Marketing Automation Requirements for Start-Up Software Companies

Jay Famico at Sirius Decisions posted a blog Marketing Automation Platforms: Minimum Requirements  where he identified 16 key requirements for marketing automation that break out into campaign management, lead management, and platform management capabilities.  That blog inspired me to share some thoughts on a start-up software company perspective on marketing automation.  And since I’m an independent blogger, I’m going to discuss my opinions on some specific solutions.  I’m not claiming to have done a thorough review of all the possible marketing solutions, but I’ve done multiple start-ups and I’ll present some ideas on the kinds of solutions that I would consider based on my experiences.

A start-up’s perspective on marketing automation is that the company has some specific marketing projects or processes that it needs to execute and it’s looking for practical solutions.  The company is constrained by funding and by the expertise of the people executing the marketing programs.  The company usually buys just what it needs (unless it just closed a round of funding and is evaluating platforms to meet future growth). 

From a start-up perspective, the company needs a CRM solution to store leads, an email marketing solution, and a solution for registration on landing pages.  The company may or may not have a website.  As the company gets funding, then integration between platforms, lead scoring, lead nurturing, campaign management, inbound marketing, and analytics become more important.  And there might be other specific needs like surveys, event management, or webinars.

The Stealth Start-up with Quarterly Marketing Budget = $0
Stealth Start-Up Recommendation:  There’s a full range of free marketing tools that you can use

I’ve worked with two stealth start-ups and free was my most important criteria.  The stealth start-up is a pre-A-round company.  The company may be trying to go to market without getting VC money.  They may be using their own money, angel funding, or money from a grant or competition to try to get the business going.  The company might have handful of prospect leads that are involved in providing feedback or beta testing early product releases.  The stealth start-up doesn’t have a marketing budget.  The company needs a CRM solution to track leads, email marketing to keep in touch with leads, and registration (landing) pages to generate new leads.  Integration of these capabilities is not a requirement.

I’d start by looking for a free CRM solution.  I’d look for a basic solution to keep track of contact information, notes, and email opt out.  Since Salesforce.com no longer offers a free version, I’d choose a solution like Zoho CRM that is free for 3 users and up to 5000 records.  When the company grows, we could always migrate the data to a different system.

For email marketing, I’d look at something like Mail Chimp that offers free email marketing for up to 2000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month.  I’d also look for a free landing page solution to support registration and download for lead gen campaigns.  You could also build landing pages as a web forms on your website if you have resources to do that.  My experience with web-to-lead or website web forms is that you also need to add some sort of Captcha solution to avoid generating spam leads.  These web forms usually aren’t integrated with CRM so you’ll have to import the registration data into your CRM system. 

There are plenty of other free tools that you can use for surveys (Survey Monkey), analytics (Google Analytics), SEO (Google Keyword Planner), competitive analysis (Hubspot Website Grader, Google Keyword Planner), and the list goes on.  Of course Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and SlideShare are free places to engage prospects.  If you have a marketing need, there’s a very good chance that there’s a free solution out there.  It may have ads, it may not be integrated, and it may not work perfectly, but it’s free.

The Boot Strap Start-Up with Quarterly Marketing Budget <K$100
Bootstrap Start-Up Recommendation:  Enterprise-class CRM, stand alone marketing capabilities with some integration with CRM, continued heavy use of free marketing solutions.

I worked at one Boot Strap Start-Up and there was some marketing budget, but free and do-it-yourself marketing were very important.  A Boot Strap Start-Up has some investment, but the amount is too small to consider it an A round.  In this case, there is some marketing budget in the tens of thousands of dollars per quarter.

In this scenario, I’d be looking for a CRM solution that is affordable and that can grow with the company.  I’ve used Salesforce.com at every start-up so I tend to recommend that platform.  However, there may be other compelling business or technology reasons to consider Zoho, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM or other CRM solutions.

Your email marketing needs to look more professional, you’re sending email more frequently to bigger lists, the tracking and analytics on your email is starting to become important, and integrating email campaigns with your CRM system is important.  However, the budget still can’t afford a marketing automation platform.  I’d be looking at stand alone email marketing platforms that have strong integration with the CRM system for uploading lists, syncing email opt out, and tracking email campaign history.  I won’t even try to review email marketing platforms, but the last time I was in a start-up with small marketing budgets, I settled on Vertical Response because I felt it had the best integration with Salesforce.com, good email analytics, and a pay-as-you go model.

