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With the recent release of Marketo’s “Abort” button for email campaigns, we are finally taking a step to making Marketing Automation Platforms more robust against human error. But if you reached a point where you need to press abort, then the platform has already failed you.

Marketing Automation is on a Data Tight Rope

In my opinion, many firms with MAPs are walking on a tightrope because there are so few safeguards against data errors in many platforms.

In the past few months, I have committed, seen, and corrected massive data errors in my MAP. All were caused by human error in some way. As I worked to fix these, I reflected on just how delicate these systems are. We rely on our MAP to process huge amounts of data each day. We rely on these systems to make the correct decisions based on a rigid view of previously human processes.

I saw this fragility in my first implementation. The process we established to implement Marketo with Salesforce was very solid, from the human side. We did everything in a sandbox and I heavily researched just how things should work. We checked in with various teams before acting on data. And everything went smoothly.

But as I built out the lead management flows and important autoresponders, I began to think of the tool as a delicately balanced system, akin to erector set with very few bolts. It worked really well, but just one thing off could break the entire flow, collapsing my structure.

Years later, I see lead management flows and data management flows in the same way. Why? Because nothing has changed in the robustness of the tools themselves. From what I can tell, this is true for many major vendors. Where are the safeguards against someone accidentally breaking the carefully built erector set?

And I don’t mean an “abort button,” however useful to prevent external firestorms of criticism and embarrassment. I mean, how do I stop someone, myself included, from turning on a workflow, or changing a name, or moving something that causes massive data errors?

Common Solutions that are not enough

• Security by Role: most systems let you restrict untrained or those who don’t need to know from accessing key areas. What I have seen, however, is that core workflows like Lead Management are still vulnerable to people who have access to run email campaigns.
• Training: yes, that could work, to a point. I’m considered well trained and “experienced”, yet without proper documentation and checks, I can still do a lot of damage without intending to do so. Most marketing automation managers came up through marketing, not technology or system administration. Thus, a lot of data governance training is needed, and it’s not getting done.
• Workspaces and Lead Partitions: these do help. The impact on the system can be contained in many cases if a user is restricted to just their area. Depending on the setup, however, many users can still import data that runs amok across the system. They can also hose their own data!
• Don’t let anyone in: not really feasible for most organizations.
• CRM and Database Safeguards: this is often available to large organizations that can afford to add rules and logic to the system to prevent massive data errors. It can help avoid many errors, but not all.
• Design the system to be less prone to human error: this is more for the vendor to do, as the MAP rules are geared toward moving data round, not letting you prevent errors.

Real Safeguards for Marketing Automation Platforms

So what could real safeguards look like without ending up with an Enterprise System or custom tool?

• Lock Programs and Smart Campaigns after they are set to run.
• Lock Smart List configurations. [Vote]
• Change Logs with more detail that permit more filtering.
• Changed Data History expansion. I know this is expensive.
• “Are you sure?” dialogs with count information. (this usually appears on delete).
• Alert Dialog – “Changing this campaign will affect XYZ”. While “Used by” exists in Marketo, you have to look at it first. Same for other asset changes.
• Refined User Role Access: I’d like to see Role Security down to flow step permission and leads affected. [Vote]
• Schedule Tabs that display: Total Qualified – Total Blocked from Email = Total Estimated Send. [Vote]
• Order of Execution. This can be controlled with Campaign is Requested, however, this seems to be only something an advanced user would be able to setup. [Vote: idea 1 and idea 2].
• Individual record view should not permit editing unless you have permission and press “Edit Mode”.
• Hide Core Lead Management functions from other users. This would reduce the chances of “explorers” finding something and touching it. [Vote]
• Smart Campaign View Only Mode – Let people look at a campaign and then press Edit to modify the rules or workflow. [Vote]

You can vote for the ideas in Marketo. If you are using another tool, consider these as ideas for the integrity and security of your dataset.

Human Safeguards

Of course, the vendor cannot prevent all human error. As a marketing leader, you need to establish rules and processes for the team as well. Here are a few of my tips:

• Document everything and train people to read it first.
• Use diagrams to help understand dependencies.
• Four Eyes – two people check campaigns.
• Campaigns over 50,000 leads must be approved going up the chain.
• CRM Admins must be consulted and approve major changes.
• IT team should review and approve changes that would affect major systems such as websites, email, and other databases.

Do you have other ideas to help increase MAP robustness? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credit: martintaylor

This post expands on my post at RingLead.com: Six Marketing Automation Principles to Keep Your Data Clean.

Many marketers who are new to marketing automation suddenly discover their success on the job is directly affected by databases that seem out of their control. CRMs have data that is imported by salespeople, interns, hand typed, etc. That one hot shot sales director you poached from your competitor? He brought his “personal” list over and uploaded 5,000 records with no Lead Source, few Emails, no unsubscribe, no lead assignments, and uploaded it all without permission.

Sound familiar?

Almost always this data is not imported correctly or with consistency. It is just there!

But you can take control. If you want your job to be successful with marketing automation, you must take control – and take responsibility – for the data from Sales. (and sometimes your CRM managers). You need not worry, you can do this and do it well with the principles of data cleanliness.

Principle One: Design the System to Avoid Human Error

Marketers I have worked with have a familiar refrain: “Sales, Leads, and Other People are always importing bad data into the CRM.” When I look at their CRM and Forms, the most common root cause of these errors is the design of the system. Simply design your workflows and access levels to encourage certain behaviors while blocking bad behaviors. This is the first principle because the others rely on system design.

