Marketing Rockstar Guides

An Etumos Company

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Services
    • Demand Generation Consulting
    • Marketing Automation Consulting
    • Data Quality Systems
    • Lead Nurturing and Engagement
    • Marketing Analytics
    • Content Marketing
  • Marketo Consulting
    • Marketo Implementation
    • Marketo System Audit
    • Marketo Training
    • Lead Scoring
    • Subscription Management Center
    • Email Reputation Management
    • Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics
  • Blog
  • Tools
    • Marketing Technology Maturity Model
    • Build a Marketing Operations Center of Excellence
    • Marketo Expert’s Guide to Program Templates
    • Intelligent Lead Nurturing
    • The Marketo Guide (2013)
    • Sell Faster with Sales Insight Booklet
  • Speaking
    • News & Events
    • Past Presentations
  • Clients
  • About
  • Contact

How to Think About Your Marketing Tech Stack

December 27, 2019 By Josh Hill

How to Manage a Martech Stack

How to Think About Your Marketing Tech Stack

At the 2019 Adobe-Marketo Summit, I had the pleasure of presenting thoughts on Martech Stack management with Kelly Horton of Docker. We presented several methods to help fellow marketing operations teams think about how the MOPs function works in the organization. We also discussed in detail how to manage the Marketing Technology Stack (MarTech stack) within the organization in a way to deliver business value and take the burden off of marketers.

Solving Shiny Object Syndrome

The reality is you will never completely stop this. Other teams will do what they want thanks to the power of the corporate credit card and cheap SaaS tools that solve one single problem. In particular, event teams seem to love trying tools because they can never quite get their perfect solution for smaller events. With 7,040 or more MarTech tools, there are a lot of point solutions.

Shiny object syndrome is rampant across many teams of course. I also tend to see this syndrome occur with particular use cases at least twice a year. Standardizing the Department and the Company on a single tool reduces overhead (training, contracts, data flows, etc.) as well as ensures a single admin can develop use cases faster. Here are the top three Shiny Objects to watch out for:

  • Event management tools from scanner apps to registration systems.
  • Schedule Meetings and Meeting Calendar tools. Sales can easily buy 12 of these without realizing the other 14 sales teams around the world already have 4 other tools.
  • Project management or Workflow management tools. Unless you’re a massive firm with a Project Management Office (PMO), you can easily end up with 4 or more just within a large Marketing team.

Ultimately, you have to know your organization’s place in the company as well as the stack. To reduce the impact of rogue apps that aren’t playing nicely, there are three easy steps to take:

  1. Map out your current stack
  2. Find solutions, vendors
  3. Manage the stack: follow a process

Step 1: How to Map Your MarTech Stack

There are dozens of ways to map the MarTech stack to display it to different audiences. Scott Brinker’s Stackies provide a lot of idea fodder. You may also want to go through a Migration Exercise or a Marketing-Sales Process review at least once a year to capture new requirements and understand organizational evolution before it outpaces your technologies.

Kelly Jo Horton provided this option, which is a solid, digestible systems diagram.

A close up of a map

Description automatically generated

You can use tools like Giphy, MS Visio, or Lucidchart to build these maps. I don’t recommend PowerPoint because it’s process charting tools are a bit limited.

For larger exercises, you may have to go full systems architecture. Here are a few ideas from a quick search:

Screenshot of Google Search for “Enterprise Architecture Systems Examples”

I personally prefer something along the lines of Kelly’s map as an overview for new staff and higher-level discussions with IT.

The next step is to use Swim Lanes and a Marketing-Sales Funnel process to map both actions and systems to understand the full funnel process. Ask questions like:

  • Who owns which systems?
  • What action is expected at each step in the life of a Lead or Account?
  • Which system takes an action if a Salesperson creates an Opportunity?
  • What should a salesperson do at this point?
  • Should marketing do something at this other point?
  • If a Lead or Account doesn’t proceed to Stage 5, should those people go to a Nurture?

Thus, you will have several MarTech stack maps:

  • Systems Level Map showing the connections between databases, tools, vendors, etc.
  • Funnel Lifecycle Map showing the Stages and Handoffs between teams
  • Funnel-Systems Map showing how each system manages parts of the Lead Lifecycle
  • Workflow-Systems Map showing how each team works at each part of the Funnel.

You will find all four helpful in managing the stack. Each one has a different role to play in internal discussions.

Type of Map What to Put in It When to Use it
Systems Level Map – Databases Tools
– Connections between systems
– IT
– Vendor management
– Data transfers
– How to move data around
– Identify gaps
Funnel Lifecycle Map – Sales-Marketing process
– Funnel stages
– Sales-marketing process and handoff discussions
– Updating processes
– Identifying requirements from teams
Funnel-Systems Map – Sales-Marketing process
– Funnel stages Attribution
– Vendor management
– Building funnel attribution models
– Change management
– Modifying key areas in the funnel or a CRM/MAP change
Workflow-Systems – Marketing to sales workflows
– Internal project management
– Sales-marketing process
– Use cases
– New vendor discussions
– Changing a vendor
– Designing a process
– Modifying a process
– Understanding what a team needs or wants

Once you have one or more of these guides, you can use them to walk people through various situations. Each can become a great training tool. I will walk new staff through one or more of the documents depending on their need. Then they can see what we have done and why we are there before making assumptions. We can then have a conversation about what they may see as a gap in the process or an area to automate, rather than focusing on a vendor.