In this scenario, I’ve used Salesforce.com web-to-lead registration forms as a low cost way to create landing pages.  The only downsides to using web-to-lead forms are that you usually need to add a Captcha solution and a web-to-lead form will generate duplicate leads in your CRM system.  So you need to be prepared to merge duplicates when using web-to-lead forms.

For any requirements like segmentation, analytics, nurturing, or lead scoring, I’d be looking for DYI solutions.  Run reports in Salesforce.com and analyze the data in Excel to create your segmentation.  Then manually create and schedule a series of nurture emails at that targeted list.  Build your lead scoring formulas in Salesforce.com using formula fields and workflow/field updates.  And for more extensive tracking, start using Google URL builder to tag your links with URL parameters that can be tracked in Google Analytics and Adwords.  I would still use all the free tools for SEO and keyword analysis.

The A Round Start-up with Quarterly Marketing Budget >K$100
A-Round Start-Up Recommendation:  Either a basic or full feature marketing automation platform

I’ve worked at two A round start-ups.  With more substantial marketing budgets, there is a much wider range of solutions to consider.  At this stage, I’m assuming you have an enterprise-class CRM solution and I’ve used Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition in those start-ups.  With this level of budget, you’re building more complex and automated marketing capabilities.  Integration between solutions is important.  Analytics capabilities are important.  Easy is also important because even though you have a bigger budget, you still don’t have lots of people with the expertise to drive all these capabilities.

In my opinion, this is where you get into the marketing automation platform decision.  Do you buy into the Hubspot vision?  Do you get an entry level marketing automation platform like Act-On.  Or do you go for a full-feature marketing automation solution like Marketo, Eloqua, SilverPop, or Pardot.

These tools provide email marketing, landing pages, registration forms, tracking, lead scoring, lead nurturing, and more.  They all are tightly integrated with Salesforce.com and with webinar platforms.  They all have some level of integration with social networking.  The pricing for these systems ranges from a couple hundred to a couple thousand of dollars per month (and their sales reps will usually provide a deep discount for first-time accounts).  If you look at one of my earlier posts on my blog, I provided a list of criteria that I used for evaluating marketing automation platforms.

Now, I’ll share my personal opinions on these platforms.  And full disclosure, I’ve used and/or tested Act-On, Marketo, Eloqua, and Manticore.  I haven’t used HubSpot, but I know a number of people that have used it.  For a basic, easy to use marketing automation platform, Act-On is a great solution.  It’s a basic marketing automation platform with a friendly, intuitive user interface.  However, it has limited capabilities.  So if you’re just getting started with marketing automation, Act-On is a great place to get started and then as your needs grow, you can consider migrating to another platform.

For a full-featured marketing automation platform, I’ve been using Marketo for 3 years and I’m very satisfied with that decision.  We migrated from Eloqua to Marketo because Marketo’s capabilities were more accessible to a non-programmer.  A strong marketing person can implement most of Marketo’s capabilities.  Whereas accessing the same capabilities in Eloqua often required javascript programming or outsourcing the development to a consultant.  Eloqua is an impressive solution, but in my opinion, you need to have technical resources or a deep marketing budget to be successful using their platform.  I’ve looked at SilverPop and Pardot and my impression is that these platforms are closer to Marketo in terms of ease of use.

I’ve never used HubSpot and I’ve never really understood what’s differentiated about their platform.  I can build tracking for leads from any channel whether the lead came from outbound, social media, or organic lead sources in any of the marketing automation solutions.  All the marketing automation solutions have landing pages, integration with Salesforce.com, analytics, lead scoring, and lead nurturing.  There are plenty of free and paid SEO and keyword tools.  And from talking to people in my network, I haven’t heard of anyone having a huge success or a huge failure using HubSpot.  So from my perspective, HubSpot is another marketing automation solution and you just have to assess its capabilities relative to your needs and budget.  In other words, don’t get caught up in HubSpot’s marketing message and do an objective assessment based on your marketing automation requirements.

