Sending Marketo Emails From Sales when there's no active or real sales owner assigned

[Jamie_Hunter]

How do you handle sending Marketo nurture emails to contacts who are not assigned to a salesperson for whatever reason (ie: account is outside of ICP, inactive owner assigned, etc).

For contacts outside of ICP, we currently wait until they do some sort of hand-raising activity or MQL before we reassign to a salesperson OR have someone manage the replies and manually reassign the salesperson. However, this is very manual and not a perfect process so we're trying to identify a better way to manage this process (ideally automated).

For contacts owned by an owner that's inactive (due to BDR attrition), do you sign off the email from an alias name and have someone manage the inbox of replies? Do you pause them in the sales nurture so there are no more emails going out from that inactive owner? Our sales ops team needs to reassign the inactive owners manually and consider the account books when doing so, which means it could take a couple of weeks to reassign accounts from an inactive owner to an active owner.

[SanfordWhiteman]

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How do you handle sending Marketo nurture emails to contacts who are not assigned to a salesperson for whatever reason (ie: account is outside of ICP, inactive owner assigned, etc).

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Same as you’d send to Marketo-only leads (who by definition have no sales owner/CRM owner).

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For contacts owned by an owner that's inactive (due to BDR attrition), do you sign off the email from an alias name and have someone manage the inbox of replies? Do you pause them in the sales nurture so there are no more emails going out from that inactive owner? Our sales ops team needs to reassign the inactive owners manually and consider the account books when doing so, which means it could take a couple of weeks to reassign accounts from an inactive owner to an active owner.

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This is a good question and tbh I’d venture most Marketo users do not have a plan for this, because it requires close coordination with sales.

What we use (ah... when we remember to) is a Velocity token that checks to see if the Sales Owner in Transition field (a field maintained using SFDC triggers) is true, and if so, use a generic mailbox.

[Jamie_Hunter]

Thanks for your feedback and responses, Sanford!

We are actively using velocity scripting to display an alias name if someone is owned by an inactive owner (checkbox field), owned by analytics, etc. so glad to hear we're on par with your recommendation. For the generic mailbox, do you have one dedicated salesperson who is managing replies and vetting the qualify of leads that are hand-raisers and manually round robin? Just curious how this general mailbox works for you as we're considering hiring an individual to manage this inbox daily.

[Floyd_Alvares2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jamie_Hunter 

I would either go with the velocity setup or using a generic email address (suggested by Sanford) as opposed to not engaging or communicating with your customers at all. 

Yes, this would involve establishing a new process in managing accounts that do not have a BDR, but I would suggest trying to build a process and a solution rather than losing revenue because you were not able to engage with the customer at the right time.

Just my 2 cents

Floyd

[Jamie_Hunter]

Thanks for your response, Floyd! I 100% agree with you that the customer should not be punished and ignored as we try to figure out our operational issues/ owner assignments. Thanks!