One thing I noticed on the Marketo Community is how hard it is to explain how to write out a Smart List using filters just using alphanumerics. Images explain what is going on so much better because Marketo is such a visual tool. Yet, there is no agreed notation method for writing out a Flow Step or Smart List Filter using just text.

Here’s what I suggest we do.

Filters or Triggers are written in Title Case: (if possible use Courier or Preformatted to show this just like a snippet of code).

Fills Out Form

Filled Out Form

Data Value Changes

Operators are shown in ALL CAPS such as IN, OR, AND, IS NOT EMPTY.

Filter Values are shown in double quotes “” to make it clear these are variables to adjust.

Filled Out Form IS NOT "Unsubscribe"

Visits Web Page CONTAINS "Careers; Career; Job" AT LEAST "2" times
Member of Smart List IN "Personal Email Domains"

Note the use of the semi-colon to denote the use of multiple values for a filter instead of OR since this is how Marketo shows it on the workspace.

A Trigger like Data Value Changes requires an Attribute (field) before further filtering. This would be denoted by a colon after the Trigger Name and “with” to start the additional Constraints. You could also use this for similar Flow Steps.

Data Value Changes: Email Invalid with New Value IS "True"

Choices in Flow Steps can be denoted in a similar fashion, adding “then” between the condition and the change you want to make.

Change Data Value:

Choice 1: If Email Invalid IS "True" then New Value IS "False"

Choice 2: If Member of Smart List IN "Personal Email Domain" then New Value IS "False"

Default Choice: Do Nothing

Showing Smart List Rule Logic such as ALL, ANY, or Advanced can be accomplished by using those operators before the Smart List or showing the order like Marketo does, using “1, 2, 3…” before each filter, then showing the logic as

(1 or 2) and (3 or 4)

Finally, an entire Smart Campaign should be written as:

Campaign: Email Revalidate

If Data Value Changes: Email Invalid with New Value IS "True"

Then Change Data Value: Email Invalid to New Value IS "False"

Schedule: Qualification Rule=Every Time and Recurrence: Daily at 10:00 AM

I like this method because it is clear how to go back to Marketo to select the matching Trigger, Filter, Constraints, Operators, and Values. I use a similar format in the Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo with the use of font changes. The chief advantage of the method in this post is you can use it on the Marketo Community, an Email, or anywhere else without the need for fancy text editors.

 

Happy New Year to my Marketo friends!

Since I released my Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Lead Scoring, I have received great comments from the community. Thank you. But something’s been eating at me about Lead Scoring. In the past month, I have worked with a few of you on lead scoring issues. Most of the work stems from scoring models which just don’t seem to work. Initially it seemed that the audience or Sales had changed. Now I think it is the model was wrong from the beginning and it only became clear as it broke down. In fact, I believe Lead Scoring is entirely misleading to salespeople and to marketers.

Lead Scoring Does Not Prioritize Leads Well

Lead Scoring is touted as a way to help Sales prioritize leads, but is often used by Marketing to pre-qualify leads with the assumption that higher scores equals higher priority. I do not think that is logical because the sales process is more complex than that. Each salesperson has his own prioritization system based on his approach to entering an Account. Sure, it’s roughly the same: find champions, supporters, and decision makers. Sometimes it’s better to build up support before speaking to the decision maker; sometimes it’s the decision maker’s call from the start. Marketing can’t know this in advance. As Sirius Decisions pointed out, most people score C-suite at +20 (or higher), but how often does your salesperson work directly with CXOs? Are you sure the busiest person is a priority on the first call?

Marketing’s role is to find leads who are in the target audience and who have indicated some level of interest in the service. In the past few years, vendors and consultants have told marketers that we need to figure out the buying stage and offer content at the right times to leads who poke around our site looking for possible solutions to their problems. That seems like a good set of activities to keep us employed. As a marketer you then track those interactions to determine when a salesperson should call. Call too early and you risk irritating the lead and the sales person who will forget about the lead until it is too late; call too late, and the opportunity is missed.

What a salesperson wants is a pre-packaged deal ready to sign by the end of the day without leaving their home office. Yeah, not happening these days.