How do you design the system to make behavior work for you? Let’s try a few common CRM tools at your finger tips.

Picklists

Picklists ensure that your field values are completely static and controlled by you. The user or lead gets a choice, but the spellings are always precise. Common fields to use these on are: Country, State, Lead Source, and Lead Status. For countries and States, I use the ISO Country List.

Read Only Fields

Some fields are meant for information to Sales or to Marketing. Thus, only a few people should ever be able to access the field. For example:

• Comments History
• Interesting Moments
• SFDC Campaign Member
• SFDC Campaign
• Lead Source
• Subscription management fields

Import access must be limited to certain people

Even within Marketo, you may want to restrict junior or inexperienced staff from importing lists. The most well intentioned user can create havoc by not following procedures. With a marketing automation platform (MAP), always import into the MAP, never into the CRM. Of course there could be exceptions, but only an administrator would really know when those should occur.

Role vs. Title

Another design principle is to use picklist fields and free text fields at different times. For example, Role is a picklist that you might put on a form early in the buying process. Later, or in a progressive form, the Title field would appear. The reason I like this two-part data collector is that Role is easy to just choose. Titles vary widely and are for most people’s vanity. Lead scoring and other routing based on free text fields has to take into account a lot of options. Why not avoid issues early on?

Principle Two: One Field for One Purpose

The field that comes to mind is Description (in SFDC) or “Notes”. This field was intended to be for either the Lead to fill out some detail or to provide a scratch space for Sales. Instead, it is often used to put in call notes and the history of the Lead.

Do NOT permit this to happen. Sales absolutely must use Tasks or Meetings to log calls, even voicemails or emails. These records are stamped with time and date and have appropriate fields to help track Sales’ interaction with the Lead. Tasks are also a great way to tell Sales what Marketing is up to.

Thus, a field like “Description” is best used as a temporary field for handling data that will be passed to a Task or a “Comments History Field” [see instructions].

Principle Three: Use Automation to Correct Data Values

The use of automation rules to correct common misspellings or missing data goes back to the 1960s and early principles of data quality when direct mail errors could result in thousands of dollars wasted. Today, data quality mistakes ruin reputations far faster than a misdirected mail piece. Email reputation, choice of language, and customer experience matter and they matter more because mistakes can go publicly viral in minutes. Save your firm’s reputation with automated data cleansing.

These data management flows are one of the first things I setup in Marketo. Most firms setup these flows to start.

• Country Corrector (although you should have followed Principle 1 to not need this)
• State Corrector or Mapper – often helpful if you have Country and Inferred State.
• Count of Employees to Employee Range – again, Principle 1 and 2 say you shouldn’t need to do this, because you chose one option, but it’s possible you ignored me 🙂
• Bad Lead Source to Good Lead Source
• Email Invalid to Email is Good if the Email changed.

For example, this flow adjusts Employee Range based on Employee Number.

Principle Four: Prevent Duplicates at the Source

Your system can include tools from the Appexchange such as Dupeblocker or RingLead to stop a user from entering a duplicate at that very moment. If you get the settings right, this should discourage salespeople from just entering data without thinking.

Then you should run a deduping process over your entire CRM before you connect your marketing automation platform (MAP). You will thank me later. Most marketing automation firms offer a cleansing service (including Marketo), but you can ask other firms for help. If you have an SFDC Admin, they will know the tools and services to help you dedupe effectively. Usually this involves DemandTools, if your company can afford it.

Principle Five: Establish a Regular Cleaning Process

This cleaning process includes a monthly or quarterly review of the MAP+CRM. You will want to bring your team into a room, with laptops, and with pizza. Spend an entire Friday afternoon doing this and life will be better the rest of the time. Assign one person to each area at the start, and then go from there.

• Duplicate count review: find out who is doing this and clean it up.
• Asset Cleanup: turn off or archive old emails, landing pages, workflows, programs. Marketo does a great job of allowing archiving to retain data. Also, team members should delete tests and other items they no longer need.
• Workflow Review: are the right ones working properly?
• Empty Value Counts: review records that are still missing key data: Country, Employees, Annual Revenue, Industry, etc… whatever is crucial to determining customer fit, scoring, and MQL status.

Principle Six: Automate Data Appending

You will always have leads without key demographic data points. These leads could be interested, but if you do not know they are in your target audience, you will never pass them to Sales. Nor should you!

Instead, find an appropriate data appending service. There are two types:

• Form Based Autofill with ReachForce, for example. These tools ask the Lead to confirm if they are at a specific firm. The Lead confirms and the system autofills geographic and firmographic data automatically in the background.
• Backend Autofill: these services are similar to Hoover’s, DiscoverOrg, RingLead, and ZoomInfo. Their integration or service backfills missing firmographic data based on your rules. This happens in the background, but the Lead never sees this.

Often, firms use both front end and back end appending tools to cover as much of the data gap as possible. Whichever one you prefer will help you improve segmentation capabilities and reduce the number of unaddressable Leads.

Remember these principles as you clean your database:

1. Design the System to Avoid Human Error
2. One field is for One Purpose
3. Automate Data Correction
4. Prevent Duplicates at the Source
5. Establish a Regular Cleaning Process
6. Automate Data Appending

Here are a few resources you can use for preparing your database to be clean in and out:

• Salesforce Appexchange
• Marketo Easy Merge (ask your rep)

(Disclosure: I sometimes write for RingLead). [Updated: Feb 15, 2018 – removed back url]

Image Credits: Whatleydude, Barbourians