How do you manage distributed teams?

[Amanda_Thomas6]

Hi All,

We have a field marketing team, that manages most events. We allow them create emails, landing pages, and campaigns, but we'd like to keep the reigns on scheduling and approving campaigns. Is there a way to set up alerts when they are finished, requesting our admins to review and approve? Curious as to how other teams handle multiple teams in Marketo. Do you guys just have a Marketo admin (or certified expert) on all teams within Marketo?

Tagging Houston User Group​ for some responses as well.

[Josh_Hill13]

No, there is no workflow or approvals process. Assuming you didn't give them permissions to approve pages or send items, then they would be forced to ask for final QA, which is what I do.

ideally you should train the local teams on Marketo use, perhaps identifying someone who can be a Power User or an MCE eventually. Most "regular" marketers do not need to be MCE, but they should be trained on their specific area to be more independent.

You define the rules, train, then let them handle it.

[Amanda_Thomas6]

Thanks Josh Hill​. I figured I'd get this answer. This is exactly what we currently do. I think it's true, we just need to spend more time training people to be power users.

[Josh_Hill13]

There are several blog posts on Marketo regarding team management that should be helpful.

[ChristinaZuniga]

Joe Reitz​ was telling me about this last week - he has a good process in place for a large distributed team.

[Amanda_Thomas6]

Thanks, Christina Zuniga​!

Joe Reitz​, I'd love to hear your process!

[Diego_Lineros2]

You should have a clear process that you can translate into a work management system such as WorkflowMax, SmartQ, ProjectManager.com, Workfront...  So you can make sure that what has been done in Marketo is what has been requested, therefore the building, amendment and approval stages are clear.

[Joe_Reitz]

Sorry, Amanda Thomas, late to the party

We have something like 600 users in Marketo all across the world. This is going to grossly oversimplify it, but basically the permission sets are tiered based on platform expertise (i.e., standard users versus power users) and geographic market, and only an internally certified group of power users has the ability to schedule/activate smart campaigns and landing pages. The GEO permissions are important because we also have some stringent communication limits to defend our (prospective) customers' inboxes from over-communication, and we don't want US-based marketers targeting records in the RoW. And even if you are in this elite group of power users, we've architected a process by which YOU CAN NEVER SEND/ACTIVATE ANYTHING THAT YOU'VE BUILT. The QA always has to run through another power user. With so many users, this helps us severely limit the possibility for errors, enforce key legal compliance policies, and generally just raise the bar when someone who doesn't really do marketing automation full-time wants to send something mediocre (or worse). It's about more than the technical "did you build this correctly?"

To answer your original question though, we manage this through a ticketing system as well as a general email alias. When something is ready for review, a ticket is either assigned by the campaign builder or requested through the alias of all power users. It can be a challenge for internal stakeholders, but it's a process that has worked out well for us overall.

I'm planning on submitting a session to the champion track to discuss our process and how to enforce compliance for distributed teams at Summit this year (*ahem* @kevin_lau *cough* ). I think there's some good takeaways to help marketers share the load across distributed teams, even if you don't have 600 users waiting in the wings

[Amanda_Thomas6]

I think this would be a great session! We definitely don't have 600 users, but we do have enough requests for a ticketing system. We use Zendesk, and require all marketo requests are created with a Marketo Asset Brief form and sent to our marketing zendesk ticketing distribution email address. Zendesk definitely isn't the best at holding projects, like when task x of project is complete, email owner of task z. So, we would have to have them almost create another ticket to request approval/scheduling. I love the idea of a QA team, we could build out a mini version.

[Amy_Goldfine]

I think this is less about distributed teams and more about project management. I would definitely get on board with a PM tool (if you're not already) and train everyone. The field managers can tag the marketing ops person when they're ready for their work to be QA'd and launched.