What can happen is placing the right leads in front of the salesperson at the right time. The right lead may be a Supporter, Champion, or Decision Maker. But you should let the salesperson decide which one they need to get in touch with and when. Thus, assigning points to titles like “CEO” or “Vice President of Research” is not going to tell the salesperson if that lead is “sales ready” or even the right person to call today. You should show Sales leads who are possible Supporters, Champions, or Decision Makers. Those are people in your Target Audience and who have certain behaviors. That is your group of MQLs. The priority to call is up to the sales person.

Lead Scoring is Unnecessary for Marketing Qualification

Imagine a scoring system where the threshold is 30 points. A Form Fill Out is +10, a Visited Page is +1 and +5 for Multiple Web Page Visits, and a Clicks Link in Email is +2. So it’s pretty easy to hit 30 points after just 1 email CTA since it often sparks a series of actions.

+10 for Form

+2 for Click

+1 +1 for Visits 2 pages

+5 for Multiple pages (a lead will invariably hit up other pages)

Usually two of these are enough to reach a threshold. This problem began to expose itself with Lead Nurturing where we found out it did take 1 or 2 emails to trigger the threshold and then reassign a lead to a sales person.

To me, advancing a lead after two Fill Outs seems too soon unless it is a specific Form, such as Call Me Now. Do we know from the point value or from 2 forms that this person is ready for a sales call? I doubt it. The difficulty with Scoring is it masks the actions taken by a Lead with numbers, abstracting it away from the real intent behind those behaviors. The same is true for the demographic score: if you already know the target audience and have the Smart Lists, why waste time scoring? They are in the audience or they are not! You probably set your MQL flow to say something like

If Lead Score > 30 AND Member of Smart List IN "Target Audience"

Then Sync to SFDC with "Auto-Assignment Rules"

So you are already filtering by Demographics, therefore, don’t duplicate your efforts by adding Lead Scores here.

Replace Behavior Scoring with Behavior Qualification

You can also forget behavioral scoring. It’s pointless. Why abstract the actions with numbers? Use Behavior Qualification instead. This method helps you select the behaviors most likely to get the sales person to call the Lead. If you can, go one step further to select behaviors most associated with a Closed/Won Opportunity.

Let’s examine a possible scenario: If it takes roughly 2 Form Fill Outs for a lead to be worthy of a sales person, then just set a campaign to say:

Fills Out Form IS NOT "Unsubscribe" AT LEAST 2 Times AND Member of List IN "Target Audience"

This Smart List achieves the same thing as scoring each Form Fill Out at +15 and 5 Visits Web Page at +1 or any rough combination of other scores. The flow is also clear and honest about what it does.

Your trigger list could go deeper to specific page and form combinations, specific web visits, and email clicks. You are already doing this with scoring, with a secondary layer of unneeded logic which will tend to mask the behaviors you want to see from the Lead.

What about negative behaviors?

If you look carefully at many firms’ negative behavior list, the only truly negative “behavior” is to be a Competitor or a Student. Those people get excluded immediately through demographics. The next behavior is to Unsubscribe, yet I rarely see a system which strongly deprecates this behavior. And Unsubscribing may not even be all that bad as long as the lead takes other actions you want. Instead, create a Smart List to segment out Unsubscribers and Career Page Visitors from your MQL if you prefer. You still don’t need points here.

There is a better way to handle Marketing Qualification: Behavior Qualification

The better way is to take what you learned from your Sales Survey to establish a series of Smart Lists or a set of triggers around the buying process. This new method is called Behavior Qualification. Once you’ve set clear MQL thresholds based on the Target Audience Smart List and behaviors, you might go even further into the buying process stages, refining that list of behaviors to better time that call from Sales.

If you’ve gone through a Lead Scoring Survey process as I wrote about in the Lead Scoring Chapter of the Guide, then you are ready to implement Behavior and Demographic Qualification for your MQL process.

You can still implement Lead Scoring to drive Marketo Sales Insight’s Stars and Flams, but my experience has been Sales teams often ignore these visual cues.

Is anyone using a system like this, without scores? Tell me what you think in the comments below.

Images: Josh Hill and Marketo

Great, you purchased a Marketo License! Now you are on your way toward becoming a Rockstar.

