How does Marketo classify industry? And Is there a way to improve this?

[Anonymous]

Hi! I'm trying to set up a newsletter that classifies leads by industry, but we have a ton of leads that have no industry marked. Is there a way to fix this besides going in by hand and looking up the company and classifying it?

[Cory_Gabor1]

Hi Kat,

Do you have specific filters you can use to create smart lists for each of the different industries?

If so, you can create a smart campaign and then use a flow step with Change Data Value of Industry to <industry name>.

Let me know if you need further clarification.

Thanks!

[Jessica_Kao3]

Many data appending vendors will append the industry data for you such as ReachForce. 

[Loren_Posendek]

Like Jessica Kao​ mentioned, there are many data appending vendors. We use Clearbit with webhooks but have the ability upload batches directly through Clearbit's interface.

[Tom_Kerlin2]

Another data appending vendor is Synthio: Synthio for Marketo » Marketo LaunchPoint®

[Amy_Goldfine]

I'd recommend using a data enrichment vendor (we also use Clearbit). With their new Marketo webhook they can backfill existing leads (the setup we have new only calls the webhook when we specifically trigger it, which is after person creation). Then you can add an enrichment call for new leads as they come in.

You may need to set up some data normalization if your values don't match what your enrichment vendor uses. You sync the enrichment to a Marketo-only field (call it, say "Clearbit Industry"). Then you have an operational smart campaign that listens for "Clearbit Industry" and sets the correct value for "Industry".

After running everything through enrichment, you can run a list of people/companies without Industry and see if it's manageable to manually look them up in LinkedIn, DiscoverOrg, on the web, etc.