Another tip – make new MOPs and SOPs staff members create one of these on their own. Most firms let these process charts go stale very quickly. As part of your process, a new staff member should update it. The benefits include:

  • New person meets all the key people they need to know.
  • New person sees a new way to display information.
  • New person understands the systems faster.
  • New person can make recommendations and take on ownership of useful projects that are “their idea.”
  • You now have an updated map.

Step 2: Finding Solutions, Not Vendors

Time and again, it seems marketers (or salespeople) get sold by MarTech sales vendors. Since most MarTech firms these days are point solutions, this is an interesting phenomenon to explore. Usually the conversation is something like:

Vendor Salesperson: “Hey, you want to increase MQLs (pipeline, opportunities, etc.), right?”

Marketer: “Yes, I do!”

Vendor Salesperson: “Great, we built this AI chat tool that increases MQLs 150%* so you should install it on your website, and it takes 15 minutes.”

Marketer: “Oh that’s great, just what I need, can you give me a demo?”

Vendor Salesperson: Let me hand you to our qualification Team…

New Vendor Salesperson: “Sure!” [shows demo of product, neglecting to discuss the excruciating details MOPs would want to discuss.]

Marketer: “Ok, how much and where do I sign?”

Marketer: “Hey, [website/MOPs/tech person], I bought this tool for a year that’s $15,000, please put this on our site today so we can get more MQLs!”

MOPs: “What is this tool? How do I turn this on? How does it generate MQLs exactly?”

Marketer: “Just do it and stop questioning me. It’s already signed.”

MOPs:  🤨 🙄

We’ve all been there. Maybe we’ve even done the reverse and had to sell a new tool to Sales or a Marketing team because the requirements changed, or the team changed while we were busy negotiating.

A Solution Based Approach to Marketing Technology Management

The Business Case or Use Case:

First, are you solving a real problem? Some refer to this as a Business Case. A good salesperson will use solution-based selling and questioning to help you build an internal case. Most of the time we skip all this and assume it will “work.”

In our all too common conversation with a MarTech salesperson, we use poor business case statements.

  • Install AI Chat thing – it’s great!
  • We need Vendor X because…
  • We need vendor Y because I don’t want to use spreadsheets…
  • We need an automated prospecting email tool.
  • Connect LinkedIn Ads for me.
  • Upload these leads I got from some place.
  • Build a nurture program for me.

We all do this, it’s okay to admit it and do better next time.

Instead of saying, “I need vendor X, because I used them at my last firm,” or “Vendor Y does automated prospecting for sales,” we need to speak in Use cases.

When you, as the MOPs leader, start asking questions about the vendor, the marketer becomes defensive or simply tells you they’ve already signed. This is not the best decision for the business.

If you are doing your job well, or perhaps your vendor’s salesperson is a true pro and helps you build a business case first, here’s what to do.

Instead, we should have a Business Case – are you solving a real problem? If you’ve come from the Product Management world, you may recognize these techniques.

Establish a Business Case Process

This is where being a bureaucrat is a good thing. Why? It helps funnel nervous energy and excitement about things into a process where we collectively understand a problem, devise a solution, and actively make it happen. Only a process can stop arbitrary decisions and frankenstacks.

You can use this process as a one person MOPs shop or with 50 people; it’s about the process, not the number of people.

  • Stakeholder Focus Groups

This is the fancy term for a series of meetings. Have a meeting where you ask the requestor to walk you through their needs.

Whiteboard everything.

Ask open ended questions and withhold any judgement or vendors you like.

  • What would your ideal process look like?
    • What would you want to have happen next?
    • Why do you think this tool will help?
    • Tell me more about…
    • Help me understand the problem you are having today.
    • In six months, what would your workday be like?

The steps can be in one meeting or several:

  • Bring together the USERS who will tell you use cases (and reality of daily use)
    • Bring together their managers who will tell you their goals
    • Bring the executives so you can align on budget and strategy

I can tell you from experience that a fast way to fail is to ignore executives in this process. One time, I negotiated a great deal, closed all the use cases, and thought I was pretty clever. When I went to get what I thought was final approval, I discovered I didn’t know our procurement process that well, and that I had four other executives to go through. Let’s just say that deal is not yet signed.

  • User Stories and Use Cases

User stories and use cases are product management techniques to help developers build features that solve a user’s problems.

The common method, often used in Agile, is:

As a [Persona], I want to [do something] for [this reason].

You can also call these “use cases” to prompt people into explaining what they are doing or want to do.
For example, an Event Marketer might say,

“I want to setup 1:1 meetings at the tradeshow.”

If you ask good questions, you can articulate the solution more clearly:

“We find 1:1 meetings between high level prospects and our executives (or salespeople) are very effective at advancing the sale. Many of these prospects will be at the show and it’s the only time to get their attention. My team needs a way to

  1. send an email to a prospect,
  2. have them click on a link,
  3. choose an open time on our Calendar.
  4. Then, that open slot will be filled for the Meeting Room and then the Account Executive for that Company.
  5. Calendar invitations will be sent to everyone involved automatically.
  6. We also need an easy or automated way to mark down if a person showed up for their meeting.

Once you know that, you can easily generate a process chart with more details like Fields, Databases, and potential systems that would make that process work in real life.

