How do you use LeanData and Marketo together for lead routing and alerts?

[Geoff_Arens]

We've been using LeanData for a while now and it's been awesome for managing our lead routing logic as well as matching leads to accounts. However, there is one big issue with movie our routing out of Marketo and into another system like LeanData.

It is difficult to quickly route leads and send alerts to the new owners. For instance, when a lead fills out a form, it gets added to a SFDC campaign and synced to SFDC. From there, LeanData picks the lead up and processes it to assign the right owner. However, SFDC can't give Marketo the signal that this lead now has an owner and is ready to receive an email alert. Instead, Marketo has to wait and pick up on the owner change when it polls SFDC next for updates.

With the introduction of SDR Follow Up SLAs, there is going to be a lot of focus on increasing our overall speed-to-lead (the time from lead created, routed, scored, qualified, and alert to SDR follow up) down to the minute. This delay makes improving this a real challenge.

To deal with this, we currently have a fairly gross solution in place where new alert-worthy leads are flagged in Marketo before they are synced to SFDC. As a result, we can send alerts immediately from LeanData once the owner has been assigned. However, that workflow only works for new unassigned leads. There must also be a workflow for all existing alert-worthy leads. This alerting logic lives in Marketo as a smart campaign and filters out leads created in the last hour, with the assumption that these would have fallen into the first workflow. As I mentioned, it's not an ideal solution and alerts often fall through the cracks.

Are there other teams that use LeanData and Marketo in their tech stack and have overcome this issue? In theory, it seems so simple: send an email alert after an owner has been assigned...

Thanks in advance!

Geoff

[Josh_Hill13]

have you discussed this with LeanData?

Have you considered adding the logic to LeanData or SFDC instead?

[Vineela_Maram]

Hi Geoff,

We are currently evaluating Lean Data solution to address our current Lead routing challenges(routing it to right owners in case it was previously assigned to inactive owners or wrong owners).

Why cant SFDC create a workflow rule when a owner changes from system to user or from one user to another user or when a new lead enters the system. This way when Lean Data assigns a lead to a rep, SFDC should automatically trigger an alert.

You could ask Lean Data to send a notification for existing lead/contact by creating a task to the correct brand/product rep along with new assignment to the owner and i am sure they can do it.

For existing leads/contacts, you could ask them to create a task to the correct brand/product rep and also notify sales managers etc if any. Lean Data can also check for the recency of the tasks present for that Lead for the same brand/product and send a notification to the right owner.

You should definitely talk to your account rep at Lean Data and add additional steps to your flow.

Thanks,

vineela.

[Andrew_Sielen1]

Either you need to send the alerts from Salesforce or you need to tell Marketo that the lead is done routing and then send the alert.

LeanData lead routing does allow you to update a field as part of the routing flow. You could create a checkbox field on the lead/contact that is called something like "Routed" and check that at the end of the LeanData routing flow. That should trigger an update back to Marketo and then you can trigger off of that (+ the original form fill.)

Routing - Lead Routing Guide – LeanData (Update Lead)

What I think I would do if you want to send the alert from Marketo:

1. On form fill, determine if it merits an alert and if so add them to a static list.
2. Sync to salesforce
3. LeanData routes and updates Routed = True which syncs back to Marketo
4. Marketo triggers on the "Routed" field AND the static list membership.
5. If Routed=True AND member of static list: Send the alert, set Routed=False and remove from the static List
6. To make sure nothing is lost in the syncing, I would probably also trigger a wait step to send the alert anyway if someone is still a member of the static list within 10 mins or so. (but make sure they are still a member of the list and the alert hasn't been sent)

You can also just send the notification as part of the LeanData routing flow (if you have access to editing salesforce templates)

Routing - Lead Routing Guide – LeanData (Send Notification)

[Geoff_Arens]

Thanks, Andrew! I like your solution, and especially the idea of using static lists to capture any leads that failed to receive an alert. I might incorporate that into a future iteration of this, however this is what I ended up doing for now:

1. On form fill, determine if lead merits an alert and set Send Alert = True and Form Fill Time = {{system date/time}}
2. Marketo syncs to SFDC
3. LeanData routes lead if net new
4. SFDC process builder sends email alert only when lead has owner AND Send Alert = True
   • Side note that we have multiple versions of this alert, so the process builder actually has multiple email templates/recipients to choose from depending on the lead's demographics
5. In same workflow, SFDC process builder sets Send Alert = False and Alert Sent Time = {{system date/time}}
6. Any remaining leads that still have Send Alert = True after X amount of time triggers a separate "failed alert" email to me

So far this seems to be working well for both existing leads with owners (who receive the email alert immediately) and net new leads (that need to be routed to an owner before the email alert is sent). Again, the reason we decided not to have Marketo send the alert is because we found the delay in SFDC's sync to Marketo to be sometimes very long (important when time is of the essence for high value leads!). With the setup above, our average time from form-fill to email alert is ~9 minutes for new leads and <1 minute for existing (based on the two time stamp fields).

As a side note, I've noticed features that are available in Marketo but sort of lacking in SFDC process builder when it comes to alert automation:

• An activity history that would show an audit trail of the lead running through the process
• Complex filtering based on lead activity
• Easy-ish interface

If anyone sees any glaring holes in all this, please do let me know! Always curious how other people would go about doing this.

[JJ_Cordz]

Hi Geoff Arens - I realize your post is a few months old, so please disregard if you've already solved your query.

I'm wondering why you've chosen not leveraging the send notification function that is built into the LeanData flows? We leverage LeanData for all our matching/routing and all alert emails are sent by LeanData when a record is assigned, no alerts go out of Marketo anymore unless its a "request received" confirmation to the submitter.

For some of our segments we have owner pairings which we've defined in the Territory Management document w/in LeanData as well so that ensures notifications to the pairing are sent to both people.

In SFDC Communication Templates, you can import a Marketo template &/or create your own template with dynamic fields pulling from the objects to include necessary information in the alert.

Dynamic field variables both from SFDC & Marketo

[Geoff_Arens]

Thanks for the response Jennifer! The main reason I'm not sending alerts out of LeanData is because only new, unassigned leads flow through it. As a result, there are many existing leads in our database that could perform an alert worthy event, but wouldn't go through LeanData to receive the alert since they already have an owner.

Now, that said, I could probably use the "Update" node LeanData to process all alerts, whether they be for existing or newly-assigned leads. Something I may consider in the future, but I just went with the solution I outlined above.

[JJ_Cordz]

That makes sense. We employ routing/alerts for both new & existing records. So the "update" node will pick up on the alertable actions.

[Dara_Warde1]

@Geoff Arens We also turned off all the Marketo alerts and are sending SFDC templated emails from LeanData - but again we have the New and Update nodes set up. Its additional work, but definitely has helped us to have both running through the same system.

[Asher_Mathew]

Hi Everyone,

This is Asher @ LeanData, kindly send us a note at support@leandatainc.com if you need to connect with someone from our team and we'll help you with best practices on how our customers are using LeanData in conjunction with Marketo.

Thanks again!

Best,
Asher
asher@leandatainc.com