The High Growth Start-up with Quarterly Marketing Budget > K$250

Okay, you just got a big round of funding and you’re planning for big growth and expansion.  In my opinion, at this level of funding, you should really be leveraging the full extent of your marketing automation platform.  I’d be focusing primarily on full featured marketing automation platforms.  I’ve seen a number of companies using Hubspot just for inbound marketing and a marketing automation platform like Eloqua for everything else.  You may start getting into more advanced or specific capabilities like data cleansing/appending (e.g. Data.com, DiscoverOrg, RainKing).  You may look into solutions that automatically populate account names on form fields.  Or you might start testing online retargeting solutions or adding e-commerce and subscription management capabilities.  An enterprise class CRM solution and a full-feature marketing automation platform will be important to integrate more advanced capabilities.  At this point, you’re getting sophisticated enough to figure this out yourself so I’ll end my comments here.

How to Add SSL to Marketo Landing Pages

Adding SSL encryption to Marketo Landing Pages

When we wanted to implement SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption on our Marketo landing pages, I found that there was very little information available.  We needed SSL for a free trial registration and account creation process built on a Marketo landing page.  This blog post will share the details of implementing SSL in Marketo.  I’ll save the discussion about building a trial registration system in Marketo for a future post.

What is SSL and why would you want to implement it on Marketo landing pages? 

At a very high level, SSL on a Marketo landing page enables encryption so the information that a user types into their browser onto a Marketo registration form is secure (from the browser into the form).  In our use case, we built a software free trial registration system integrated with Marketo and Salesforce.com.  We built a highly customized Marketo landing page that let the user register for the free trial and generate a password to activate a software license.  Since the user is creating their own password and entering it onto the Marketo form, the password field must be encrypted from the user’s browser to the Marketo form field.  Consequently, you need to implement SSL on your Marketo instance to secure the password creation process.

There’s very little information available on implementing SSL in Marketo

When we went to research this topic, there was little to no information available in the Marketo community or Google search.  Marketo sent us a PDF document describing their service for implementing SSL, but other than that we had to ask a lot of questions and then go through it ourselves to understand all the details.  We contacted Marketo support and they put us in touch with the Marketo Services team.  Even then, the Marketo Services team only has a high-level understanding of the process and we had to reach back into their organization to find the implementation people that could answer our questions.

Implementing SSL on Marketo
 
At a high level, implementing SSL on Marketo consists of the following:

1. Purchase the service from Marketo to implement SSL and schedule a date to deploy it
2. Buy a SSL certificate and give it to Marketo
3. Update your Marketo landing page templates to prepare for the transition to SSL
4. Deploy SSL on Marketo and work with your IT department to update your DNS record and TTL value
5. Fix any Marketo landing page template issues that you might have missed

Marketo says that it will take approximately 2-3 weeks to schedule and complete the process after receiving the SSL certificate from you.  The Marketo team is working in the Pacific Time zone so the window for scheduling the change is during normal business hours Pacific Time.  Marketo says that it takes 30 minutes to complete the process.  Since you probably have a live instance of Marketo, you’ll want to schedule the change at a time when there won’t be significant traffic hitting your Marketo landing pages and give yourself enough time to test and fix any potential issues after the switch is made.  The change is fast, but I would plan for a 2 hr window when traffic to your landing pages is light.  We also set our email marketing schedule to avoid driving traffic to our landing pages on the day of the changeover.  Typically, when we send an email, 98% of the total clicks occur within the first two days of sending the email.  Also, there’s a short availability outage during the transition.  Anyone hitting one of your Marketo landing pages during the transition will be re-directed to your fallback page.  Your fallback page is a setting in Marketo that defines the url that a visitor will be redirected to if Marketo is not available.  So you should check your fallback page setting in Marketo before you deploy.

Our IT department had all sorts of questions about buying the SSL certificate that weren’t covered in the Marketo documentation.  The SSL certificate must be for at least a 2 year term.  Our IT department asked for information on the server that the certificate would be installed on.  Marketo told us that they’re running an Apache load balancing server.  When you switch to SSL you get a dedicated external IP address for your landing pages and there’s a set of IP addresses related to the web servers behind the load balancer.  There isn’t a specific server that the certificate will be installed on.  You just need to buy the certificate and give it to Marketo.  The information that we added on the CSR (Certificate Signing Request) was the common name (CNAME) of our Marketo instance and then all the Org information was our company information.  You’ll also need to give Marketo the private key.