  • Five Whys

Taking a cue from Six Sigma, asking “Why” five times is another method to get at the core of what someone really wants.

With Five Whys, you can go from a baseless assertion to real business reasons to take action.

Example:

            Why did we forecast all our leads to come from SEM?

            Why is the forecast wrong?

            Why was SEM weighted to 100%?

            Why was the process not checking for obvious mistakes?

            Why was the attribution model approved by an intern?

  • Solution Based ROI Statements

A combination of methods is to work toward an ROI statement. What would an “AI Chatbot” actually do for us if we installed it? Is the juice worth the squeeze?

Always ask, “If we spent $X and 500 hours building this, what would we save or gain?”

  • AI Chat will free up 2 hours per day for 20 reps to work on SQLs and generate more qualified MQLs by 20%
  • Scale events to enable additional registrants without manual work.
  • Nurturing our opted in pre-MQLs takes about 120 days for a 3% conversion, but 90% of those go to SQL.
  • User Stories: As a marketer, I want to know how many registrants I have for Event Z with one glance, not go to 3 places that takes my team 3 hours a day.
  • Are you able to demonstrate scale, time, or money savings?
    • Would this process or tool allow you to build a Campaign in 30 minutes with perfect HTML across devices instead of 20 hours?
    • Or does it just shift work to a different team or person?
    • Automate away boring, tedious jobs such as
      • Data Enrichment
      • Data Normalization
      • Transferring Data
      • Transforming Data (calculations, remapping)
      • Recording Data
      • Sifting Data (from basic logic to fuzzy to “artificial intelligence”)
  • Does your firm have clear ROI thresholds? Should you?
    • For example, you want to automate a process that takes 2.5 hours/week.
    • The replacement tool that pulled the same data in one place cost $10,000/year or $833.33/mo. If the hourly rate for human time is $2.99 then $2.99 x $2.50 = $7.45 per week * 52 weeks = $387/yr. Therefore, there is no dollar reason to purchase the tool.
    • If your hourly rate is $15.00 then $31,200/year in man-hours > $10,000 for automation. Thus, buy the tool and allocate people time to better things.

User Stories and the 5 Whys are great ways to dive into what a marketer is actually trying to do. I also like walking through an ideal scenario as a process to help envision what a Solution would do and how we might build it.

What does a Business Case Look Like?

Once you have gone through the exercises above, you will be able to create a one-page document, or a couple of slides to summarize the Problem, Solution Options, ROI, and Recommendations to an executive.

Problem Statement: our chat tool on the website means we need to have 24/7 coverage, but our sales team can only be on from 7am EST to 4pm EST, which means we lose several business hours in Europe and West Coast. Our calculations show that each hour we receive 10 chats, 5 of which become MQLs, and 2 go on to Opportunities within the month, with at least 1 sale that has an ASP of $5,000.

Solution 1:

So, if we could stay open 24/7 (168 hours) instead of 9 hours x 5 days (45 hours), we could get the following:

  • 123 more hours
  • 1230 chats
  • 615 more MQLs
  • 246 opportunities
  • 123 closed sales * $5000 = $615,000 expected revenue per month.

And I’m not even calculating per week and cohort analysis here. The chat tool itself costs $15,000 a year at this volume and it will take about one month to install and train the AI to collect MQLs properly.

With that much money, we could even hire one or two more people to cover more hours to assist the AI and close faster.

The ideal scenario is then to request a 3-month proof of concept to see if such a lift really occurs (or what the lift may really look like).

Now, that’s a business case. There could be other options as well. Executives love to have two options, so they feel like they had input and “guided” you and “added value.”

Success of Every Tool is Your Responsibility

As a MOPs (or SOPs) leader, any tool you agree to install is ultimately your responsibility whether it was your decision or not. Ideally, the Business Case process reduces risk to the firm by clearly identifying the Who, What, Why, and How of solving the requestor’s problem. Then you will understand how to install the tool for maximum benefit.

Why do MarTech Failures Happen?

While this could be a long post on its own, there are a few clear ways vendor failure occurs.

Failures are likely to occur when:

  • Business Process wasn’t defined first, so the implementation becomes messy and the vendor is blamed.
  • No buy in from users or executives so no one feels they have to use it.
  • Overpromised and underdelivered in time period.
  • Onboarding and training met too much resistance and people “blamed” the vendor instead.
  • No one to use or manage the tool.
  • Vendor was decided without discussing why the vendor would help (see Executive Playbook).
  • Vendor Name becomes synonymous with the Process it helps to manage. Once people decide they hate the process and the process means “Vendor X” that Vendor will be cut loose eventually, even if the tool could have been modified to meet peoples’ needs.

Success occurs when:

  • Business process before RFP
  • Ensure vendor is fully vetted.
  • Ensure migration plan is very detailed and you have the integration documentation. Drop any vendor who can’t show this to you before the contract.
  • Consider professional services to temporarily help.
  • Vendor Name Does Not Equal Process

Step 3: Managing the RFP: Salespeople, Negotiation, and Procurement

In the example above, we saw how a fictional, but likely sales conversation goes with a MarTech vendor. In order to mitigate fast and poor decisions, your process included an internal component to understand the Use Cases and the ROI Business Case.

Now that you understand what you want, it’s time to go out into the marketplace to see who does what and how they talk about it. I’ve written about this before in the Marketing Automation Vendor RFP Process. Here’s a quick summary of an RFP-Feature Table.

