Lead Assignment through Marketo - Best Practices and Process

[Ajay_Sarpal2]

Hi, Everyone

We’d like to leverage Marketo to assign leads to appropriate lead-owners based on territories once a lead becomes MQL. Could someone please share his/her experience on how to do this in Marketo? Although, our Marketo instance is synced with SFDC but we still want to leverage Marketo to assign leads to appropriate lead owners.

Looking forward to your response, and any help in above subject will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks and best regards,

Ajay

[Pierce_Ujjainw3]

Hi Ajay,

Good question.

The first question I would ask is, why do you want to set them up in Marketo?

Although this is definitely 'possible', we always recommend that our clients set lead assignment up in Salesforce. It's simply a much more robust and powerful lead assignment engine than Marketo.

Knowing the answer to 'why' would help recommend the optimal solution.

[Ajay_Sarpal2]

Hi, Pierce

Thank you for the swift response. We’ve two issues here:

1. There is a severe lag between our instance of Marketo and SFDC. The lead scoring is not updated even after 4 hours in SFDC – we’re using the custom fields to score our leads including total-lead-score is a custom field too. This means MQL stage is not getting updated as quick as we want in SFDC. Could you please suggest on how to get this fixed?

2. The lead-assignment-rules in SFDC are not set properly, and our Sales Ops team is suggesting us to disable SFDC rules and create them in Marketo.

Here is what we’re looking to achieve in Marketo:

1. AE XYZ : (Lead: CountryEQUALSUnited States,US,USA,United States of America) AND ((Lead: State/ProvinceEQUALSNJ,New Jersey,NY,New York,PA,Pennsylvania,VT,Vermont) OR (Lead: State/ProvinceEQUALSAl,Alabama,AR,Arkansas,DE,Delaware,FL,Florida,GA,Georgia,KY,Kentucky,MD,Maryland,MS,Mississippi,NC,North Carolina,SC,South Carolina,TN,Tennessee,VA,Virginia,WV,West Virginia)) AND (Lead: Lead OwnerEQUALSMQL)

2. AE ABC: (Lead: CountryNOT EQUAL TO,United States,US,USA,United States of America) AND (Lead: Lead OwnerEQUALSMQL) AND (Lead: Prev OwnerNOT EQUAL TO00GF000000757wB) AND(Lead: Geo RegionNOT EQUAL TOAMERICAS)

Should you need additional details, please let us know.

Best regards,

Ajay

[Guy_Goldstein6]

Hi Ajay,

Like Pierce, we generally recommend to our clients that they handle lead assignment in Salesforce and not through Marketo. There are a number of reasons, but the simplest is that you have to work very hard to twist Marketo into making complex decisions at a single point. It's certainly achievable using a series of smart lists and a large choice, but Salesforce is far more elegant (and Leandata is even better, but I'll assume we're still between SFDC and Marketo).

Based on your comments, the lag you are experiencing sounds as though it may be the result of your natural sync cycle. Marketo natively syncs updates with Salesforce on a rolling sync cycle with a 5 minute gap, this means that if the cycle you are on takes 15 minutes, and there's a 5 minute wait, it may take 20-30 minutes for updates to be pushed through.

If this is the case, you can "force sync" leads when they become MQLs using the "Sync lead to SFDC" action - This essentially tells the lead not to wait it's turn and to sync straight away. This should help resolve the MQL lag, which will allow you to go back to leveraging Salesforces easier to manage assignment rules.

If you also need to have the data in Marketo, there is a classic maneuvre - The SFDC double sync... Where you sync to SFDC, wait 2 minutes, sync to SFDC. This has the effect of pushing the data to Salesforce, giving Salesforce a chance to update the record, and requesting the updates back. It's not pretty, but it's been a staple of the Marketo Admin's toolkit for at least the past 7 years and it gets the job done.

Hope this helps,

-- Guy

[Anonymous]

It sounds like your Sales Ops team is being lazy and trying to get you to do their job!

In terms of the lag, you can get Marketo to force a sync. We have an operational flow for MQLs--when a lead hits the lead threshold, the flow steps are to 1)  change lead status to Open, 2) sync to Salesforce and assign using SFDC assignment rules.

[Luke_Wotton]

4 hours?!

[David_Gaible]

Hi Ajay Sarpal​ - it can be done! I strongly second all the recommendations to have Salesforce handle lead assignment, but I've been in a situation where we handled complex lead assignments within Marketo.  The rules you have are thankfully fairly simple - just create some smart lists with the logic, and then use cascading assignment rules to assign the correct owner before forcing the sync to Saleforce.

[Ajay_Sarpal2]

Hi, David

Thank you for the valuable suggestion. I can definitely create smart lists in Marketo. Could you please show some examples with me about the flow steps for this scenario? how to design the workflow? If you can share the picture with some example of workflow - it would be really appreciated!

Thanks and best regards,

Ajay

[David_Gaible]

Sure thing. It was at a company I'm no longer at, so I'll mock up something similar this afternoon and post some screenshots.

[David_Gaible · Accepted solution]

Hey Ajay Sarpal​ sorry for the delay. Cascading assignment rules would look something like this! These smart lists would just be the logic that determine which reps get which leads.