With a team of us sitting at lunch at Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit a few weeks ago, we decided we had talked to so many people and received so many interesting questions, that we needed to discuss it. So we asked each person at the table to respond to the following:
“What is the most interesting question you came across during Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit 2014?”
Bill Cozadd, Associate Revenue Engineer
Question: “What is the difference between Marketo and Salesforce?”
Answer: “I think I was mostly successful at hiding my surprise at the question. At Marketo Summit, as one of 6,000 attendees hearing keynotes by famous people like Hillary Clinton, it is easy to think that everyone is using Marketo. In reality, though, only about 1% of companies are using marketing automation. Even fewer than that are using marketing automation well. Next time my eyes light up when I start talking about lead scoring or tokens (yes, those things make my eyes light up), I might want to make sure the other person knows what I am talking about!”
Emily Salus, Marketo Practice Director
Question: “How big a team do you need to do good testing?” I received this in the Q&A following my session with Heather Floyd, “Debugging your Programs: Pre– and Post-Launch Troubleshooting”
Answer: “The focus here shouldn’t really be on the size of the team, but the effectiveness of the testing. The real answer is, “as many as you need to test until you are sure everything works”. At a minimum, you should have one person who was not involved in the building of the Marketo program to go over everything, whether that’s emails and landing pages or scoring tokens and naming conventions. If you’re working on a program that sends emails and has different actions, you’ll need to test each of the possible paths through the program, as well as checking all the assets – copy editing, links, appearance in browsers and email clients, form accuracy, actions after form fill outs, to name a few. If that means one who does nothing, one who opens, one who clicks, one who fills out a form after Email 1, one who fills out a form after Email 2, and one who fills out a form after Email 3, then the issue isn’t really how many people, but how many leads – because it’s possible that you have more than one email address and you’ll use one of them as the “does nothing” lead. But at base, I’d say you need at least one builder and at least one tester – and after that, it depends on the size of the team, the scope of the program, and who you have who can help you. Overall, I’d say no more than 3-5 people and their roles should be defined, otherwise you may not be able to coordinate actions and get the timely responses you need before launch.”
Alyssa Hewitt, Associate Revenue Engineer
Question: “How do I set up lead nurturing?”
Answer: “This is a doozy of a question, and there are a plethora of answers, but I think the starting point is similar for almost everyone. When someone would ask me about lead nurturing, there was one thing I would immediately ask in response: ’Is marketing aligned with sales?’ Before we can even begin to address data cleanliness, content and scoring, it’s important to understand how a lead was previously tracked from creation to conversion; and even more importantly, the sales team needs to be involved in the nurture dialogue. The connection between marketing and sales departments must be fluid and transparent. While marketing’s goal is to prep leads for sales, they can’t do so (well) without input from sales regarding what ultimately drives a lead to convert. Of course, without proper nurture from marketing, sales wastes time on under-qualified leads and has lower conversion rates. Before your company can truly realize the power of marketing automation tools, sales and marketing need to form a symbiotic relationship where lead quality becomes more important than lead quantity, and both departments’ goals align.
Bill Hooven, Senior Revenue Engineer & Technical Account Manager
Question: “What’s the best way to show revenue attribution?”
Answer: “There is no one answer because it depends on Marketo features being used, CRM and data connections, but it’s notable as the most common and interesting question I heard. It’s a good question and one that needs addressing in more detail on a case-by-case basis.”
Elizabeth Downing, Associate Revenue Engineer
Question: “We’ve just gotten Marketo and we’re doing the training, but we’re feeling daunted by all the processes we hear we should be doing from Summit. What should we do?”
Answer: “My approach for new Marketo instances addresses two fronts. First, triage: address where Marketo is going to make the most impact to your business right off the bat—this is usually behavioral tracking (i.e. munchkin code in action) and new lead creation (i.e. Marketo forms as webforms.) Getting these pieces down immediately will ensure that Marketo starts paying for itself. Address these triage pieces in an iterative fashion—you don’t have to make them perfect in order to launch. Create an inventory of pages that need to have the munchkin code added and forms that need to be replaced. You can take the opportunity with forms to improve their ability to gather or standardize key information, but the objective is to get Marketo integrated into your “passive” processes as soon as possible.
Second, address how Marketo will fit in the long term. This is the beginning of a new era for your organization and you want to start it off well. To ensure you do this, conduct this strategizing component with two things in mind. 1) What are the business questions that I want Marketo to answer for me? 2) How can I organize my Marketo instance and processes so that someone 5 years down the line can walk into this instance and know exactly what and where everything is? This WILL take some time and may take several conversations with key stakeholders, but it is well worth your time. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t start running campaigns, but well begun is half done, and having a plan of attack and organization will help not only break the process into actionable components, but also keep you oriented and on track as you move forward.”
Raja Walia, Senior Revenue Engineer
Question: “How do I set up closed loop reporting?”
Answer: “A tough question to answer. A few starting points would be to make sure we have a record of all campaigns being run per quarter. We know how much the campaign costs. Also if you don’t have RCA, we can use SFDC campaigns or even regular analytics in Marketo to measure success and relate the opportunities to the program.”
Do any of these questions ring a bell with you? We hope our answers provide some help with your Revenue Marketing efforts.
Blog Written By: Alyssa Hewitt, Associate Revenue Engineer, Bill Cozadd, Associate Revenue Engineer, Bill Hooven, Senior Revenue Engineer & Technical Account Manager, Emily Salus, Marketo Practice Director and Elizabeth Downing, Associate Revenue Engineer, Raja Walia, Senior Revenue Engineer at The Pedowitz Group.
In the latter part of the 19th century John Wanamaker, the father of modern advertising, is reputed to have said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Imagine you could demonstrate and manage the impact of marketing on revenue? Imagine you knew which half of your budget was well spent?
