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When Does Account Based Marketing Hurt Scaling Up?

March 12, 2018 By Josh Hill

Several years ago, I encountered a situation I continue to reflect on. I was asked to create demand for a fintech firm that had built an interesting product on top of existing technology. As I learned more about the business they were in, I saw tremendous opportunity to make this area scalable for financial firms, and thus make us money.

Or so I thought.

The CEO eventually explained to me that he believed his market was “50 companies and 500 people.”

I thought we needed a scalable SaaS play that went beyond 50 firms. There were hundreds of possible customers who wanted to reduce costs in this area, and do it at scale. And if it were my business, I would have built the product for that scale. A company that serves 50 other large firms? Seemed limiting to me for the solution and sector we were going after.

Now there are some solutions that do only have 50 organizations to sell to. I knew a salesperson who went to such a firm where their sales cycle paid out on each stage of the sale they advanced, even if they didn’t close. That’s how valuable these projects were.

As I’ve thought more and more about ABM, my sense is that while I might have been right from a product perspective, the CEO was also right. What he wanted was Account Based Marketing. He wanted me to get those 500 people for the sales team and have those 500 people excited to consider us. His company provided customized solutions for this space, not large scale SaaS. Doing so required a completely different mindset than typical demand/lead generation I was building out.

When we think about ABM, we need to consider the firm’s strategy, the product, and the TAM.

  • Size of TAM
  • Product Scale
  • Marketing Scale

While the Product-Market Fit stage may be an ideal place to focus on that “50 Company” group, are you planning to go beyond that? If so, your decisions about the product and how to deliver it will be very different than if you decide your firm services 50 companies vs. 5000.

There are many companies that do well with highly custom solutions for 50 companies. Those service providers, however, are not very large.

I suspect many of you reading this work for companies that are building scale, or at scale, providers of a product. If so, your approach to building ABM operations will be very different than going after 50 companies.

The 50 Company Approach

The summary of the 50 Company Approach is that the small number of marketers required are going to be embedded with Sales, almost as solution consultants. The marketer will be a visionary or a consultant, and a part of the sales and customer process. Some firms will have the CEO do this instead. In this world, you do not need marketing automation or large scale MOPS. You will need personalized service.

The 50,000 Company Approach

In this large scale world, your product and marketing operations work at scale. Most marketers, sadly, will be at a distance from Sales and Customers because they are attempting to tell the company’s story at scale, automatically. This type of work provides Sales “cover” and a library of stories for the buyer personas, verticals, etc. The product itself will have a level of customization that can be done at scale with settings. Large customers will always want personalized service through professional services.

Ultimately, the difference is in the company’s strategy and the implications of that choice on operations. As long as that choice is deliberate, there isn’t a wrong answer.

Operational Implications of Strategy

Since most of us are in Marketing Operations, we are faced with the implications of the company’s strategic direction. If the Company made a clear choice and communicated that well, the business operations (MOPS, SOPS, Finance, etc) can make the implied choices well. If the Company doesn’t make a clear set of strategic choices, you’ll see that in muddled operations.

Other examples include the operations required to service 50,000 small companies vs. 5,000 larger size companies. Each side of the business will require almost an entirely separate set of operational paths and people to deliver the service well.

  • Servicing Companies under 100 people implies
    • limited or no professional services
    • take it or leave it product
    • customizations in the product
    • some APIs or out of the box connectors with limited support
    • lead generation approach would be effective
    • Email and web based support, self service.
    • Inside sales only.
    • MOPS works more like e-commerce funnel to, high scale personalization, larger batches.
    • Martech choices will look toward scale, integrations, product connection, and data quality rather than ABM.
  • Servicing Companies Over 100 People implies
    • ABM setup
    • SDR and Field Sales
    • Live support or paid support options
    • Ecosystem of VARs or Consultants
    • Limited in house consultants for largest clients
    • Heavily supported API or connectors
    • MOPS develops personalization based on Accounts, flow is more traditional SiriusDecisions model.
    • Martech choices will look at ABM more and focus more on Sales enablement.

Of course, there are plenty of options here for a company to select from.

As you progress in your MOPS role, it’s important to work closely with executives and product teams to design the most effective setup for your strategy.

Filed Under: Marketing Operations

Reply Email Mining with LeadGnome

March 6, 2018 By Josh Hill

Today I had a chance to chat with Matt Benati, CEO and Co-Founder of LeadGnome. You may have seen some of Matt’s articles on how to use automated replies from customers and prospects to keep your database up to date, and find hidden opportunities. I wanted to learn more about Matt’s perspective on this topic as well as more about his product.

