Program Status being set when Fills out Form

[Anonymous]

We use Marketo forms to gate our newest webinars. When a lead simply hits our landing page and fills out the form to view the webinar, we have it set up to trigger a program status changed to "Viewed Recording."

However, what is actually happening behind the scenes is that as soon as that lead fills out our form, Marketo is changing their program status to the first/lowest program status option, which in our case is "Invited." Then, a few moments later as it runs through all of our flow steps, it does change their program status to the correct "Viewed Recording."

This isn't a big problem until we want to run reports on those people who were invited, for example. It will look like the random lead who simply showed up on our site was one of the invited ones, when in fact she was not. It is not accurate.

Is there anyway the prevent Marketo from setting a lead status when someone fills out a form - and instead just have it wait until we set it to the correct status in our flow step? Ideally it would do this behind the scenes: Program status changed from "Not in Program --> Viewed Recording."

Thank you!

[Anonymous]

Don't have Invited as your first status. That's not our best practice for precisely this reason. Change your first status to Member and have Invited as your second status.

[Anonymous]

Ok, that could work. So Kristen, you're saying that you've found no way to prevent it from setting the first status - basically it's just something inherent in using Marketo forms?

I was worried that was the case - which means your solution would be a good one that could work for us too.

[Dan_Stevens_]

I suspect what's happening here is you have the form local to the program, correct (e.g., it's not a common form, for example, housed in Design Studio)?  If so, as soon as someone fills out a LOCAL form, Marketo will immediately assign program membership to that lead using the first program status in that channel.  Kristen provides the best way to deal with this since there's no way around this.

[Anonymous]

Hi Dan,

The form I'm using is a common form in the Design Studio that we use for all our recorded webinars. Then I put it on its own landing page, which is specific for this particular webinar and lives under the webinar program.

The trigger is therefore: "Fills out Recorded Webinar Form on --------- Landing Page" and the flow sets their status, etc.

Do you think that makes a difference?

[Kenny_Elkington]

This attribute is actually drawn from the landing page, and not the form.  So the form fillout will set the program status for the lead in the parent program of the landing page, not necessarily the form.