Populating Data with Multiple Possible Values

[Anonymous]

Hi,

We are working on tagging each of our leads with a Type of Business. However, many leads fall into more than one type of business category. What is the best way you have found of capturing complex data points in Marketo?

I've explored a few options so far but I haven't found any to be optimal:

1) Creating additional type of business fields and capturing a second, third, fourth...etc Type of Business category in its own field. However, this makes our targeting campaigns and analytics rather unwieldy and difficult to understand.

2) Adding all values into a single field. While this strategory would work for targeting campaigns using the "Type of Business contains" filter, it becomes difficult to evaluate how certain Type of Business segments are performing against others.

3) Creating a program for each type of business and adding leads to any relevant programs as members. Again, while this would help with targeting through the "Member of Program" filter, it becomes difficult to tell which Types of Business are performing better than others.

Has anyone developed a system in Marketo that could work well with the above use case?

Thanks!

Zahra

[Josh_Hill13]

I like #3 - Programs. The caveat is you need to make that Operational otherwise Marketo will try to attribute Opps there.

Another way is to have several checkboxes or picklists, one for each type group:

Tier 1 options 1, 2, 3
Tier 2 options 1, 2, 3
Tier 3: options 1, 2, 3

Using a multi select works well in SFDC, but NOT in Marketo. You'll get semicolons between values and it gets messy.

I'm not sure there are any other ways.

[Anonymous]

Agree with Josh. Programs or checkboxes.

[Anonymous]

I like the ideas presented in this thread, and can really appreicate trying to solve this problem. 

As a suggestion, you could also look at using Segmentations, depending upon how many business categories you're attempting to map, with broader-spectrum programs for Business Sub-Category. Something like Segment: Healthcare and Business Category (Program): Software. 

[Anonymous]

For using either programs or checkboxes, can you recommend a good way to designate a "Primary Type of Business" so we can better tell which segments are performing better than others? For both programs and checkboxes, a single person could be a member of more than one program, or have more than one checkbox selected, and would therefore be double counted in reports.

Thanks!