Josh: Tell us about the burgeoning world of Reply Email Mining.

Matt: Most marketing teams use Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs) like Marketo to automate as much of their marketing processes as possible. Automating the process of sending emails to prospects and customers is a large part of this. MAPs focus on segmentation of databases, allowing for personalization and workflows that are triggered when a lead completes a specified action, such as downloading an ebook, watching a video, or even visiting certain pages of a site. For example, if someone downloads ABC, then automatically send XYZ follow-up email.

What is left out of the automation process is anything to do with the post-send of an email. Links, opens, clicks and other engagement with emails can be tracked — but the replies are typically not dealt with. Or, not dealt with efficiently. Hard and soft bounces are managed because the MAP can capture and remove bad emails from lists automatically. But auto-responses like Out-Of-Office and Left-The-Company, and even human replies like manual unsubscribe requests, are often ignored or deleted.  In fact, many folks have historically considered these reply emails a nuisance. Even MailChimp by default automatically suppresses Out-Of-Office responses from email threads.

It turns out, however, that the info within those replies provides significant intelligence and insight for sales and marketing teams. Many of us, myself included, have known about these hidden gems and have manually gone in and hunted and pecked the data for years. Now, as email mining is getting the attention it deserves, I am hearing over and over again, “I’ve been looking for this type of solution for years.” There is pent up demand for this critically strategic capability. This is not simply a tactical capability — it’s a must-have. Why? Because it provides significant advantages when we talk about driving revenue.

Josh: How did you get your firm started? Email reply data seems complicated.

Matt: It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention, and this is certainly the case for LeadGnome. Several years ago, in my first head of marketing job, my team and I were on the hook to deliver high-quality leads to the sales team. We used inbound, outbound, and nurturing methods, and all of these techniques had an email component.

My team had recently purchased a targeted list of contacts for an outbound campaign. I wanted to see how good the list was, so I began combing through the campaign response emails for bounces. I figured if the bounce rate was high, I’d ask the list vendor for additional contacts or a discount. However, as I scrolled through the response emails, I noticed something that immediately stopped me from counting bounces. I discovered gold buried in that mountain of emails – specifically I found leads in the body of out-of-office emails.

Wanting to make the most of my budget, I asked a marketing associate to plow through the out-of-office emails and mine the leads. His progress was slow and error prone as he performed the following process:

  • Open each email
  • Read the email searching for other contacts
  • Record this information (hand type or cut ‘n paste) into a spreadsheet
  • Import that information into our CRM system, Salesforce

Clearly, this was not going to scale. I figured there must be an automated email reply mining solution out there, so I searched the web. To my amazement, no solution existed. With a background in analytics, including data mining, I set out to develop an automated solution. The thing is, most of the valuable data in a reply email is in the body – in techno-speak, we call this the “unstructured data.” It requires advanced technologies, including the use of artificial intelligence, to effectively recognize and mine the relevant information from the unstructured data of an email. True reply email mining, like what LeadGnome does, goes far beyond signature scraping technology, to deliver more than just a phone number or title; the rich intelligence mined by LeadGnome directly translates to revenue opportunities.

Josh: LeadGnome sells the idea of high value leads from mining reply data. My experience is that I wanted to stop reviewing thousands of replies before I cared about new records. Why do companies seek you out? What’s that first conversation about?

Matt: It really depends on who I am speaking with and what their priorities are. In every case, the conversation starts with, “Please help; I can’t keep up with the volume of replies!” Then I start talking about what they want to accomplish with email mining – aside from automating the process. Here’s how their priorities typically shake out:

Marketing Operations Professionals:

  1. Database health/Compliance
  2. Enrich existing contacts
  3. New leads

Demand Generation Professionals:

  1. New leads
  2. Enrich existing contacts
  3. Trigger events

Sales Professionals:

  1. New leads
  2. Trigger events

Here’s what I’m talking about with these priorities:

Database health/Compliance – Database health is certainly an important need of our customers, especially considering that B2B data decays at a rate of about 70% annually. Clean data ensures you can reach prospects, helps with email delivery and sender reputation, and ensures you have accurate data to stay compliant with existing email spam laws (like CAN-SPAM and CASL). And with GDPR going into effect May 25, 2018, many organizations need solutions in place that can meet these stricter rules. We proactively built the LeadGnome platform to help ensure GDPR compliance and am happy to discuss details.