What we want Feature Vendor 1 Vendor 2
Save time on meeting setup Show rep’s calendar to the Lead x ✔︎
Click to Schedule Link to Rep’s calendar ✔︎ x
Show calendar in an email Show calendar in an email ✔︎ ✔︎
Low cost per Lead Per lead pricing $50/meeting $500/mo. no limit
Take people out of online chat AI chat script x ✔︎
Route to correct sales rep Connect to SFDC Take down info to send to rep ✔︎ x
Knows Lead Reps SFDC API or Package ✔︎ ✔︎
Push data to Marketo for deduping REST API ✔︎ ✔︎

Work the Process to Make Better Decisions

Remember to establish a process and work with Finance and Legal to understand the procurement process at your organization. It’s all too easy to bypass the rules and end up crashing into another team’s process that you must follow.

Being a Bureaucrat is easy! Here are some examples. Your organization likely has fewer or more steps. Smaller firms may condense these steps or let you make more decisions, especially for those monthly single point SaaS solutions that take credit cards.

  1. Have the Business Case
  2. Understand the ROI
  3. Get Executive Approval
  4. Vet vendors
  5. Sell the vendor to the people who matter, including executives.
  6. Set aside budget.
  7. Requirements vs. Reality of Vendors
  8. Plan the Migration with Stakeholders
  9. Negotiate the Terms with the Vendor
  10. Executive Approval
  11. Purchase Order
  12. Privacy and other Legal Review
  13. Security and IT Approval
  14. Renegotiate Terms as needed
  15. Business Term Review
  16. Legal and Privacy Approval
  17. Contract Approval
  18. Sales Order or SOW Approval
  19. Start working!

How to Negotiate with a Vendor

Again, hundreds of books on negotiation are available. The key tips with software vendors boil down to these.

All negotiation experts will tell you that unless you understand your own positions (your Business Case and limits) you will find it hard to make your best decision. Remember, you can always walk away if you discover the internal situation has changed.

Both vendors and marketers should read this article about Working with MarTech Vendors.

Step 4: Managing the MarTech Stack Lifecycle: Add, Subtract, Expand

There are three things you can do with a MarTech stack (or revenue stack):

  • Add – buy a new tool to automate or enhance capabilities.
  • Subtract – remove unused tools, or tools that will be replaced, or tools that are no longer needed.
  • Expand – leverage an existing tool more through use of new features.

The devil, of course, is in the details. How do you decide to Add, Subtract, or Expand within the MarTech stack? The methods I discussed above are how you make better decisions about your stack.

There is another consideration: the lifecycle stage of your organization and its ability to use the tools in the workflow. You can read more about these issues in the MarTech Maturity Model.

For example, if you want full funnel visibility with Channel-Offer attribution so you can see which assets are working and in which places, don’t expect that on day one. Even if a magic system spit out the data, does anyone know what to do with it?

The same goes for a lead gating system like Predictive Scoring. Marketing may think it’s great that they are using “science” to make better decisions, yet Sales goes by their gut; they don’t trust this new filter and think it will ruin their pipeline.

In other words, don’t put the cart before the horse.

Scott Brinker discusses the idea that a MarTech Stack, or even areas of it, are akin to building a product. As we saw above, the techniques used to make better decisions about Processes and the Tools to support them are essentially software product tools. I’m not sure I always think about it in the moment, however, it is a helpful guide when you consider that your goal is to enable another team to do their job better with a set of tools.

Adding to the Stack

Adding is usually the easiest and most fun part of managing your stack. Follow the steps above and find the best fit for your team. A few more things to consider:

  • Future Proof – will this work for a year or grow with us?
  • Integration Points
  • How it really works.
  • Can we do a Proof of Concept or would it be too much work?
  • Adoption Plan: what’s your roll out plan? Are you sure regular users are going to be ready or will they sabotage this? Adoption is your best defense against Resistors and Executive Playbooks. Adoption helps the vendor lock you in too – and this is why your vendor needs to support your efforts.

Subtracting from the Stack

There are three questions to ask before Subtracting or Switching vendors:

  1. Why does this tool exist?
  2. Who uses it?
  3. What is its value?

You would be surprised how often no one knows who owns a tool. It’s just “been there forever” and now you have to trace the connections and data to see how vital (or not) it is to automation or a particular person. See the slides below for more details on the steps.

  • Does this tool duplicate features of another vendor?
  • People who ran it left?
  • Does it connect to something?
  • What might break if we turn it off?
  • What’s the contract say about shut off?
  • Do we understand how to remove it?
  • Did we speak with everyone who might be remotely affected and get their approval?
  • Did we back up any data or do we have a rollback plan
  • Did we discuss the shut off with the vendor? Did they have alternatives?

In the extreme case, you may not have any idea who owns it or what it does. The person who bought it moved on and there isn’t a clear data flow or dependency. In that case, biting the bullet and turning it off may be the only way to find out. Best case: nothing happens and you save some money. Worst case: you pulled out the wrong Jenga block and kicked off a random process that now clogged the sync or overwrote 1 million records. Be careful!

Upgrading or Switching Vendors

Ultimately, you will outgrow a vendor at some point. Perhaps they stopped keeping up with competitors. Perhaps they are best used at a 200-person firm and not a 10,000-person firm with larger data needs. Just like letting someone go, it’s a good idea to keep your vendor’s salesperson in the loop and give them a chance to discuss your new requirements.

