Do you want the ability to report on your sales funnel process? Do you want to show the management and board not only the number of leads at each State, but also the conversion percentages with 100% accuracy?

You can with marketing automation! The vision of each marketing automation vendor is to show you the revenue performance of your sales funnel. Sure, as every day marketers we can automate away much of the drudgery of routing leads, choosing content, and deduping. Yet, the vision we work toward is to impact revenue. And to know if we’re impacting revenue, we must have the ability to report on the complete revenue cycle.

Sales funnel reporting is the vision your Marketo salesperson gave you during the sales process. The tricky thing is building a system that gets you to that vision. In this post I help you understand the “button” to turn on amazing sales funnel reporting.

While this post is heavily focused on how to run a lead lifecycle in Marketo, the lessons can apply to any marketing automation platform.

Alignment with Sales and Executives

Hopefully you are already regularly meeting with your colleagues to discuss the sales and lead lifecycles. At this point, you want to focus on agreement on Stages and when a lead moves between stages. You should also ask hard questions about aligning your process to how Buyers actually think. Sales-marketing alignment is a key step before even implementing a marketing automation platform.

The easy (lazy way) is to go with whatever you have been doing in the past. If you do, be sure that this still makes sense for the way you market and sell today and over the next three years. Marketing automation and building an RCM is a catalyst for change – so take action now.

It is important to have a strong definition of each Stage and the Transitions between Stages. Edward Unthank wrote a great article that uses Sirius Decisions Waterfall Model, which can serve as a starting point

These definitions, like a Universal Lead Definition, are required before you continue. Hopefully you are already buddies with Sales and have these defined, but if you are not quite there yet, now is your time.

Knowing is Half the Battle – What Is Your Reporting Goal?

If you are anything like me, you might play with reporting tools to find the right report. This is a terrible way to setup reporting that will help decisions.

Instead, start with your end goal and questions. What questions do you need the answers to? Then, what should that report or chart look like?

Questions you might ask:

• How fast do leads make it to MQL?
• How fast do leads make it to Opportunity?
• What proportion of leads created in July go from Known to Won?
• What is our Cost to Acquire a Lead?
• What is the Cost to Acquire a Won?
• Is velocity of leads from Known to MQL decreasing or increasing in the past 12 months?
• What is the average number of touches before someone reaches MQL? Won?

Now ask, “Do we have this data? If not, how do we collect it so it can be reported on?” This sort of question can lead to a massive conversation; so for the sake of this post, let’s focus on Sales Funnel Metrics.

Design Your Sales Funnel with Sales and Executives

Take the definitions of Stages and Triggers and map them out. Do this on a whiteboard, with Sales and your managers. Make it excruciatingly clear what will happen at each event.

Once you do, take that mobile photo and translate the whiteboard into a process chart using Visio, Draw.io or a similar tool. Again, have details beyond what you think you need.

Design the Revenue Cycle Model Draft

There are two steps to building this draft.

Step 1: Convert the flow chart into the RCM draft image.

This is fun and easy to do by going to Analytics > RCM> New Model Draft

Do whatever you want at this point. There are no consequences in Draft mode.

Step 2: Place the transitions and rules into a table like this, preparing for the campaigns you need to drive the Stage changes.

Campaign NameLink	Smart List	Flow Steps	Schedule	Notes
00 – New Lead to Known	Lead is CreatedRevenue Stage=AnonymousIs Anonymous=F	Change Data Value: Lifecycle Stage=KnownChange Revenue Stage to Known	Once	This is once because the lead can never go back to Anonymous.

Step 3: Build the Program and Campaigns to manage the Stages

Take the table of campaigns and set up a Program with the appropriate smart campaigns inside. This is an example of what it could look like, so do what makes sense for your organization.