Enrich existing leads – Email mining maintains and enriches 72% of existing records annually by sending just 3 emails per month. Phone numbers, titles, email addresses, and other insight about your leads are mined and can be used to segment lists and personalize messaging.

New Leads – According to Gartner research, today’s B2B buying decisions now require an average of 7 people within an organization, so discovering new leads in target accounts is a top priority for both sales and marketing. Email mining generates pipeline by adding 20%+ net new contacts annually.

Trigger Events – A trigger event, or a significant change with a lead or account, represents a sales opportunity. It goes beyond delivering a lead, often bypassing parts of the sales funnel, to allow sales to leverage top line revenue opportunities. Most importantly, when certain trigger events are discovered via email mining, sales teams have a 6-12 month timing advantage over competitors and significantly increase their win rates.

While these benefits are reason enough for most marketing and sales professionals to want to add email mining to their toolbox, the ROI is the icing on the cake. Most LeadGnome customers realize an ROI of more than 600% in their first year. How? Automation reduces both hard costs (time/effort of manual process) and opportunity costs (redeploying resources to more appropriate tasks). When you add in the net new contacts (pipeline growth), and trigger events (found revenue opportunities), many customers realize a higher ROI.

Josh: Email use rules are tightening. What is the best follow up campaign for a new name obtained from Email Reply Mining?

Matt: LeadGnome has been leading the charge when it comes to privacy and privacy law discussions centering on mining reply emails. It turns out that net new contacts identified via auto-responses and human responses can be used lawfully under CAN-SPAM, CASL, and GDPR. If your readers have questions about using reply information lawfully, I’m happy to discuss it further. Of course, each company should consult their legal counsel for advice. [ed: no legal advice is provided in this article]

Regardless of whether you’re mining emails or not, you MUST have a process in place for being in compliance with these laws. To stay on the right side of all regulations, I recommend permission-based marketing. What has always been the best practice has even more significance in today’s highly-regulated world; specifically, the fundamental tenets of permission marketing. That is, when you reach out, be transparent with how you learned about the new contact. Transparency has always been the hallmark of permission-based marketing, and obtaining express consent from the get go is the surest way to remain compliant, especially with the upcoming GDPR changes, which are shaping up to be the strictest of all email spam laws.

Josh: I completely agree that following the principles of Permission Marketing is always the way to go and will enhance a company’s reputation online and off.

Josh: Where do your customers tend to make mistakes with LeadGnome? What’s stopping them from realizing its full potential? 

Matt: My philosophy is that customers continue using MAPs (like Marketo) that they know and love. I want our customers to use the systems they use daily and I believe that they shouldn’t have to learn a new workflow system presented by a company like LeadGnome.

The challenge with that, however, is they need to create the MAP programs to automate the business logic/workflows that make sense for them. For example, some might alert sales reps via email; some via text. Because all companies do things differently, I really felt strongly that the best place to create these workflows is within your MAP. For example, your workflows may combine reply email mining result data with other data stored in your MAP – this is done most efficiently within the MAP itself.

Josh: Why do you think the major MAPs have left reply management out of their core product?

MAPs have been in place for many years, but the technology needed to mine the unstructured data from reply emails simply has not been there. Artificial Intelligence technology is how LeadGnome mines emails, but it has only become feasible and more accessible in recent years. MAPs have historically focused on the sales and marketing processes leading up to and including sending emails, but as mentioned before, the post-send process has remained largely untouched.

LeadGnome complements your MAP by filling this automation gap, closing the loop on the email marketing process and leveraging a previously untapped data source.

Josh: What percentage of each email send yields some sort of reply?

From analyzing real LeadGnome customers’ email campaigns, I have found that 2% to 3% of email send volume produces replies. Of those replies, 50% to 60% generate alternate contacts (net new contacts).

Josh: Since we both care about Permission based marketing, what are the ethics in using data obtained this way?

Matt: In a B2B world, your existing contacts or the company you are interacting with is asking you to engage with others within the organization when they put auto-responses like Out-Of-Office and Left-The-Company in place.

In an OOO, there is usually an alternate person to contact while your original contact is out of the office. Same with a Left The Company reply, as there is usually a replacement contact included in the auto-response. Because your contact gave this information freely, you are legally able to reach out to the new contact. As I discussed earlier, however, it’s always a good idea to practice permission-based marketing, reach out and be transparent in how you received the new contact’s information, and ask for them to opt-in to receive communication from you. In fact, for GDPR, it is a requirement of the “legitimate interest” rule, to provide specific information when communicating with these new contacts.