I’ve written and spoken about how several marketing automation platforms are great for startups or certain situations and to recognize when your firm is ready for a Marketo or other MAP. I’ve seen a few companies buy too much MAP, waste money, and then downgrade for awhile.

Sometimes that $50/mo. tool that’s “good enough” and gets used a few times a month, but that no one loves is the right tool to stick with. The alternative power solution may cost $2,000/mo. and take months to install and takes a highly trained person to run. Are you sure it’s worth “upgrading”?

Another consideration is how will this change the organization? Are you sure this change is to support organizational growth or change? Or is this going to cause change that will make it harder to roll out?

As we saw with the rise of Marketo and Eloqua, vendors can persuade us that our processes should change to get with the times and accelerate revenue. Always be sure this change is in line with executives and other teams. The rise of MAPs was a catalyst for B2B marketers to become more disciplined and up level their departments, but it wasn’t always a smooth transition.

Building a Martech Stack to Make Your Marketing Sing from Josh Hill

Filed Under: Marketing Technology

Adobe-Marketo Summit 2019 Session Guide

February 25, 2019 By Josh Hill

Session Guide for Adobe-Marketo Summit 2019

In this year’s big Marketo surprise, they announced they were merging Marketo Summit with the Adobe Summit on March 25-28.

Every Marketo User suddenly scrambled for budget and time in a couple of days and now we’re all back on track and building out great sessions.

Since this is my first Adobe Summit, I plan to go to a few of the advertising and experience sessions to learn more about Adobe’s martech capabilities outside of Marketo.

I am speaking once again, this time with Kelly Jo Horton of Docker on “Building a MarTech Stack to Make Your Marketing Sing” The session is about looking at your stack as a whole while managing vendor relationships for your benefit. If you have found yourself with too many tools with low ROI, this session is for you.

Marketo’s ability to integrate broadly with other solutions provides you a powerful platform, but to be successful, you need to know how to properly leverage each tool across a complex workflow. With over 7,000 MarTech solutions to choose from, making the right choices to ensure that you continue to up your marketing game is tough. The three main topics we’ll cover include:

  • Map out your data and business workflows to uncover the systems and hidden rules driving your funnel and decide which tools you need (or don’t).
  • Manage MarTech integrations, deprecations, and expansion projects with your Marketo platform.
  • Think about RFPs and handle MarTech salespeople to know the right details about their system and understand how it works with Marketo

Adobe Sessions Marketo Users Should Attend

I’ve found many in MOPs are focused on Demand Generation, which often means “Not SEO or SEM” at many companies. Since Adobe has invested heavily in Ads to Website management, this is your big chance to find out what your colleagues are actually up to when they talk about Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Audience Manager.

Why bother you ask?

Because if you want a full martech stack, you do need to understand more about “Upstream” methods and products. When I say “upstream,” I am talking about the tools that help drive traffic to your main website or tools that drive direct leads into Marketo. Downstream tools are your CRM (Salesforce) and your Product, Billing, etc.

Here are the Sessions I am planning to go see:

Optimizing Your Team for Cross Channel Marketing

Run by Bruce Swann (Adobe) and Saul Lopes (Dixons Carphone), talk about the team structure for cross-channel Marketing. I’ve actually thought about this a lot because I believe workflow is just as important as the story you are telling the world.

Delivering on the Experience Promise: a DMP Roadmap

In this session, Adobe and Princess Cruises discuss using the DMP (Data Management Platform) to unify data for a unified experience.

Delivering on the Real Time Promise

This is where Adobe and Equinox discuss using Audience Manager to build real time personalization and experience.

DMPs of the New Age

Adobe and the Discovery Channel team up to discuss multi device and channel experiences in a challenging data restriction environment. While most of us aren’t in TV or media, this could be an idea sparking session.

Marketo Sessions to Consider

5 Mistakes we Made with Digital Advertising and How to Avoid Them

With my good friends Jeff Canada of Segment and Jessica Cross of RollWorks, they will share their stories with AdTech and Martech. Those predictions of AdTech disappearing have not come true-yet. This is a great way to learn how to connect Marketo with Advertising, something I rarely see discussed more.

Reinventing Lead Scoring: Using Data Science to Market Better

This session is by Edward Unthank, founder of Etumos, the owner of this site. I am going to his session because Ed has often shown me paths I’ve not thought of and can expand upon in the future. As you know, Lead Scoring is a key topic and I’m curious what he has to say.

Building an Attribution Engine with Bizible and Marketo

This is a critical topic for every Marketo user and purchaser — how do you get to full funnel visibility? In this session, advanced users can learn more about the steps involved in using Marketo’s Bizible product.

Renovate or Rebuild? Marketo’s Own Journey to a New Instance

Paul Wilson of Marketo talks about how they rebuilt their Marketo after 10 years of use! This is a surprisingly common thread on the Nation and there are times to do this and times to not. I’m personally curious what Paul did here and what Marketo did differently than the advice given out on the Forums.

Hyper-Personalization: Engage Buyers with a Next-Level Nurture Program

Chris Vandermarel of PathFactory and Amanda Thomas of Etumos present on how to take your nurture targeting to the next level, and provide advice on how to master acceleration and skip logic. Engagement program tips and tricks make their way to Marketo’s agenda each year, and I am curious how other users are manipulating nurture architecting.