In a post like this, or even a short presentation, it is not possible to show you everything you need to do to run the lifecycle system and RCM flows. For best practices on building key operational programs, such as Lifecycle Processing, Nate Smitha of Etumos wrote a great article to read. Also, a few things to keep in mind:

• Map out scenarios involving existing SFDC Leads and SFDC Contacts.
• Include the MQL fast tracks for free trials or Contact Us forms.
• Include detours and other exceptions.
• Make sure you add flow steps to stamp dates of stages.
• Use the lead lifecycle to also manage your SFDC sync and other necessary data stamping during creation.

Test the System
Testing is a whole other blog post, but do take the time to test. In simpler models with a typical small business or tech startup, the data you have should be fairly simple. Enterprises with multiple objects and different Opportunity Types may find this the most challenging part of the setup. Be sure to get this right so your reports are accurate.

Quick testing tips:

• Map out basic scenarios such as Known to Won, MQL to Recycle, etc.
• Create a series of leads with unique email addresses and put them in a grid with the scenarios you plan to use along with the actions you must take in the ideal situation.
• Make notes on whether the test leads achieved the desired result or if they failed.
• Investigate failures.

Wait for the Data

Once you switch everything on, it takes about 2-3 months before you should rely on the data for decision-making. The reports will spike on day one when you push everyone into the stages. Then you might find you missed a scenario that has to be fixed. Thus, take your time to reach a level of data quality that is reliable for the CMO to present to the Board.

Start Reporting to Achieve the Vision

Once you have the data, you can report on it, achieving the vision you were sold so many months ago. Here are a few example reports and tips as you go beyond the vision.

Marketo’s Success Path Analyzer is one of the visionary lead funnel reports we all like to see. Keep in mind it is only looking at the green “success path” on the RCM. It does take some time for this data to even out.

Another type of report is one you extract yourself. Below is a report from data using Program Performance Report and Excel.

If you have RCE, you can do so much more, like this report, which is a Model Analysis Report (Lead) with Stage –To Stage attributes.

Other reports to consider will help answer questions we asked earlier:

• Program Membership
• Program Revenue Stages
• Lead Analysis
• Model Analysis –
  • Duration
  • Conversion to Stage % by Month/Qtr/Year
  • New vs. Existing Leads

What do I do with all of this data?

Once you have this data, you can answer some of the questions we posed earlier. Another consideration is to make a decision based on benchmarks, usually from inside the firm, but sometimes outside. Once you have this rolling 12-month average, you can decide if your current month’s data compares favorably or poorly.

The next step is to take action. Early on, I caution you to take one action at a time to impact one aspect of the funnel. If you are interested in accelerating the time from Known to MQL, come up with nurturing programs to do just that. Avoid the temptation to pull the other levers all at once, lest you end up with a lot of activity and little to show for it. Perhaps one way to keep your team in check is to remind everyone that success will appear on your resume, while befuddled numbers will be obvious to the next hiring manager.

Marketo Architecture Best Practices

Discover other best practices we’ve developed while working on enterprise Marketo instances, from Lifecycle Processing and Lead Source to intelligently assigning leads to engagement programs with Traffic Director.

The most common question I get here at Marketing Rockstar Guides is “How do I prepare for the Marketo Certification Exam (MCE)?”

Usually I tell people it is a combination of things:

• Using the system on a daily work basis for 6 to 12 months.
• Reading this blog.
• Reading the Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo (really useful for Admin and principles).
• Spending time on the Marketo Community.
• Getting a start with the Marketing Automation Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo (my course, paid)
• Learning Marketo via the Help Articles and Courses. (Free and paid Marketo courses exist from Marketo and other firms)

Now there are a few new tools available from Marketo and the wider Community that can help you. If you register for the Exam, you can now go through a real life  practice exam that is much closer to what you see on the test.

• Marketo Practice Exam
• MCE Exam Prep Kit
• MCE Roadmap (has some practice questions and topics).
• MCE Checklist
• Steven Moody’s Preparation Checklist

However, if you are a regular user of Marketo for the past year and especially if you are an Admin, you shouldn’t sweat it. You will know the answers off the top of your head. That’s not to say you shouldn’t review all the materials. I do, because there are always one or two areas I don’t use frequently, so a quick brush up helps a lot.