Josh: I see two groups of Reply Email tools: reply mining apps and reply conversation Bots with “AI”. Do you see the reply mining sector heading more toward AI reply bots like Conversica? 

Matt: I think there is certainly a place for bots that reply to conversations for their human counterparts. This could be an expedient solution for high-volume or “pat answer” situations. However, we live in a world where people want more personalized engagement with real people. I speak a lot about account-based models, where personalization is reaching new levels because the people we want to engage with demand it. So realistically, I don’t think that bots can replace humans.

I tend to subscribe more to paradigms like Jill Konrath’s Intelligence Conversations model. We owe it to our customers to learn as much as possible about them and then earnestly engage — human to human — to build value-based rapports. Reply Email Mining provides much of the information needed to start and continue these conversations.


Matt, thank you for sharing your perspective today. Email reply management is a natural win for automation and I believe every MOPS professional should have this in her arsenal.

Filed Under: Marketing Technology

Dealing with Duplicates in Marketing Automation

February 15, 2018 By Josh Hill

Remove Duplicates

One of the great features of marketing automation platforms (MAPs) is the ability to automate deduping. Most MAPs look at Email Address as the unique identifier. While this doesn’t stop all dupes, it does take care of 80% of new dupes from imports, form fill outs, and events.

But you will still have duplicates from Sales, CRM history, and people filling in different information. So how can you get closer to zero dupes?

How Marketo handles duplicates

Marketo automatically dedupes leads based on email address. The dedupe works only when you enter new leads into Marketo from:

  • List Import
  • Marketo Form (iFrame or Marketo Page is ok)
  • Direct creation in Marketo database.
  • Direct creation through API. (exceptions apply)

Thus you should do your best to create new leads using the above methods. I can’t speak for other systems, but they are probably similar in approach. There are some caveats to Marketo’s approach:

  • Records from the CRM will never be deduped. Your Sales team can create dupes!
  • Existing Records on the first sync will also not be deduped. This is why you should clean up your database before implementation.
  • If there are Duplicates by Email Address, Marketo will choose the most recently updated Record to append to. This may not be the record you actually want.

In Marketo and your CRM, you can merge records manually, but not automatically.

Choosing the Right Record in Marketo

The use case here is that you may have a Customer Record that was selected to receive an important billing message. You want that Record to be tagged as having Sent the email to.

When duplicates exist in Marketo, you will upload a static list in CSV with one column: email address. But Marketo cannot guarantee it will select the exact Record you saw in your CRM. So if it chooses a loose SFDC Lead instead, your system will record the Email Send, but it won’t be obvious to anyone looking at the Customer’s main CRM record.

marketo-dedupe-sheet

Most of the time this is not a big deal, but it can be a big deal when you want to record billing or legal messages have been sent. You can be sure that a Customer will call up sales to complain about a price increase they never saw. When Sales looks at the Contact, no email is shown. But when you look across all records, you can prove the email was sent. As a MOPS pro, you can be sure this scenario will occur and that the salesperson won’t always check possible dupes.

To solve this, you would need to do one of two things:

  • Option 1: use SFDC Report to Add to SFDC Campaign and then point Marketo at that correct list. This won’t always work if you use SFDC Campaign as attribution tools.
  • Option 2: use a CRM flag to identify the specific record to Marketo. It’s ok, but not scalable.
  • Option 3: use Talend (or similar tool) to map the SFDC ID Record against the Marketo ID Record to Add to List.
  • Option 4: paste a list of SFDC IDs into the SFDC ID filter in a Smart List.
    • Option 4 is only possible if you have less than 2499 rows to place in the filter. I don’t like this option because it’s not scalable.

In an ideal world, Marketo would enable a List Import option to map against better unique database keys like SFDC ID. Until that happens, those are your options.

But this case is not unique to Marketo — all MAPs that rely on email address deduping will encounter this scenario with a CRM or another database.

Why Duplicates Matter to You

Every record in your database costs you money and time in some way. A single record may be a fraction of a cent in some databases. In most MAPs that charge by the record, you are charged whether or not that record has value to you. Per record fees may be $.05 to $.20! That matters because, in my experience, most B2B marketing databases have about 18% useful prospect records and perhaps 60% bad or inactive records that just sit there. If you have 100,000 records, that’s $12,000 per year in deadweight. The rule of thumb bandied about is 25% of your database goes bad every year.