Scaling the Mountain: Marketing Operations in Global Enterprises

In this session, which appears to be more of a panel, Nokia, Palo Alto Networks, and Citrix discuss their instances, scaling campaigns, and teams to run MASSIVE organizations. I think about this one a lot and am curious how these three firms work.

Which sessions are you planning to attend?

Filed Under: Conference Reviews, Marketing Automation Tagged With: adobe, adobe summit, marketo, marketo summit, martech

A Conversation with Edward Unthank of Etumos

February 11, 2019 By Josh Hill

Edward Unthank, Founder of Etumos

The Founder of Etumos shares how he first got involved in the world of Marketing Operations and Marketing Automation (specifically Marketo), and the journey that led him to take over the reins of Marketing Rockstar Guides.


How did you get involved with Marketo?

I’d like to think that I’ve gotten into Marketo (and Marketing Operations) from the ground-up. My Marketo career started at a high-caliber marketing services company on the 4-person task force in charge of creating an Agency service line, where I helped establish the scalable foundations of the MOPs practice. During the day, I personally implemented, managed, and optimized Marketo for ourselves and all our clients. During the night, I would write the technical “how to” articles about Marketo that I wanted to read myself. I fell in love with Marketing Automation and inventing Marketing Operations from the ground-up.

Here’s the less glamorous and less buzzwordy version:

I studied statistics and economics in undergraduate and taught myself web development in my spare time for fun projects. I got into everything digital marketing as a generalist working for small local businesses, immersed myself in Web Development communities and philosophies, then I moved into running and managing Marketo. It took about 3 years of a career to find Marketo and throw everything I have into the tool and vocation.

I briefly considered software and web development for the “big bucks,” but I wanted a clearer career path to leadership. Hence, Marketo!

Edward Unthank, Founder of Etumos
Edward Unthank, Founder of Etumos

Why did you decide to become a consultant?

I jumped into the consulting world because how few people knew how to run Marketo well (5 years ago), and I wanted to be the one to figure out the answer and spread the answer.

I saw a massive talent gap in the emergence of Marketing Automation. I came into the world of Marketing with a background in statistics and web development, and I found pretty quickly that my perspective was unique compared to most marketers.

I saw significantly more value in the full, maximized usage of technology in Marketing. We’re in the midst of massive changes in the industry, and one of the things that we’re seeing is how technological maturity opens massive doors and provides huge competitive advantage. The speed of tech improvements and online growth is incredibly fast. The speed of Marketing adjusting to this is slower, and it is struggling to keep up. I look around at all of the technology, the capabilities of harnessing the internet, and I see massive opportunity to rethink how we’re doing Marketing through Marketing Technology. I became a consultant because that was the way I could turn this passion project and hobby into a company that could define and scale Marketing Operations.

What’s your approach to consulting and how is it different than others?

My company, Etumos is all about inventing best practices. The most exciting thing to me about this field is how brand new it is. We get to be the pioneers, carving out and creating best practices that we can spread through our practices and what we write. We have an internal motto of “Build a Better Wheel,” which represents a core belief that if we rethink Marketing in today’s world, we’ll reinvent the core foundational components to create a Marketing machine that runs holistically.

We hire people who are *really* passionate about making Marketing Automation (Marketo, specifically), the people who are fully immersed in the industry, because those are the people who are learning the fastest, inventing trends that resonate, and Etumos is the place where they can thrive.

Take all this with a handful of salt and do your own research, but in my opinion—Etumos is the big leagues. We work with the most advanced/impressive clients, we have the smartest people in the industry, the deepest technical knowledge, and the most authority in MOPS process, strategy, and tactics, and best practices. We find the A players, and we show them how deeply Etumos will invest in their growth and career.

What is a challenge you think most CMOs don’t understand well about MarTech?

MarTech in itself does very little. Marketing Operations (people running MarTech) is what creates value. I don’t care about shiny tools—I care about extracting every single drop of value from these tools.

If you have twenty MarTech tools and only one person to work on the tools, you only get the output of one person, not 20 MarTechs.

The realized value of MarTech is proportional to your company’s investment (hours and budget) in the running of MarTech. Honestly, I think the explosion of MarTech has meant that (in macro) some MarTech salespeople have promised low on-going investment while seeing the same results. It just isn’t true. You can do it in-house, you can hire others, but the fact of the matter is that MarTech needs people to run the systems, and neglecting the tool nearly guarantees a negative financial return on the MarTech.

We see MarTech fail when companies put all of their money getting the most-expensive tool they can, and because of that they don’t have any leftover budget for good people to run the system. They blame the MarTech because it’s too complicated, too expensive, and not providing value; a year later, they abandon the MarTech and move to something cheaper after having wasted a year of time and money. Don’t overbuy MarTech. If you don’t have smart people to run it, it will provide you very little value (at least nowhere near the massive tech price tags).

There’s a whole art and science being created here, a whole budding, specialized vocation of managing MarTech: Marketing Operations. CMOs need to be aware that, like it or not, this is a new role. If you train a generalist on how to use Marketing Automation and that person wants to go from a Marketing Manager (~$65k/year) to a MOPs Manager (~$95k/year), you are probably not going to retain that employee in the medium-run. What I’m seeing is this huge brain-drain movement in the job market, where MOPS employees would rather become consultants than work on Brand marketing in-house.

