Using Inferred Country and Inferred State to assign leads?

[Anonymous]

Has anyone created lead assignment rules in MKTO to assign lead owners based on MKTO Inferred Country and Inferred State?  Currently, our lead assignment rules sit in SFDC and are based on Country and State/Province.  I'm looking for ways to reduce the number of fields on our MKTO forms and considering whether to eliminate Country and State/Province and just use the MKTO Inferred data to assign leads.

Here are my questions:
- Has anyone gone down this path and what has your experience been?
- Are there any issues or challenges that I should consider in using the Inferred Country and State data?

Thanks,
Dani

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Dani:

Inferred State is typically not very reliable. Email server locations can skew where the actual person resides. Inferred Country is better but not 100 percent accurate either. I wouldn't recommend relying on it for lead assigment especially if your territories are complex like ours. Hope this helps.

Mike

[Anonymous]

Thanks.  I'll run a report to see how the inferred data compares to the actual data in SFDC.  All of our sales are phone based so we're debating whether it's important to have geographic territories relative to any improvements in conversion rate that might be gained from reducing the number of fields on our forms.

[Anonymous]

In my company we assign by country and state and we use a combination of progressive profiling, inferred State and Country and data enrichment tools. I have a batch process that runs every night on Marketo, checks for leads without Country/State and applies inferred data when available.

[Anonymous]

I recommend caution when using a campaign to overwrite Country and State with inferred data. Depending on how they get their internet service, or if they're using a proxy, it could overwrite the Country field with inaccurate information.

[Anonymous]

We only push inferred data when the Country or State fields are empty, to avoid that exact issue.

[Anonymous]

Hi Franco,
How did you set up your campaign?
Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Hi Marion,

This is how I set it up:

(For the US States one)
SMART LIST:  
Country = USA
State IS Empty
Inferred State Region IS NOT empty

FLOW:
Change Data Value (only one step)
Choice 1: If Inferred State Region is AL --> State is AL
Choice 2: If inferred State Regon is CA --> State is CA
Choice 3: If inferred State Region is CT --> State is CT
.........etc.

This is a batch campaign that runs once a day. We made two separate campaigns, one for East Coast and one for West Coast to make it easier to manage.

We got thousands of leads enriched by this process and it helped us a lot. We do the same for Country (divided by Regions).

- Franco

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much Franco! Very helpful!