[Update: April 16, 2015]

First, it turns out this is my 100th post on the site! Wow! Thanks for reading and subscribing.

Second, I took my third Exam this week at the rockin’ Marketo Summit. While I cannot tell you specific questions (nor can I recall 100 questions), I can tell you that you may encounter the newer features more often than in the past.

[Update: January 18, 2017]

I recently took the upcoming new MCE Beta Exam, which will test your abilities in different ways. I learned that those who take the test at home only need the regular laptop camera. The test instructions indicate the need for a separate webcam, when in fact this is not necessary. Simply press continue on the WebAssessor prompt. If this does not work, then please call the exam administrator to confirm the equipment needed.

Ready? Sign up for the exam.

If you are taking the MCE at this year’s Summit. Good luck!

[Updated: July 9, 2017: fixed broken links, added Marketo You Tube channel; added MRG Course ;)]

Logic in Marketo is important for managing things like segmentation, but also triggered campaigns.

All orange triggers are considered to have an OR between them. This is an important and very powerful feature. If you have any Triggered criteria, you can only use ALL or ANY as options, but these operators only apply to the green filters. Multiple Triggers use the OR operator between them, such that any trigger will fire the campaign if the Lead matches the remaining Green filter criteria.

How would that work in Marketo though?

Single Trigger

In this case, if a lead matches this trigger, the flow will continue.

Two Triggers:

If either filter matches, the lead will qualify for the flow. In this case, the lead must Visit a Web Page AND be a Member of the Smart List, OR Change Progression Status AND be a Member of the Smart List.

Multiple Triggers and Filters

The lead must match any of the triggers, but also all of the green filters. So you could understand this one better by taking each orange trigger plus the green filter logic separate from other orange triggers.

Thus, the lead must match either of the Triggers plus both green filters to continue. Changing this to ANY, would mean that as long as either Trigger matched AND either green filter matched, the lead could continue.

See more details in my Marketo reference guide:

Last week we discussed basic Boolean Logic for Marketers. This week we delve into the use of NOT in Marketo.

The NOT filters in Marketo:

Let’s say you want to focus on a group that did not do something. To be specific, let’s look at people who did not click OR open an email. If that is true, then we will take that group and send them a different email.

The first way is to just use the Not filters, excluding anyone with that behavior.

To ensure we only look at people who might have received the email in the first place. Otherwise

(Not Clicked in Email OR Not Opened Email)

Will bring us tens of thousands of leads – because a lot of people never clicked or opened that email. We just want the leads inside that Program.

Using Positive Statements to Exclude

In English class, you were probably scolded for using double negatives because they can be confusing to the reader. “The same is true in Marketo: it can be confusing to setup a system that says “If someone has not clicked or not opened an email, then do not send email X.” Invariably, these are error prone statements, resulting in incorrect segmentation.

Instead, it may make sense to use a positive, inclusive statement to exclude people. It is counterintuitive sounding, but it actually works far better in most cases.

Use this two-step process to make a negative “positive statement.”

Step 1: Setup a Smart List

Step 2: Use the Smart List to Exclude

Then we say, please show us everyone who is NOT IN the Smart List

This would be true of a trigger campaign. Let’s say you wanted to automatically move a lead from Stream 1 to Stream 2 if they did NOT click OR did NOT Open an email.

There is not a trigger method available for that, but you could setup something like

This way you say that anyone who did not click or open the email 2 days after it was delivered, move to Stream 1, everyone else stay put. If you tried to use a Not filter in a Choice Step, when you wanted to use Not OR Not, then you will cause a misfire.

 Thus, quite a few folks might trigger Choice 1, but never get to Choice 2. In this situation, a positive smart list with NOT IN will better reflect your intention.

This post draws on my webinar, How to be a Marketing Automation Rockstar with my friends at RingLead. Check it out for more helpful tips.

Disclosure: Perkuto provided access to a Marketo instance for this post.