Pros and cons

[Anonymous]

So we have been newly acquired and are debating between workspaces/Partitions or just using the segmentation functionality in the Lead Database.  Does anyone have experience with multiple business lines, with one instance of Marketo?  Which do you use?  Pros/Cons to each?  Anyone with experience in either of these that could shed some light on them for me?

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Couple of items:

We do not use "leads" in salesforce, we convert them into contacts.  Could someone explain the duplicate leads idea?  How do you move a contact inbetween segments?  or is that why you would have duplicate leads so they can be in all segments?  For example, Contact 1 qualifies to be sold business line a, b and c.  (not sure how you would get a dup contact in SF, as they are only created if they have different email addresses but same name)

Thanks in advance.  Trying to figure out what might be the best for our company.

E

[Anonymous]

Hi Erin, Carey, Edward and Kate, 

Thanks for all the valuable input! My team is going through possibly forcing duplicates and all this information is great!

Erin - We originally started to look at Workspaces because there seemed to be a lack of permissions on the folder or campaign level.  We have a complex setup with some campaigns that should only be touched by our DemandGen Architecture team while still having a use case for employees that aren't automation geeks to use the system.  All of our highly complex campaigns live in the Architecture workspace and basic landing pages and campaigns can be created in their respective workspace.  As Edward said it can be a headache moving campaigns and assets from one Workspace to another.  

What we did to handle this is create a custom field called "requestCampaign" and then setup triggers in campaigns that listen for the field to get set to something specific.  This essentially is like a "Request Campaign' flow that works cross-workspace. Right now the workspaces operating this way share a partition.  Here are some more details on the setup:
http://community.marketo.com/MarketoDiscussionDetail?id=90650000000Pgr3AAC

Kate - the additional logic for Business Unit on the dedup rule is genius!  Did you generate a Munchkin code for each workspace or do you have a global Munchkin script?  I'm interested in how the activity log records if there are 2 records in different partitions that share a munchkin code. Does the Account Team object allow you to use tokens for signatures in emails? 

Carey - Does your company generate a Munchkin code for each partition?   Does the data not updating between partitions cause problems?  

We are considering forcing "dups" when porting a subsidiary company to our single Marketo instance but are still on the fence   😕     

thx! 

[Anonymous]

Hi Erin, I work for a company with 11 global business units. We use one instance of SalesForce, and one instance of Marketo. We also have purposeful duplicates, meaning that if a lead is a prospect for 3 business units, 3 leads will exist in both SalesForce and Marketo. Our company is structured in much the way that Carey's is--our business units market very different products to the same companies.

An added layer of complexity for us is that although we have a purposeful duplicate strategy with respect to leads, we do NOT have duplicate contacts. We also do not have contact owners, since hypothetically multiple reps and business units can do business with the same individual. Instead, we use the Account Team object on account records.

We decided not to go with partians because we have a small marketing automation team and felt it would add another layer of complexity to manage. It would also have been incredibly difficult to make this work with the way we use leads and contacts.

What we were able to do was have Marketo set up a custom de-dupe rule for us based on 2 fields instead of just one. So when a lead is uploaded or fills out a form, Marketo checks both the email address and a field called Business Unit to find out if a lead already exists and is associated with a particular business, or if another lead with a new business unit should be created. So far this strategy is working well for us, and we haven't run into any issues.

Hope that helps!

[Anonymous]

I'm glad I could help. We've learned a lot through trial and error working this way, and I am glad that I could help 🙂

[Anonymous]

Carey, that is AWESOME.  Thank you so much for taking the time to help me understand the differences, now....to decide which is better for our company.... Thank you thank you thank you.

[Anonymous]

Based on my experience, here are your two options and some thoughts for each. I will use the email joe@gmail.com as an example, and sales people Mary and Steve for simplicity.

Option A - Lead Partitions [How our company does it]

• joe@gmail.com - owned by Mary, on its own lead partition
• joe@gmail.com - owned by Steve, on its own lead partition
• Both Mary and Steve market to Joe independenty of each other. Joe will have two lead records that shows the different activities performed by Mary and Steve.
• Mary won't necessarily know what Steve is sending Joe and vice versa. If Joe unsubscribes from Mary's emails, Steve can still email him.
• If Joe changes data changes from a form fill on Mary's record, it won't update Steves.
• You cannot use Marketo's automatic deduping situations in this case.

Option B - Segments

• joe@gmail.com is owned by Mary, but also shows up in Steve's segment
• All of Joe's activity will be tracked on on lead record that both Mary and Steve can view.
• You can use Marketo's sending limits and deduping functionality in this way

Our company uses Option A because our we market completely different products to some of the same companies. It has to do a lot with the way our sales and marketing teams are structured. We work in silos from the other business units, so our data has to be in silos.

Does that make sense?

[Anonymous]

Hi Carey, do you mean duplicate email addresses across each business line?  Yes, we do share some common clients amongst the newly acquired business lines.

[Anonymous]

Will you have duplicate email addresses? That is a big part of why you might use Lead Partitions.

A lead can definitely be in more than one segment. Segments are useful just to help group people for marketing campaigns, whereas partitions are almost mean to be silos. Group A leads belong to you and Group B leads belong to me. We each deal with our own silos and don't touch each others leads.

[Anonymous]

Carey, we will be using SFDC for the time being.  Not sure if that is going to change or not.

Edward:  Yes, we will want to Market across business lines.  The Traditional use would probably work for us but rather than use regions, we would use product/business lines, would that work as well?  Can a lead be in more than one segment?  Any other information that anyone can share using their experience will help.  Thanks so much in advance.

[Anonymous]

Hi Erin:

It really depends on your specific business case. We use a mix of segmentation and partitions/workspaces. 

Partitions/workspaces are helpful if you would basically just open up another Marketo instance. That's their real value in my mind—you can have more than one Marketo instance in one, and it's cheaper that way. But this means that there wouldn't really be much overlap in the marketing that happens. It gets messy when there is overlap in campaigns—one of the "gotchas" with workspaces is that it is mind-bogglingly difficult to move campaigns from one workspace to another. So if you have entirely different campaigns going with very little marketing overlap, partitions/workspaces might be the better choice.

Segmentations are useful when there is going to be more overlap with the marketing campaigns, in my mind. A traditional use is segmenting by US region—there may be marketing overlap for many US region segments in most cases, but occasionally you want to send an email blast specifically to the Southwest region.


Does that help at all?

Edward Unthank
Marketing Operations Specialist
Yesler

[Anonymous]

Across business lines will you have duplicate email addresses? We have a very complex implementation of both Marketo and SFDC with multiple business lines that have intentional duplicates. (ex. We might have joe@gmail.com for one company, but he may be in another company's database as well. There is specific intention to keep those duplicate emails and not sure an account)

It can be done, but it greatly complicates deduping and data management to use different partitions tied to different record types in SFDC. Will you be using SFDC as well?

[Anonymous]

I would love to have a conversation with you to better understand how you handle the intentional duplicates on the Marketo side. We have come up against the same situation with intentional duplicates in different business lines and are looking for a solution. Please let me know if you can discuss. Thanks!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Kris,

You are sending a message to a deactivated profile, from the previous community, so I am afraid it will not reach it's addressee.

IMHO, you should rather open a new thread, you will get quite a few people to answer it.

-Greg