"Lead is Created" trigger - best practices on when to use

[Nina_Valtcheva5]

I'm finding myself having to use the "Lead is Created trigger" in several smart campaigns (around 10 currently) but can't figure out a way to get around it. Is it bad to use it multiple times?

I thought using "Data Value Changes" would work instead for most cases of what I am trying to do, but I'm finding that's not true for net new leads. For example, when a new Advertising lead is created and their campaign source is "google" and campaign medium is "cpc", I found that Data Value Changes trigger would not work because they came in with these values. So the only way I can think of to get around it is to add the "Lead is created" trigger as a second trigger like below. We have several similar advertising smart campaigns so I had to add it to each one.

Another example is an alert that I want to send to myself if someone comes in with a potentially misspelled email address. If I use "data value changes" as the only trigger, it will only alert me if an existing lead's email address changes to one of these domains, so I had to add the "lead is created" trigger as well to make sure any new leads created with a junk email domain will trigger the alert.

Is there a better way to do this?

[Anonymous]

I don;t see a better way to do this myself.  Why do you think it is not optimal?

[Nina_Valtcheva5]

I think I read an article that it's best practice to only use the "Lead is Created" trigger once in your instance. This was over a year ago though...can't seem to find the link. So I guess I'm just asking for validation if that is true or if it's ok to use this trigger whenever needed in multiple smart campaigns.

[Eileen_DeLeon]

I recently went through Marketo implementation at my org and our consultant said that the "sync lead to SFDC" flow step should only be used once in the entire Marketo instance; could that be what you're thinking of here? I've not heard about limiting use of the "lead is created" trigger, so would be interested in hearing from others on best practices and use cases for this trigger!

[Dan_Stevens_]

We have multiple trigger campaigns that contain "lead is created" - which is required based on the reply I included in this thread: Campaign Queue Backlog  (see my reply that starts with "Lots of great insight here.  One of things that needs to be mentioned...").

In terms of the "sync lead to CRM" (we use MS Dynamics), we have a central campaign that's used for this (where other campaigns request this when a lead needs to be synced to CRM:

[Justin_Norris1 · Accepted solution]

Nina Valtcheva​

I would not consider anything to be an unbreakable rule.

Every "best practice" needs to be applied with common sense and with consideration of what will work best in your instance - including how easy something is to maintain, update, and troubleshoot, the performance impact on your instance, and so on

With respect to "the lead is created trigger should only be used once": the principle I try to follow is consolidation and centralization wherever possible and practical for operational functions and business logic like routing, sync to SFDC, lifecycle etc.

With marketing activities, the opposite can sometimes be better - to decentralize and replicate triggers in each program

Let's take the example you cited - the best practice is to create a single program to represent a single marketing activity. This is the basis for assigning attribution in Marketo, and it is inherently distributed. So either you need a lead is created trigger in each program for it to work (as you've done) or you build some very complex central routing campaign that tries to assign membership in all these marketing programs from one central lead is created trigger.

I know which one I would choose in terms of ease of maintenance, ability to scale it across a team etc.

So the bottom line here is - use best practices as guides, but always consider your ultimate goals in how you design things. How easy will this be to maintain? Will it be easy for others to add on to it and update it? Is business logic centralized? How will it impact your system?

Sometimes there are best practices that are in opposition to each other (centralization vs. simplicity) and you need to consider the tradeoffs and make a call.

[Nina_Valtcheva5]

Thanks for the great advice, Justin! Makes perfect sense.

[Justin_Norris1]

Nina Valtcheva​

No problem!

One other thought: if performance is an issue and you want to reduce triggers, you could also make these smart campaigns into scheduled batches instead of triggered campaigns where possible. This keeps things simple and will reduce the load on your campaign queue. It could work for programs that are solely tracking attribution and not performing any real-time actions.

E.g.,

Filter: campaign source: contains "google"

Filter: data value was changed: attribute is campaign source, previous value was "google", time in last 24 hours

Filter: member of program not in [current program]

Filter logic: (1 OR 2) AND 3

And run once per day at midnight.

The only way this could get tricky is if you are trying to combine multiple attributes in your filters though - e.g., would be hard to tell if someone had both "google" and "cpc" in different fields in past 24 hours if both values had subsequently changed.

[Robb_Barrett]

Remember that Marketo sees these as separate transactions.

Let's say you have a SC with three triggers: Lead is Created, Fills Out Form, Data Value Changes.  In actuality, this COULD trigger three times (if the DVC is in a flow step.) 

I like "Fills Out Form" because it gives the record a couple of seconds to see all of the information populate correctly, attribute to the correct program, etc.