  • Clutter – not being able to get accurate counts for segmentations.
  • Compounding Bad Data with Sales – salespeople update the wrong records and chaos ensues
  • Spam Law Compliance – issues with duplicates not having the right permissions could end up as a nasty letter or legal action.
  • Vendor Costs – most vendors use the number of records as a pricing scale, even if you have duplicates. Managing this is your problem, not the vendor.
  • Email Costs – if you use a vendor that prices per email, then you will definitely have an increased cost.
  • Inaccurate reports – incorrect records invariably lead to questionable reports and bad decisions.
  • Double Purchases: bad data quality and dupes often means Salespeople (and you) will buy lists that have the same people.

There are tons of studies by data vendors that make the case even more clearly. A 2011 Gartner study suggested poor data quality lowered productivity 20%. And SiriusDecisions (and data processing vendors) have shown how bad data compounds over time.

Hunting Down Sources and Preventing Dupes

You can prevent duplicates. One way is to map out how data enters your systems and develop processes for deciding which systems can create records or find and append records. The steps I would take include the following:

Map of All Data Entry Methods:

  • Create in CRM
  • Import into CRM
  • Product database
  • List Import into your MAP
  • Salespeople/Manual Creation
  • Lead fills out a form

Then decide which sources are permitted and who is permitted to create records.

  • Which system is the Source of Truth that trumps other sources?
  • Which records will win during a merge?

Those people and systems then need a process to ensure they attempt to identify dupes and handle them. You can create a hierarchy of record scenarios to build automation rules.

If you are looking for specific rules over which fields and records to choose to override, you can think about some of the options:

  • Prefer Older Record over newer.
  • Prefer more complete record to less complete.
  • Prefer the Source of Truth Record against an incoming record.
  • Choose the existing data rather than the purchased data (if not empty).
  • Choose the Customer record over the Lead record.
  • Choose the business email record over the matched Gmail record.
  • Choose the data from Data Vendor 1 over Data Vendor 2.
  • Choose the most recently updated field over the older field.
  • Average the scores (although Marketo adds them).
  • Use the score of the more recent lead.
  • Choose the record that is furthest down the funnel.

Blocking Dupe Creation

  • Using a CRM Tool like Dupeblocker: enforce a search of the database before creation.
  • Using Automation to use unique keys across systems to match up before creation.
  • Using Email Address deduplication in your MAP.
  • Block Salespeople from record creation.
  • End use of SFDC Leads and only use Account-Contacts. (Much harder!).
  • Sync your CRM-MAP with all records. Not syncing all records ensures dupe creation.

At some point, you will have to accept that duplicates will exist and have a tolerable threshold. My personal rule of thumb is that you are doing very well if 3% of your database are dupes by email address. Duplicates by Name or other fuzzy criteria may be slightly higher, so you will need more powerful tools to identify that count. I have often come across duplicates where the company had multiple domains and Company Names, which would be very difficult to fully identify without knowing their particular case.

At the end of the day, your team must decide how much bad data is costing you against the cost of setting up an automated process to clean the database. For smaller databases, some simple rules will be enough with your email address deduping. For databases over 1MM records, I personally recommend an automated solution. The earlier you can do this, the less frustration you will have in the future.

Image Credit: barbourians

Filed Under: Marketing Technology

How to Run Events with Marketo

January 31, 2018 By Josh Hill

event-workflow

Planning and organizing events is a major undertaking and typically a large part of your marketing spend. By leveraging marketing operations and running Marketo event programs only helps ensure success and data on ROI. If you are planning a virtual or recurring event, this post can help, too. But you might also want to read, How to Setup Recurring Webinars in Marketo. Here You should also check out Etumos’ How to Build Your Next Marketo Event Template. It does a great job of deconstructing each aspect of an Event program and ensures the program is scalable.

To me, an Event serves two major purposes:

  1. Bring like-minded people together to network.
  2. Bring your company’s story and people to life.

The old saying goes that “people buy from people they like and know.” What better way to establish “liking” by running an in-person event, shaking hands, and handing out some food or small gifts? What better opportunity do you have for salespeople to have a fairly “captive” audience of several companies at once, rather than one by one?