CMOs, think about this from the Individual Contributor (IC) employee’s perspective:

  • Would you rather have authority in your interactions with employees on the day-to-day, or would you rather be treated like a customer service function working through a never-ending, monotonous to-do list?
  • Would you rather work from home or forced to work in-office (aka, do you want to move somewhere where you can actually afford a house without a 2-hour commute)?
  • Would you rather make more money for the same work?
  • Would you rather be deeply immersed in one company’s business (Marketing and Sales), or exposed to many different businesses, needs, and priorities?

I’ll tell you now, if you want the most experience quickly, you don’t go in-house.

Thoughts on setting up full-funnel transparency?

There is no excuse not to do this. It is 100% possible, and we’ve done it. I don’t care how small you are, how “unique” your business model is, or anything else like that. Take your business-driving goal and come up with a consistent way to measure those in small, actionable milestones. B2C? There’s a conversion funnel. B2SMB? Yep. B2B? Duh. B2Wholesalers? You bet.

Don’t believe people who say it isn’t possible, find the people who can do it and have done it.

There’s a lot of odd mythology around “full funnels” which makes it scary and unapproachable to many Marketing companies. Some orgs, honestly, are afraid of rolling out a full funnel because they think it will decrease their job security. How? Pre-funnel Marketing companies care about different things, and they hire Marketers who can deliver on what they care about. Switching to a full funnel model of Marketing and Sales means new rules of the game, and new definitions of success. That’s scary, and I get it.

Let’s demystify— 

A funnel is a mathematical model representing Marketing and Sales holistically. It’s the ultimate set of KPIs. It takes a really hard and complex process (“make people like us and buy our stuff”) and chunks it into actionable subsets. It takes really hard goals (“increase revenue by 50%”) and breaks them down into achievable goals.

The foundation of a funnel is to say, “All else equal, if we increase the conversion rate from this stage to the next stage, we’ll create more Customers (and therefore increase revenue).”

A funnel creates the foundation of measurability. A funnel converts what you’re doing as a company into KPIs that have bubbled-up and provide a measurement of what is converting in real-time, and it gives the ability to measure the quality of Marketing ideas in objective (or at least, consistently subjective) ways.

The next step is grading your Marketing and Sales organization by this approach, and then Absolute Reliance upon that Data. Don’t discount metrics by calling them “directional;” embrace math in Marketing, because it’s the key to improving (and testing) all of the “Art” of Marketing.

What’s your advice for someone getting into martech today?

Get into Marketing Operations, don’t get into “MarTech.” MarTech is a trend, while Marketing Operations is the substance that will sustain through time.

Filed Under: Marketing Automation

Archiving Assets in Marketo

December 29, 2018 By Josh Hill

Archiving a Folder

“But it’s still good!” – Grandpa

As we work with different clients, we encounter users with newer instances and users with older instances. In each case, both compile a legacy of active triggers, scheduled batches, and old assets. These collected items make it harder to see what is currently important and what is safe to remove. Now that a new year is upon us, a Marketo cleanup is in order.

You may have pages with old offers still visible online to people. Pages and emails may have old branding or addresses listed. Your new intern may have found that great offer from 2018 to resend to 10,000 people—except that Forrester report is from 2015 and no one cares.

Don’t let that happen to you. Establish a regular procedure for archiving and unapproving old or expired assets.

Archiving Assets and More in Marketo

In Marketo, you can “archive” an asset, program, campaign, folder, etc. Archiving tells Marketo to no longer display or prioritize an asset.

You can Archive old assets of any type using the Archive feature of folders. Once a folder, program, asset, or campaign is inside an Archive, it is no longer visible to Search and it looks all filed away. Do keep in mind, Archived campaigns are not deactivated. The logic will still work, so if you plan to archive an active campaign, you should consider deactivating it first.

Here’s how to do that:

Archiving a Folder

What Changes

What Does Not Change

Asset is no longer visible in search. Results will return the collapsed Archive folder. Global search still searches Archived folders.
Assets no longer appear in auto suggest. Active trigger campaigns are still active.
Templates are no longer available across the system for new assets. Data is available in reports.
Pages cannot be added to new Landing Page Tests. Filters in Analytics will still see the archived asset.
Subfolders are also archived (and vice-versa).
Archived sub-folders cannot be un-archived unless parent folder is un-archived.

Archived Programs are still available to Revenue Cycle Analytics as long as it has at least one period cost.

In terms of organization, I recommend that you create Archive folders by date or as “zArchive 2018” so the folder isn’t in the way of your main folders. You should also create an Archive in Marketing Activities and Design Studio (for all asset types and templates).

Archiving Assets in Engagement Programs

Engagement Programs offer a more refined way to handle archiving of assets.

  • Pause an asset so it isn’t sent out – ok to do, but can be reactivated easily.
  • Remove/Delete an asset – watch out, this deletes related data.
  • Archive a stream asset – do this to retain all the data.