When the switch occurs, you’re on the phone with the Marketo team during the process.  Some of the following detail in this section goes beyond my expertise, but I’ll share what I know.  When you make the switch, the IP address associated with your landing pages changes the CNAME from companyname.mktoweb.com to companyname-ssl.mktoweb.com.  Your IT department needs to change the DNS record from the old CNAME to the new SSL CNAME.  Then Marketo will verify if they can see the new DNS values in their network and make final changes to their systems to allow SSL on your landing pages.  During the change, your IT department will need to lower the TTL value for the DNS record associated with your Marketo url.  Lowering the TTL value is the process that updates the new CNAME (url) across your DNS.  If the TTL is set too high (long), then some DNS might still cache the old CNAME and some visitors might not hit the SSL landing page.  Our IT department was concerned that lowering the TTL value might impact other systems.  It turned out that they were able to lower the TTL value just for the Marketo url and the changes were deployed very quickly.  After you complete the switch, you can return the TTL value to its previous level.

Preparing our landing pages for the switch to SSL also required some effort.  In our case, our Marketo landing page templates were designed by our web team to pull the CSS and images from our corporate website.  We have one set of Marketo landing page templates that pull the header, footer, and CSS from our corporate website so these Marketo landing pages look like you’re still on our corporate website.  When you switch your Marketo landing pages to SSL, if you pull any images or CSS from outside of Marketo into your landing page templates, then that will cause a warning message to appear every time someone visits your landing pages.  The warning message will say:  Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely?

To avoid that bad user experience, all of the images and CSS for your Marketo landing page templates and landing pages need to reside in Marketo (Design Studio).  In our case, that meant that our web team had to rebuild our landing page templates inside Marketo. That also meant that we had to reapprove every landing page using the revised templates.  Inevitably, we missed something, but it was obvious as soon as we switched on SSL.  It turned out that we missed moving the footer images into Marketo.  That was relatively minor, but it’s an example of how easy it is to miss a small detail in this process.  For us, this also meant that we now had separate images and CSS for the corporate website and our Marketo landing page templates.  And when changes occurred on our corporate website, we didn’t always have the resources to keep the Marketo templates in sync.  Of course, if all the images and CSS for your Marketo landing pages and templates are in Design Studio already, then this won’t be an issue for you.

Some additional questions that might come up

When you switch to SSL, any pre-existing http: links to your Marketo landing pages are automatically redirected to the https: link for the landing page.  So you don’t have to worry about breaking pre-existing links to Marketo landing pages from your corporate website or in old emails or banner ads.

The dedicated external IP address for your SSL Marketo landing pages is completely different from a dedicated IP address for email.  The two have nothing to do with each other.

The cost to add SSL is affordable.  Marketo charges a reasonable service fee to make the change and then it's just the cost of a 2 year SSL certificate that you buy.  Marketo will not buy the SSL certificate for you.

Overall, adding SSL to Marketo was pretty straightforward after getting answers to all of our questions.  However, there are a lot of parts to the process and it was time consuming to get to the right person that could answer all of our questions.

Building Lead Scoring Models in Marketo and Salesforce.com

Building Lead Scoring Models in Marketo and Salesforce.com
The theory, practice, and realities of lead scoring

In this blog post, I’ll share my experience building and using lead scoring models in Marketo and Salesforce.com.  I’ll share what worked and what didn’t work, as well as some insights on organizational challenges that can impact lead scoring models.  Ultimately, one of the primary goals of lead scoring is to get sales and marketing aligned with respect to lead quality.  Lead scoring helps marketing focus on lead quality over lead volume and it helps sales prioritize their follow up on leads.  Getting sales and marketing on the same page with a lead scoring model helps eliminate the classic argument that occurs when marketing says “look at all the leads that we delivered” and sales says “all the leads are junk.”  However, building that alignment and developing a lead scoring model that really works is challenging.

First, let’s start with some background.  I was at a start-up years ago - before lead scoring and lead nurturing were common marketing topics.  I did some analysis on the demographics and behavior of leads that converted into won opportunities.  The behavior data consisted of Salesforce.com campaign data and website page visits.  What I found was that certain sets of demographic values and behavior activity had high correlation with won opportunities.  This suggested to me that if I could acquire certain types of leads and then drive a series of marketing campaigns at them to engage them with the optimum behavior profile, then those leads would have a higher probability of converting into won opportunities.  The behavior activity was a model for what a lead needed to do to understand the value of our solution.  It was a powerful learning experience, seeing this set of demographic and behavior data associated with leads that turned in won opportunities.

