT professionals, they are usually very smart and dont like to get tracked, they care a lot about privacy and don't like to get emails just because. Usually, they ask for a quotation using a gmail and later they give us the real work email, but just when we have established a more personal interaction with them.

My issue is the way we would update this. I can do it easily myself but my team usually uses a bunch of other tools and would get very confused with the Marketo inferface.

[Anonymous]

Hey Zayra,

We have this same issue. We get some strange info in our forms and later we are able to verify it or update it. The issue with Marketo is if you enter a new email address it will create a new record. We usually do 2 things to try and attack someone changing an email address:

1) Manually go in and update the record.

2) Add the new email (creating a new record) and every six months clean out the database with inactive records (No opens in the past 6 months).

3) Add a new field for work email and then create a smart campaign to copy to work email into the regular email field.

Andy