Unapproving Assets in Marketo

Assets such as emails and landing pages must be approved to be visible to leads and to be sent out. Old emails, pages, and lists can clutter up things and eventually confuse people. Once a year (or twice), hold a clean-up day with pizza and just get it done. Here’s what we recommend as a regular clean-up procedure:

When

What

Procedure

Every 2 Months Emails Remove unused or test emails.
Every 2 Months Pages Remove unused or test landing pages
Every 6 months Pages Review pages and offers; turn off ones that are stale.
Every 12 months Templates Review templates for updates to your site and styles. Unapprove templates no longer used or Archive them.
Every 12 Months Forms Archive or delete stale forms. Unused Forms can be deleted.
Every 6 Months Smart Lists Clean up the Smart List folders. Look at the Used by tab to help remove unused lists or move them to a more logical location.
Every 6 Months Static Lists Carefully review lists and delete ones that are no longer useful for reporting or flows. Deleting a list does not do anything to the Leads in the list.

I wrote a few other tips on the blog, where I recommend to always default to Not Publish to Sales Insight. This will save your Sales Team from being confused by hundreds of emails.

Archiving and Reporting in Marketo

Archiving assets and campaigns retains all the data associated with those assets. In certain reports, such as Landing Page or Email, you can choose to include Archived items in the report, but this is not done automatically. If you set up your folder structure and naming scheme, you will easily find the folders and Programs to include in a report.

Chaos Too Big for Your Team?

Etumos can help. Start with a complimentary Health Audit and we can provide suggestions focused on old programs and assets, as well as other areas to make your Marketo instance run smoothly!

Filed Under: Marketo User Guide

Marketo Tips for Holiday Campaigns

December 4, 2018 By Josh Hill

reset-stream-cadence

It’s that time of year again!

Not Turkey and presents, but the dreaded holiday campaign season. Whether you are in B2B or B2C, you always have a holiday campaign from the Customer Email Card to the “special offers” to induce last minute budget spending.

Here are some quick tips you can use in Marketo to run those campaigns faster.

The Holiday Card to All Customers

Ideally you can identify all customers because your database is always up to date and the flag says “Customer=TRUE”.

LOL.

Anyway, assuming you know where your customers are, you can do a few quick tricks to ensure the Holiday Email goes out well.

1. Customer Only Engagement

In this situation, all you need to do is drop the email at the TOP of the Stream and it will go out at the next Cast.

2. Master Customer Emailable Smart List 

Pretty simple – always have a master Customer Emailable list to use for random batch campaigns like this.

No, your Seasons Greetings card is not operational. It’s a promotional communication.

Avoiding Holiday Casts

Remember how we all asked Marketo to enable a Calendar where we could set “Holiday-Do Not Send” and Marketo would just “know” what to do?

Yeah.

Option 1: Engagement System Shut Down and Restart

You can do that anyway though with two simple tips. First, just don’t schedule your batch on a holiday. Second, if you are running mostly Engagements, it’s easy to do a few things if your next Cast date is on a holiday.

First, go to your Program > Setup

Second, turn OFF the Engagement

Third, a day or two after the holiday, turn the Engagement back ON.

Fourth, go to the Stream > Cadence and change First Cast date to the date you want (any date in the future) and verify the Cadence is still the same.

reset-stream-cadence

The only caveat here is if you are using Time Zone Sends, you should turn this back on at least 36 hours before the next Cast.

Option 2: Pause or Suspend

An alternative is to Pause people in the Engagements, Wait Until the holiday is over, and then set their Cadences to Normal. And for good measure, switch on/off Marketing Suspend. In some ways, it may work better to simply set Marketing Suspended=TRUE for that time period, especially if your Marketo isn’t Engagement heavy. If you have a global instance, remember to only target the people that would celebrate that holiday.

Here’s a quick flow to review.

holiday-suspend-flow-example

AB Testing End of Year Offers

Some of you may need to do a final push to fill pipe and revenue goals for the year. It’s hard to know which offer will do well, so you have a few options.

AB Test Day of Week – send some offers on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and a Regular Day. You can also run some offers on December 22, 23, and 31. [see random sample]

AB Test the Offer – see if Holiday messaging is helpful, or not. Be direct and ask for unspent budget before December 31. This works better with consumer products and ecommerce, however, low price point SAAS services should also test it.

Before you send that copy off to Creative for a design, be sure you have a reason to communicate with your customers. What is the goal of the holiday email or communication? Is it gratitude? Is it a gift? Is it an offer or discount? Make it meaningful, make your customers be thankful they work with you.

Filed Under: Marketo User Guide

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 39
  • Next Page »

2019 Adobe / Marketo Summit Sessions

Adobe Marketo Summit 2019

Special Content

Learn Lead Lifecycles
Speaking the Same Language for Marketo Architecture & Best Practices
Expert Guide to Program Templates

Categories

  • Conference Reviews (6)
  • Demand Generation (16)
  • Market Strategy (2)
  • Marketing Automation (49)
  • Marketing Careers (4)
  • Marketing Operations (9)
  • Marketing Technology (21)
  • Marketo User Guide (87)

Topics for Marketing Technologists

  • Conference Reviews (6)
  • Demand Generation (16)
  • Market Strategy (2)
  • Marketing Automation (49)
  • Marketing Careers (4)
  • Marketing Operations (9)
  • Marketing Technology (21)
  • Marketo User Guide (87)

Services & Products

Marketing Technology Consulting
Marketo Consulting Services
Marketo Training
Marketo Health Audit
Revenue Stacks

 

Contact Me

Marketing Rockstar Guides
Contact Us

Copyright (c) 2022. Etumos. All Rights Reserved. Unless otherwise noted for that content only. Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2023 · Enterprise Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

 

Loading Comments...
 

You must be logged in to post a comment.