Fast forward to today, I’m going to assume that most people reading this blog are familiar with lead scoring.  At a high level, you’re assigning scores to attributes related to individual leads (demographics), their company (firmographics), their behavior (e.g. campaign engagement, pages visited), and BANT attributes.  BANT covers any questions that capture information about Budget, Authority, Needs, or Timing.  Examples of BANT questions might be: do you have a budget, what is your role in evaluating or purchasing these solutions, what is your most critical challenge.  And each of the BANT questions would have a pick list of potential responses.

How do you get started building lead scoring models

Building lead scoring models is a joint exercise with the sales and marketing teams.  You go through a discussion where you define the attributes of an ideal lead using insights and data from both the sales and marketing teams.  You’ll probably come up with a big list and you’ll need to prioritize the questions to define which ones make it into the model.

We built separate demographic, behavior, and BANT lead scoring models instead of one overall combined lead scoring model.  We designed separate lead scoring models because we wanted the sales reps to be able to see what was driving a high lead score. 

Next we defined a point scale range for each lead score model.  The Demographic and BANT lead score models had a maximum value of 100 points.  The Behavior lead score model was uncapped.  I’ll explain later in more detail why we created an uncapped Behavior lead score model.

Then we weighted the importance of each question in each lead score model.  For example, if we had 5 BANT questions on the registration form, a simple approach would be to assign each question a maximum value of 20 points.  However, you can also use uneven weighting.  For example, with a lead scoring model with 5 questions, 2 of the questions could be worth a maximum of 35 points each and the remaining 3 questions could be worth 10 points each (so the maximum possible score is 100 points).  Finally, we discussed each model to decide what would be a meaningful threshold score for the lead to be considered a Marketing Qualified Lead.  You validate your initial models and determine the threshold score for a MQL lead by discussing how existing known leads would score against the lead scoring models.  In our case, we defined score levels for the demographic and BANT lead score models.  We defined A, B, C, and D score ranges across the 100 point system for each lead score model.  A/B were considered good scores and C/D were considered bad scores.

For the behavior score model, we left it uncapped.  As long as a lead kept engaging with campaigns, the lead’s behavior score would continue to increase.  We wanted the behavior score to be able to reflect the history of a lead’s activities.  We went through the same process of determining the threshold at which the behavior score indicated a marketing qualified lead.  We were planning to build an aging factor so any extended periods of inactivity would cause the behavior score to degrade over time.  We also wanted to be able to measure the rate of change of the behavior score.  A lead that engaged in 3 campaigns in 2 weeks might be more valuable than a lead that engaged in 3 campaigns over 3 months.

Finally, we developed two different buyer personas or segments.  We created separate segments for a technical buyer and an economic buyer.  All leads fell into one of these two segments.  Each segment had its own separate point scale system for the behavior score model.  For example, a technical buyer downloading a strategic whitepaper was a low behavior score, but an economic buyer downloading a strategic whitepaper was high behavior score.  For the BANT and demographic lead score models, everyone was scored using the same point system.  However, you could have potentially applied the segmentation to the other lead scoring models.  There are some system considerations in implementing the buyer segmentation that I’ll discuss in more detail later.

Building Lead Scoring Models in Marketo and Salesforce.com

Here are some detailed insights around building the actual lead scoring models in Marketo and Salesforce.com.  We found that certain types of models or formulas worked best in Marketo and others worked best in Salesforce.com.  In general, Marketo is good at adding to a lead score if a condition is met.  Whereas Salesforce.com was better to set a specifc lead score value based on a response to a questin.   We decided that it would be better to handle picklist questions with formulas and workflow/field updates in Salesforce.com.

Build demographic and BANT lead score models in Salesforce.com

Let’s start by looking at how we built lead scoring for a BANT question.  Suppose the question is What is your budget?  And the picklist of potential answers is a) I don’t have a budget = zero points, b) project is approved, but no budget yet = 15 points  c) project and budget are approved = 25 points.

In Marketo, you would build a Smart Campaign.  You would have to trigger on form submits and data value change across a wide range of fields.  Then the Flow logic would be:  if data value changes, value is “project and budget are approved”, then +25.  And you would create flow logic for the other picklist values.  The weakness with applying this flow step for lead scoring because it is an Additive function.  If the lead submitted the form a second time and changed the answer, Marketo would add an additional score value to the lead score total.  What we wanted was a formula that would set a specific value based on the picklist value. 
We chose to implement the scoring for that type of picklist question by using formula fields and workflows with field updates in Salesforce.com.  The Salesforce.com approach to building that lead score calculation would be to create a formula with CASE or IF statements based around the picklist values.