The caveat is that events like this are relatively expensive compared to other Channels and Offers you have in your arsenal. Thus, ROI is often critical to continuing the program, yet often hard to ascertain. As a marketer, you have an excellent tool with Marketo to improve ROI tracking on events (This was one of my early drivers to buy Marketo for event tracking!). As a marketer, you also have a responsibility to spend that money on prospects that will have the greatest impact on Sales. Let’s be real: students and junior staff are often not targets for these events.

Using Marketo, we can manage a great deal of this responsibility in an automated fashion while collecting the right data to prove our event works (or doesn’t). Before we get too far into the details, let’s define our event types.

Roadshow Events

I define these as Company Owned events that are an Offer to see our staff and like-minded industry people in a private setting. Often these are at a restaurant, hotel, or private venue with a company expert, salesperson, and sometimes an industry expert. Industry experts or other panel members can be paid an appearance fee. I often find non-commercial organizations are happy to either host or provide their experts at no cost. Remember, everyone likes publicity especially if you do the work for them.

The format can range from

  • Company Expert speech.
  • Third party expert interview of Company Expert.
  • Small Panel with local industry group or a Consultant.
  • Customer Interview of some type.

I find many firms get into trouble by making the Roadshow too much about them, or too much Sales and not enough insight. The buyers who are willing to trade 2-3 hours are usually in a later stage, higher level staff. You may not get the SVP or C-level, but you will get their direct subordinates.

If you really want the top executives, try inviting that person to speak at the event!

Tradeshows

These are third-party owned platforms that are a Channel and sometimes also an Offer. The company pays for space and a speaking slot and we get a wider reach, but less 1-1 time. Many firms will work to generate secondary Lunches (Roadshows) around the Tradeshow or invite key people to VIP Meetings.

It’s important to distinguish between Roadshows, Tradeshows, and any ancillary minor events for tracking purposes, creating “Event in a Box” and creating Program Templates in Marketo. Each event type may be run differently and paying for a Booth vs. paying for a hotel meeting room are different kinds of activities to track separately.

Checklist of Marketo Items to Run an Event

Marketo Docs site contains a fairly good overview of some of the Program components you may use with Marketo. That’s only a start because each event you run will be different than the ones I run. To get a sense of the principles and Statuses involved, here is how I think of these Programs.

Here is the basic workflow for any event requiring Registration.

event-workflow

Building this out in Marketo can be done in a Program Template to clone for each event. Marketo has pre-built Program Templates you can Import. Be careful because those are useful for understanding, but not always right for your systems.

Roadshow Events Program Channel Design

Roadshows will follow the above workflow. Roadshow Program Channels can cover a variety of event types like:

  • Dinners
  • Lunch and Learns
  • Breakfasts
  • Tradeshow Special Registration Events

You will need some components and Program Statuses. I suggest learning how to manage Program Channels and Statuses first.

Required components

roadshow-program-tree

  • Form
  • Page
  • Invitation
  • Confirmation
  • Reminder
  • Statuses and Confirmation Flow
  • Post Event Assets and Flows

This is a typical setup, however, each event team has slightly different needs. You may want to tokenize all the flows and emails and pages, or you may not. There are a lot of advanced considerations to make this a true “event in a box” template. I suggest Etumos’ Edward Unthank’s tokenization posts for help.

If you have worked with basic autoresponder campaigns for whitepapers, the principles here are exactly the same, however, the information you convey will be different. But the Program Statuses become MUCH more important to a successful event since you need to monitor Registrations and Attendees very closely.

 

 

 

 

Standard Program Statuses and Campaign Setup

Each campaign flow in the Template will have a setup similar to the outline here. Sometimes it is a good idea to preschedule Reminders and Thank Yous, but be careful! I’ve seen a lot of missends when using auto-reminders.

event-registration-channel-campaigns

Basic Smart Campaign Triggers for Registration

The single critical step is to get the Registration campaign flow working. In this example, we trigger off the Form+Page combination while excluding Competitors from receiving a Confirmation. It is very important to Change Program Status to Registered as well as send a follow-up email with an ICS Calendar button.

If you prefer to Waitlist people and cherry pick attendees, you can do so. Just make sure your copy and thank you pages are clear that the person should expect a final confirmation. And use the Status of “Waitlisted”. You will have to manually adjust each Waitlisted person to “Registered-Confirmed”.

