I’m back from the Marketo Summit 2013 massive event where I met many of you for the first time in person. I’m so glad we were able to connect and talk about Marketo, marketing, and more.

Session Takeaways

• EMEA and Canadian Privacy Issues: many thanks to Adam Waterston for his detailed look at the implementation of the EU privacy and cookie laws and how he helped Planon increase the proportion of visitors who accepted.
• Using Multiple Product Lines requires serious planning to work well with RCM and scoring. We knew that though
• Advanced Forms Use: in this session with the legendary Eric Hollebone, he and the other presenters described how they used javascript techniques to pull in tons of background detail on their audience without actually asking for it. Most of these methods will require a web programmer and possibly a tool like ReachForce. Seems well worth it to enhance data quality and targeting without annoying leads.
• SFDC Dashboard Creation: Will Scully-Power from Datarati took us through his methodology for developing helpful dashboards that are Actionable and Understandable. His big tip is to start with the end in mind.

New Features and Integrations from Marketo

• Hootsuite integration: this will be amazing.
• Financial intergration: wow. This completely automates my budgeting and ROI process. If I had this right now, I would save at least 1 man-day a month on reporting.
• Marketo’s new interface looks fantastic! Clean, modern, etc.
• Forms 2.0: this could be a game changer for many of the less technically inclined.
• Nurturing System Module!! Completely abstracts the complicated traffic cop flows to make nurturing super easy. As Glen Lipka noted in the “History of Marketo”, “We never wanted traffic cops.”
• Multiple RCM Modules: I know quite a few advanced users have been asking for this for years to handle multiple partitions or product mixes.
• Marketing Calendar: this sounds great. Not sure how it works yet.
• Box.net Integration to upload files directly into Marketo. Pretty neat. I know more firms are using DropBox or Drive though.
• Gmail Sales Insight Plugin: ok, this is very cool since now we can move away from the horror of Outlook while enjoying the benefits of Gmail and MSI.
• Email Performance Reports: those with Revenue Explorer can now see very cool Day of Week and Hour of Day heatmaps.

These changes show me that Marketo is still very much attuned to the Ideas section of the Community and feedback from all of us. Perhaps a few of these features (Forms 2.0) took longer than we’d all like because it’s complicated to make things “just work.”

If you use any of these features, I’d love to hear from you! Remember to sign up for more updates.

In a previous post, I decried regular lead scoring, favoring instead Audience Filters and clear Behavioral Triggers for a marketing qualified lead system.

I had a conversation the other day with a friend of mine who now needed to integrate another service line into the scoring system. She wanted to create a new field “Product 2 Score” and a whole separate list of workflows to handle these leads. While there are some legacy process reasons for separating these leads, this is the exact scenario that prompted my earlier article. If you find yourself creating special scoring scenarios, then the scoring concept is just broken.

Let’s say you have 5 products, but the audience for each one overlaps 95% of the time such that you can technically market any of these 5 products to the whole market and expect some success. Only the lead’s behaviors and self-identification will help you narrow the actual product interest before the hand-off to sales.

Why bother having 5 scoring fields with 20 scoring flows (100 campaigns!) when what you actually need is better behavioral tracking and response tracking for your marketing programs? In other words, stop sending Products 1, 2, and 3 when the Lead only responds to Products 4 and 5. If the Lead buys Product 5 now, they may still need Product 2 at a later point if they responded to the Product 2 program.

Even if each Product has its own audience by functional area, you still don’t need scoring to help you. Simply setup Smart Lists or filters to help automate audience segmentation by Product. Then watch what each group does over time that leads to a sale. Then build the workflows to send promising Leads (marketing qualified leads) to Sales at the optimal times. All of this is based on behavior patterns, not abstract scores and unnecessarily complex workflows.

Since my original post, I had conversations with people about what they do and came up with possible models for marketers.

Lead Lifecycle/Buying Stage Triggers: you’re probably planning or already using these to move people through your Revenue Cycle Modeler or existing lead flow. Why not take the scoring triggers out of this and use the content engagement for your early stages? Your late stage leads are already with sales, so you can worry less about them.

Content Offer Hybrid Model: The Hybrid, two-stage content offer suggested by David Meerman Scott: 1 piece is  a free download, the other webinar or more detailed paper requiring registration. In this model you get interest, sharing, and highly targeted engaged leads.

What is an Marketing Qualified Lead Worthy Trigger?

An MQL worthy trigger is one where the lead has taken the actions that indicate strong interest in your service(s). This is instead of a score threshold trigger. Such triggers could be

• More than 1 form fill out in 5 day period
• Responded to that juicy content offer by downloading and sharing it.
• Or more likely, a Call Now – request for contact on a form or via a demo request.

In Marketo, such behavior triggers may work even better with Programs than some Lead Scoring systems because Progression Statuses are based on behaviors. So you might end up with 3 or 4 “tracks” for a generic system:

• Call Now Request: a demo, an explicit request.
• Multiple Form Fill Outs in a Short Period: at least 2 fill outs where Call Now was not an option or selected.
• Multiple Views or Downloads of specific offers:
• High Value Offer Download.

I’m very curious who else has given up on traditional lead scoring. Let’s discuss below.

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