Another limitation of using the Data Value Changes trigger in Marketo is that Data Value Changes only triggers on existing leads.  When a lead is created for the first time in Marketo, it does not trigger Data Value Changes.  In Salesforce.com, I prefer to use formula fields over workflow field updates whenever possible.  A formula fires whenever a record is read.  A workflow will only fire when a record is created or edited.  Consequently, I prefer to build scoring models for picklist questions with formula fields in Salesforce.com.

In the example of the BANT lead score model, we had five separate BANT questions.  Each BANT question had a set of answers built with a picklist on the field.  Each BANT question had a maximum score and the combined maximum value of all the BANT questions totaled to 100 points.  Using the same BANT question example above where BANT question 1 is worth a maximum of 25 total points, we created a formula for the lead score associated with that specific question.  We created a formula field for the BANT lead score using CASE statements in Salesforce.com.

CASE (BANT1_field_name__c,  “I don’t have a budget”, 0, “project is approved but no budget yet”, 15, “project and budget are approved”, 25) +
CASE (BANT2_field_name__c, “….. etc) +
CASE (BANT3_field_name__c, “….. etc) +
CASE (BANT4_field_name__c, “….. etc) +
CASE (BANT5_field_name__c, “….. etc, 0)

One quick tip, Salesforce.com formulas can be picky when special characters are included in the picklist.  For example, we found that if you include a dash in a picklist, it’s important to not have any leading or trailing spaces around the dash for a formula to work.  For example, this picklist value “100 –  500” would fail in a formula.  Whereas this picklist value “100-500” will work in a formula.  In addition, we found problems when we wrote the formulas in Word and then pasted the text into Salesforce.com.  We had to type the formulas directly into Salesforce.com to get them to work properly.

Build the behavior lead score model in Marketo

Marketo was great for handling the behavior score model because the model was uncapped (i.e. it was not constrained to a maximum of 100 points).  We simply created smart list criteria with flow steps to add points to the behavior score field.  We built separate Behavior Score models for lead gen campaigns (e.g. webinars, whitepapers), inbound contact (e.g. submits a contact us form), free trial registration and activation, and page visits to key pages.  Then each of the individual behavior score models was combined into a total behavior score.  This would enable the sales reps to see what kind of activity was driving the total behavior score value.
Instead of having to create smart lists for every single campaign, we standardized the naming conventions of our Salesforce.com campaigns and used keywords in those campaign naming standards as triggers in a Marketo Smart List.  For example:

Smart List:
Trigger – Status is Changed in SFDC Campaign
Campaign Starts with keywords
New Status is memberstatus
Flow: Change Score
Score Name: Behavior Score Campaign
Change: +25
 
In addition, we standardized all behavior scores as being high, medium, or low point values.  Then we created tokens for those point values and used tokens in the Marketo Change Score flow steps.

We built separate personas or segments for different buyer roles and each persona had its own set of scoring for the demographic and behavior scoring models.  We created segments for a technical buyer and an economic buyer.  If a technical buyer that downloaded a technical whitepaper, that lead would get a high behavior score, but when an economic buyer that downloaded a technical whitepaper, that lead would get a low behavior score.  We worked with Sales to define different behavior scores to each persona.  To implement those segments, we created smart lists in Marketo that assigned each lead to a segment based on keywords in their job title.  Then we added the Role Segment into the flow steps on the behavior score models.

Perhaps the most painful part of building the behavior lead scoring models was the effort to back score all the existing lead behavior.  We had to create Smart Campaigns to score each individual campaign and run the existing Campaign Members through the flow step once to score the existing leads.

 

Additional Considerations and Lessons Learned

Data quality is important
 
Your lead scoring models will only be effective if you have clean, consistent data.  That means you need to establish standards for data values and naming conventions.  You may also have to clean your existing data.  For example, our demographic lead scoring model placed a higher score on Country = United States.  All of our registration forms standardized on “United States” as the value in the picklist for country.  And we cleaned all of the data in Salesforce.com and Marketo so that all the country data with USA, United States of America, US of A, etc., would be converted into United States.  As part of this standardization process, we came up with a consistent naming methodology for our Salesforce.com campaigns and campaign member status values.