Registration-Confirmation Flow

Tradeshow Program Templates

Tradeshows aren’t much different in most cases. However, the use of Program Statuses will be different to ensure clearer attribution. Remember that Tradeshow attendees will be Scanned at Booth, Get a Demo, or Ask for Follow Up. You may have separate Dinners and VIP meetings to be managed in a separate Program. And you may also get pre and post-showlists.

Here is just one example of how to handle Tradeshow attribution.

tradeshow-statusesOther Neat Tips and Tricks for Running Amazing Events

Refer a Friend and Get a Prize – most referrals wins.

I’m not the biggest fan of this tip, yet it’s pretty cool idea and could be repurposed in various ways. To increase the number of Registrants, offer early Registrants an Offer Code/URL that they can share with their colleagues. If the Colleagues registers, the Original Referrer gets credit for the Registration. If the Registrant and the Colleagues all Attend the Event, the person with the highest number of Referred Attendees wins a prize.

The execution involves a bit of javascript and two fields: Registrant Code and Referral Code.

On the Thank You Page, the unique URL is generated for the Registrant, who can then copy/paste it. If you are very slick, you could send the Confirmation email with that URL as well (be sure to turn off Marketo Tracking though!).

The challenge is in downloading and matching up the Referrer and those who signed up later with the Code. A bit of vlookup can help with that.

My personal experience with this is mixed. I’m not a big fan of bribing people to show up; I’d rather rely on the content to be the draw.

Charge a Fee to Increase Attendance Rates

This is my Number 1 tip that I know works: charge a small fee to register for the event. This works very well with higher class events with premium speakers that can offer a future insight into an industry. The fee can be about $35-75. Any more than that and you are essentially running a tradeshow. (Could be a great way to test early tradeshow concepts!).

In Marketo, you will need to choose a couple of paths to operationalize this.

Option 1: pass Lead to EventBrite and waitlist

In this option, we allow the person to Register and change their status to Waitlisted – Not Paid. Then the Form Redirect goes to an EventBrite page (or similar service). The lead then pays using a credit card.

Each day you will download the paid list from EventBrite and then manually go to the Program > Members and change Status to Registered – Paid for each person you accept.

One other reason to collect payment is that you will self-fund expansion of your event programs. Positive ROI keeps these alive.

Option 2: integrate with Payment Service or Event Tool.

In this option, you integrate with a payment tool or event service to ensure a seamless experience for the lead and automatically move them from Waitlisted – Not Paid to Registered – Paid.

For either option, you should have several Statuses such as:

Program Status Definition
Invited Sent an invitation
Waitlisted – Not Paid Pending payment
Waitlisted – Error Issue with payment or other
Registered – Paid Paid and confirmed
Registered – Guest Unpaid guest
Attended Showed up
No Show Did not show

Waitlisting

As you saw above, you can use Program Statuses to manage the RSVP process. At many events, we want to block Competitors or certain people from showing up. Perhaps some events are Customer Only and we need to ensure a prospect isn’t slipped in. All you need to do is adjust your Registration trigger to Change Status to Waitlisted.

You can still provide a Thank you Page and Confirmation email where you explain their RSVP is pending review and they will receive a confirmation with the date, time, and location information. Be sure to set up a daily Scheduled Smart List to the Event Manager to review the requestors.

At Show Automatic Emails or SMS

While mostly used at large Tradeshows, you can also use triggered emails and SMS to welcome guests to the event once they Attend. There are a few ways to manage this (Marketo Login required).

Essentially, you decide on a set of messages to send each day or in a 2-3 hour span to drive traffic or engagement at a large event.

Keep in mind that the setup time involved is high. Be sure you want this experience and have enough events or Leads opted in to make this worthwhile.

Progressive Forms

I never see this enough – use Progressive Profiling on event forms. Most of the time you are inviting people from the existing database. Use this opportunity to ask one more question to improve targeting and Registration rates.

Sales Agent Credit or Source Credit

Firms will sset upcompetitions between Salespeople for most Registrations. You can also do this with a nice temp field and a URL parameter that uses a hidden field.

go.company.com/page.html?sales-agent=joe283

temp field: salescredit

Add this as a hidden field to your Registration Form.

This works well for tracking third party partners who may want to know how well they did, or how much you need to pay them per lead.

Capping Registrations

A longstanding request of marketers is to cap registrations and automatically stop accepting new registrants. Marketo itself can’t do this natively, however, there are some tricks people have shared over the years:

  • Webhook
  • Zapier+Webhook
  • Waitlisting (simplest, but you need to pay attention)
  • Third Party Event Platform

Additional Resources:

  • How to Build Your Next Marketo Event Template
  • Understanding Tags
  • iPad Adapter
  • Event tools on Launchpoint
  • Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Running Events

Get Planning!

