Marketing automation tools like Marketo can help you monitor your deliverability and list health over time. Of course, you may want to download all that data into a helpful Excel sheet.

Here is a sample report you can use to get started.

There’s much more email reputation management detail in the upcoming Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo, so stay tuned.

In preparing my first internal guide for Marketo, I started a set of checklists for our team to be sure we did not miss a step in running emails, newsletters, webinars, etc…

After working with other firms, I decided to update these checklists to be more generic while allowing you to adjust them for your business. Feel free to download them and use them at your firm.

Marketo Marketing Checklists [docx will download]

Whether you are preparing for a new marketing automation solution or switching to a new vendor, you will need to do diligent research on the available options. To do this, I have created two documents to help you in your quest for sales funnel bliss.

Preparing a Marketing Automation RFP

You will likely need to go through a request for proposal process to make sure you have fully evaluated each vendor’s capabilities. These helpful documents should make the RFP process move faster, at least on your end. Using these documents, several vendors quickly submitted completed RFPs to me which had far more detail than they offer on their websites.

• RFP Cover Letter Example [doc]
• RFP Feature Matrix [xls] and new 2014 [xlsx]

Feel free to edit the letter and matrix to meet your own business needs. It is best to find out at the start of the process what a vendor is able to do now, and what their roadmap looks like over the next year. You may find it better to grow your ability to use the system along with their feature list, rather than have to install features you are not ready to use. For firms switching to a new vendor, it is important to understand the reasons for the switch (technical, capabilities, or cost) and how much the new vendor will help you make the transition.

Managing the sales process

During your evaluation process, be sure to ask as many questions as you can come up with to ensure you understand what you are buying. Many salespeople are happy to help, while a few will find too many questions a sign of a “tire-kicker.” My bias is toward salespeople who will explain everything or find me a technical sales consultant to answer those questions. Unresponsive or irritated salespeople are not a welcome part of my team, internally or externally. A vendor is there to help you solve your lead funnel problems, not for you to buy their product on their schedule.

As you narrow down the vendors, ask two or three of the best to come in for a full sales presentation with your marketing, sales, and technical teams. For larger firms, you may want to have these as separate meetings so each team can ask the questions they want. Successful meetings mean you have coached your teams as well as the vendor team on what to expect. I have found pre-coaching your own team will let you cover more ground during a vendor call while exposing unspoken concerns your colleagues have.

Negotiation Tips

My friends in automation firms will hate me, but you can use their sales pressure to ask for additional concessions, such as free months, an email IP address, more customized training, or free trials of add-ons.

A few vendors offer free trial months, however, those usually involve the entire integration process to work well, effectively ensuring you will buy their solution. Be careful if you want to test their system with your own data. Ask if you can upload your own data on a standalone instance instead of integrating the system up front. Run a few campaigns or test lead scoring systems. Use the month to better understand how automation works with their tools so you are better prepared for potential pitfalls or workarounds. No vendor is perfect, so make sure your deal-breakers involve fundamental issues of functionality or price.

Good luck with your funnel construction!

PS: here are a few additional resources for those considering automation solutions

• Sirius Decisions (research)
• DemandGen Resources

After working with a few companies now, I have seen various Salesforce and Marketo combinations. Each one has its unique characteristics, workflows, and record types. In the end, few things are truly unique, except in how each is managed.

I am continually surprised at how few firms are taking advantage of SFDC Campaign Hierarchies. Even if you have Revenue Cycle Analytics or are using Marketo Programs full capabilities, someone in your firm is using Salesforce as the database of record.

So why use Salesforce Campaigns and the hierarchy feature?

Easy. Using campaign hierarchy lets you do several key things faster if your SFDC Administrator has done her job:

1. Group campaigns by channel, year, or whatever makes sense for your firm.
2. Roll up campaign data to quickly see totals, averages, and metrics directly in Salesforce. So if you click on Webinars 2012, Salesforce instantly tells you the total count on Leads, Contacts, Conversions, Opportunities, Costs, and Won dollars.
3. Grouping campaigns makes it easy to see what you have already done this year and in other years.
4. Grouping campaigns can make your dashboard or report creation easier.
5. You can clone Campaigns more easily for each type of campaign, even when you use Marketo Programs. Why? You’ll know where they all are.

Here’s my Quick Guide to Using SFDC Campaigns. [pdf]

Enjoy!

Many of us in the B2B demand generation space are targeting the same companies: Global 2000, Fortune 1000, and Fortune 500/100/50.

In other words, large companies with complex problems, multiple functional areas, and global operations ripe for us to solve problems for.

In Marketo, though, you need to filter these firms out to do three things:

• Score leads who match from these firms.
• Route these high value leads over to sales
• Segment these leads for nurturing, dynamic content, or whatever.

And wow is it painful to copy and paste that list in from Hoover’s or other databases. So here you are, the lists, in an easy to copy format. Many thanks to Jason Long for the Fortune 500 list and for reminding me to find my files :).

• Fortune 500. [xls]
• Fortune 1000 Company List [xlsx]
• Global 2000 Company List – with name variations for “Contains” and “Is” lists. [xlsx]