Can the Acquisition Program be attributed by Salesforce?

[ThaísMacedo]

Hello Community!

I have a situation where leads fill an external form (not a Marketo form), and an API integration creates the leads in our Salesforce, which then is integrated to Marketo. There's a hidden field in this form with the Acquisition Program Name we want for these leads, and a campaign in Marketo with the same name.

This Marketo campaign contains a smart campaign triggered by "Lead is created / acq program is XXXX". But, testing it, we noticed that the leads don't come through. Actually, the leads arrive without an acquisition program.

Is this because the leads are created first in Salesforce? Is there something we can do to make these leads already arrive with the correct acq program?

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

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Is this because the leads are created first in Salesforce? Is there something we can do to make these leads already arrive with the correct acq program?

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Yes- that's the expected behavior. CRM inserted records don't get Acquisition Program populated OOTB. However, in your case, you can very well create a campaign that updates the Acquisition Program field with the respective Program Name (assuming you have that Program already created in Marketo) using the Change Data Value flow step when the lead gets created in Marketo from CRM. Unfortunatley, Acqusition Program can't be updated using tokens, so even if you have the hidden field synced over to Marketo with the AP data, you would not be able to use it as a lead token in the CDV flow step for setting the system Acquisition Program field.

Note that, this CDV will, of course, be after the Lead is Created activity, so people would still not qualify for your original trigger campaign looking for people with AP value at the time of lead creation, but you can request that Campaign from your Acquisition Program update campaign (or have those flow steps after the Acquisition Program update flow step). This may not be 100% what you want, but I feel it's something you should do anyway from an Attribution standpoint. I hope this is helpful. Let us know if you have questions. 🙂

[michellechopin]

@Darshil_Shah1Following on from your point above, what if we have leads that are created in/by CRM and have never crossed through a Marketo program but are naturally synced to the Marketo database as part of our custom sync? Our Dynamics database is the record of truth for a large chunk of our database so acquisition program isn't set automatically and we don't have a specific program to assign them to.

Do you have any suggestions on how best to approach this? I'd love to get more use out of the Performance Insights but we're showing that more than 25% of our leads have no acquisition program and date.

Appreciate your insight as always!

Michelle 

[Katja_Keesom]

The best practice we use is to set up a specific Marketo program for acquisition program CRM purposes and all people coming in from your CRM as program member to that program as soon as they enter Marketo. That will automatically stamp them with that program as the acquisition program.

[michellechopin]

I was wondering if this was the way to do it and I appreciate that you shared your process, @Katja_Keesom!

This makes perfect sense and is straightforward too. I've set up a generic CRM program to accommodate the leads that come in via Dynamics moving forward and I'm also going to clean up the leads that are already in our Marketo database. We're good at ensuring our other leads coming in via Marketo are attributed to the proper program when they're imported etc. but I have had to do a little clean up for the rare ones that were missed.

Thanks also to @Darshil_Shah1 for adding your input and confirmation on this process. This should all come together to clean up our leads either completely or good enough to get Performance Insights working better for us.

This community rocks! 😀

[Darshil_Shah1]

Yes, running a batch campaign to process the existing people created from CRM should do the trick. I usually create a trigger campaign first, clone it and remove the triggers from it and set it up as a batch campaign for such things. You can also create a monitoring smart list to see whether anyone from CRM is attributed to the designated program.

[Katja_Keesom]

I actually have a central person creation trigger with a fair few executables running off that, among which this.

[michellechopin]

@Darshil_Shah1 - I ran our batch campaign on Friday when all was quiet and MPI has already removed that "error" when I open it up (not surprising given that 80%+ of our database is a sync back from Dynamics). I have our trigger campaign working now to catch any new additions to Marketo via CRM so we don't have to do this manual work again/much in the future.

@Katja_Keesom - I considered adding this to an existing campaign to keep all those CRM Admin items together but went with a separate campaign for now (I did what Darshil ended up mentioning here where I created the trigger campaign first and cloned it to set up the batch campaign). I may still move things into the single campaign to keep things clean, tidy and easily accessible.

Thanks for all the ideas sharing - I was definitely on the right track with my own assumptions and I always appreciate the help in clarifying/confirming things 😀

[Darshil_Shah1]

Sounds good, @michellechopin! Glad that you were able to close this out. I feel having a separate campaign for processing the batch records instead of converting the same campaign to the trigger campaign later serves the purpose of ready-referencing people who were processed by the batch update. 

[Darshil_Shah1]

I agree with Katja here! You should consider creating a dedicated operational program to process people coming from your CRM and updating the acquisition program and other updates that you'd normally want to do for people getting created from Marketo. This would allow you to keep things organized and ensure people are processed just the way they should.