Need help getting your next event off the ground in Marketo? Etumos can help.

Filed Under: Marketo User Guide

How to Diagnose SFDC-Marketo Sync Errors

January 24, 2018 By Josh Hill

Use Notifications View in CRM Errors

From time to time, Marketo and SFDC do not always agree on the sync of particular records. For many systems, this is a minor irritation that is resolved automatically. However, you will see Notifications in the upper right corner and you may be curious about these errors. And for high volume instances or complex SFDC setups, these errors can build up over time, creating data issues.

We have compiled a list of error codes you may see along with suggested courses of action. Each SFDC-Marketo instance is a bit different, so not every suggestion will work and you will need to be an SFDC Admin or discuss some of these with your SFDC Admin.

These are all SFDC errors that block Marketo from fully syncing the data. In many cases, Marketo will try later and the data will sync. But you should investigate the Notifications and list of leads so you can fix the problems to reduce data issues.

Using Notifications in Marketo

Most users should be able to see the Notifications Log in the upper right corner. Here’s how to use it:

Use Notifications View in CRM Errors

  1. Click on the button.
  2. Sort by CRM Sync
  3. Review past 7 days or so of errors. Errors before that are likely either to be repeated recently or they resolved themselves.
  4. Note issue in a log.
  5. Click on smart list “more.”
  6. Look at a few of the lead’s Activity Logs.
  7. Add a special SFDC View to your smart list: [FIELDS]

Error: Locked Row

This indicates someone else is editing this record. Marketo will resolve normally. Essentially, SFDC blocks all other users from editing a record when someone clicks “Edit” on the record. Since Marketo syncs every 5 minutes, this error resolves by itself.

However, there could be times when this repeats for the same records. If so, you will want to investigate further because the data fields will gradually be out of sync.

Error: Field Validation

In SFDC, you can set a field to have Validation Rules. This means that SFDC will only accept certain values or formats for that field. When Marketo attempts to send data values that do not conform to SFDC’s expectations, SFDC will throw an error and tell Marketo to stop. For any of these SFDC Sync Errors, you can view more information by going to the Lead’s Activity Log:

View Activity Log on Lead to Understand CRM Error

You can also see some of this data in a smart campaign by going to Smart Campaign > Results and using similar filters.

In our experience, Marketo does push the sync of all other fields, just not the field in question. It’s important to investigate the source of the bad value on Marketo’s end to fix it. Possible sources include:

  • Form data
  • Bad list imports
  • Data management flow that’s out of date

Regardless of the Source of the error, you want to pinpoint it, stop it, and correct it. This may mean manually editing a few records.

Another consideration is whether this Validation Rule is still important. You could just turn it off.

Error: Apex CPU Limit

Something caused SFDC to use up Apex cycles (too many Apex triggers) and it can’t process the incoming data. This can happen for many reasons, but often because you sent SFDC too many records and SFDC has too many triggers to process.

You will tend to see this when your SFDC Org is older or very complex.

Notice: Change in SFDC Picklist Values

If you’ve been using Marketo for a while, you probably received an email (as an Admin) warning you that an SFDC field has a new Picklist and you should be careful to fix any workflows or Marketo Forms to be in compliance.

What the notice doesn’t explain is that, barring Validation Rules, Marketo can accept ANY value into that field and sync it to SFDC. While you won’t see that new value as a picklist option within SFDC, it will appear as the Lead’s current value.

Marketo’s picklist options when you are in a Smart List or flow will only show the values both systems have in common. Thus, it’s a good idea to maintain a separate list of accepted values and stay in touch with the CRM/SOPS team on data changes.

The ideal steps to fix this are to:

  • Know the changes.
  • Map the Old Values to a New Value in a sheet.
  • Update the Marketo Forms to only display New Values.
  • Run a data correction flow or upload to overwrite (re-map) the Old Values to New Values.

It is important to coordinate this kind of change because it is easy for such values to become out of sync across systems and cause segmentation problems or Lead Routing errors.

These are the most common Sync errors I see on a daily basis, but there are more and if you are the Marketo Admin, you should establish a regular process to log these errors and get them fixed.

Dealing with bigger issues than Sync Errors?

Get a complimentary Marketing Health Audit.

Filed Under: Marketo User Guide

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