Business Process Question: Create Opportunity for EVERY Order to maximize Marketo?

[Anonymous]

Hi,

We are a relatively new user of Marketo. We historically haven't always created an Opportunity for every Order. For example if a rep received a fast request for a software product, they would have moved directly to the Order, skipping the Opportunity. However, we want to take advantage of the Marketo features, which are tied into the Opportunity status. Best practices for Marketo users, do you require sales to create an Opportunity for EVERY order so it can be tracked, acted upon, changed to the correct revenue stage, etc?) Any guidance on your business process would be very helpful.

Thanks

Rob

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Rob,

This would only make sense if you really have a use of this opportunity information, such as detecting the date at which the opportunity was created and setting the contact in a specific campaign or stream, of just stop all marketing activities for a while. Creating all orders as "won" opportunities may also make sense in term of pipeline reporting, so that you can have a complete picture of all the business. But his has nothing to do with Marketo

There is at least one conditions that you will need to fulfill if you want it to work : not only the sales need to create an Opportunity, but they also need to attach relevant contact as "contact roles" of this opportunity. If you do not to this, Marketo will not see opportunities in contacts.

Attaching the contacts to opps is where generally things go wrong : The whole thing is a process that sales hate in general, because they have the feeling that this is cumbersome process to which they attach no value. In other words, a waste of their precious time.

If this is really needed, I would encourage you to look into the possibility to have these orders created automatically in the system.

-Greg