Rockstars, believe it or not, are organized. They leave nothing to chance and they practice disciplined rocking, er, Marketing. Setting up Marketo to function well should be one of your first actions before using the system for your big marketing push.

A few minutes of thought and careful setup will save you hours and days later.

Key Tip: Choose a Consistent Naming Formula

One of the first things Marketo suggests to new users is to devise a naming scheme for your various programs and assets. I agree. I have seen several options over the years and recommend a few systems depending on your need or area of Marketo. Learn more about naming and organizing Marketo with my full guide.

Rule 1: Keep the name clear and memorable so if you ever leave the firm, others can start where you left off.

Rule 2: Number steps in a program so it is easy to see how leads should progress.

Naming is also important because it can help you find assets while you set up filters or triggers. In particular, the creation of Smart List reports and Reports becomes much easier when you can use a filter like

Visited Web Page Web Page CONTAINS “webinar”

instead of finding every single webinar you want to include. While Marketo does allow searching of names of assets, the functionality is limited because it works best on the first few letters or numbers (which is why dates are so important). You can use dates like

YYYY MM DD My Big Event Program

YYYYMMDD My Campaign Name

Warning! Avoid Use of Underscores

I’ve found underscores unnecessary. Underscores also confuse the Marketo search function such that My_Program_Name cannot be found unless you actually type in “My_” at a minimum, instead of “My.”

More Best Practices

• The Marketo Expert’s Guide to Advance Program Templates
• Responsive Marketo Landing Page Template

I’d like to help all the new Marketo customers with a critical step during the implementation phase: DKIM, SPF, and CNAME setup. It’s simple to do – if you know what it is you need to do.

Contact your IT, Web Team, or Network Admin to do these steps!

Email Reputation and Authentication: Why you need DKIM and SPF

As explained in the Email Reputation Chapter, DKIM and SPF are two DNS authentication methods used by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and hosts of other email providers as a first check for spam or spoofed email senders. Emails which fail SPF or DKIM checks are more likely to end up in the Spam box.

Why?

All DKIM and SPF records do is tell the internet (and the target email server) that you said it is ok for Marketo to send email on your behalf. It’s like a proxy on your Outlook Calendar. If this permission is missing from an email Marketo sends on your behalf, other servers will be skeptical it’s really from you.

CNAME and SubDomains Also Help Trust

When you first discussed marketing automation, you probably found out you could host your own landing pages on the new system. Your demo probably included a landing page demo where you saw “http://go.mydemo.com/page.html” and said “Wow, let’s have our own URL like that!”

And you can. In the instructions below, I go through how to select a sub-domain for your business as well as how to choose a Tracking Sub-Domain so your email links don’t look sketchy.

Detailed Instructions on Setup of DKIM, SPF, and CNAME for Marketers

What can you do right now? Take a look at these instructions to do it yourself or pass these to the IT guys to take care of it for you. It’s fast, easy, and builds trust with your audience.

Sub-Domain and Email DNS Setup in Marketo

Stay in touch and keep up with the Marketo Guide! Sign up for email updates.

No matter how awesome we think we are, we all make mistakes. Something gets overlooked during a rush or maybe you think you’ve checked the entire email when you’ve just scanned it. Perhaps you sent 100,000 emails out with the {{lead.Lead Owner}} slug instead of {{lead.Full Name}} slug.

Been there.

After that terrible sinking feeling, you probably said, “I should use a checklist,” but never did much about it. Here’s your chance for redemption since I’ve done most of the work for you.

I created a few handy checklists to help people new to Marketo be more process oriented when running campaigns, setting up webinars, or importing a list. In fact, the Import Checklist has saved me and my colleagues from terrible data disasters. Here are my favorite checklists as part of the Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo project.

• Marketing Automation Setup Checklist
• Campaigns Checklist
• Email Creation Checklist
• Landing Page Checklist
• Webinar Checklist
• Live Event Checklist
• Whitepaper Download Checklist
• Importing a List Checklist

See them all in Appendix III: Checklists .

If you want more updates on using Marketo, sign up for the Newsletter now.

Image Credit: Flickr xtremeexhibits