The lead scoring models must be easy to use for sales reps

Sales reps don’t want to lose precious time trying to interpret a complex lead scoring model.  That’s where the Score Level fields that translate a lead score into a simple A/B/C/D scale make it easy for a sales rep to see which leads to focus on.  However, the details of the lead scoring models are useful for marketing purposes to be able to get a better understanding of what’s happening with your leads.  So we built fairly complex lead scoring models for marketing analysis, but built fields to simplify the complexity of the models for sales usage.

Registration conversion is impacted by the number of questions on your forms

What happens when you put lots of questions on registration forms?  The expected result is that you get lower conversion rates (higher landing page abandonment).  And that’s what we saw.  Marketing was asked to create a process that required leads to answer 14 questions to be able to register for any content.  8 of the questions were the essential contact information that we needed to create a lead and assign it to a business development rep.  The remaining 6 questions consisted of 1 firmographic (# of employees) and 5 BANT questions.  Compared to our previous registration process where we required only the 8 essential fields, we saw a 25% reduction in conversion rate across all of our landing pages.
 
An alternative might have been to employ progressive profiling to capturing the data.  Progressive profiling lets you display different questions each time a lead submits a registration form.  In our original model, we were using progressive profiling that captured the complete set of data after two registration form submissions.  However, in this case, Sales insisted that marketing require all 14 questions because their goal was to get to the highest score leads as quickly as possible – regardless of the impact on conversion rates.  The rationale was that highest quality leads would be so interested in our solution that they would be willing to answer 14 questions to get our content.  There was also an assumption that people would answer the BANT questions truthfully.

In addition, we created a poor user experience by making all 14 questions required on all of our registration forms.  That means that if a person wanted to download two pieces of content, then they would have to submit all 14 questions both times.  The good news is that if the Marketo tracking cookie was in place, then the form would pre-populate with the same responses that they submitted previously.

Should you include BANT questions on your registration forms?  

There’s research that shows that BANT data captured on registration forms has very low accuracy.  When you talk to analysts that specialize in marketing and sales process research, they’ll tell you that BANT data is best captured in phone conversations with leads (tele-qualification of leads).  After several months of capturing data, there was no correlation between the BANT score and lead quality.  In fact, we saw the opposite trend that the higher quality leads that moved down the funnel tended to have low BANT scores.  So either the BANT score model was wrong or people tend to lie when filling out forms, or both.  

In our case, the Sales team felt that BANT data was the most critical piece of lead scoring to prioritize their efforts despite the low correlation with lead quality.  So we made a decision to require answers to all of our BANT questions on all registration forms.  That is a significant decision when you consider that requiring 14 questions on our registration forms impacted conversion rates.  Faced with a similar decision, you’ll need to decide for yourself whether capturing data with low accuracy on registration forms is worth the tradeoff in lost conversion. 

Over the course of 12 months, we made 3 revisions to the BANT lead score model and none of them showed strong correlation with actual lead quality.  The revisions were driven by subjective input from the sales team as opposed to analysis of actual customer data.  The reality of lead scoring in a start-up is that you don’t have the bandwidth to spend lots of time analyzing data and you have to make your best possible estimate of how to improve processes and then execute.

It’s important to get executive buy-in on the lead scoring strategy

Ultimately, it’s critical to get executive buy-in on the lead scoring strategy.  Despite what the data and industry best practices may show, if you don’t get buy in for a given strategy, your lead scoring models could evolve in ways that prove to be ineffective.  In our case, the Sales team’s emphasis on the BANT lead score model to prioritize their efforts became the primary focus of our lead scoring efforts.

Final Thoughts

We built some pretty cool lead scoring functionality, but the jury is still out on whether it was effective.  At the end of the day, a lead scoring model only works if the sales team uses it.
 
Developing a lead scoring model is an important process to help get sales and marketing aligned with a common view of how the lead funnel is performing.  Lead scoring should be a process of continuous improvement and it should be a team process with sales and marketing working together to improve the model.  Start by building your best estimate at a lead scoring model, then capture data and continue to refine the model each quarter.

I’d also like to thank Flora Felisberto for her help in designing, building and testing these lead scoring models.

Integrating Go-to-Webinar and Webex Event Center with Marketo

When we were evaluating marketing automation systems, one of our key criteria was the ability to integrate the marketing automation platform with our webinar platform.  Webinars are one of the key lead generation tools that we use.  This blog post will discuss what we learned and our experience using both Go-to-Webinar and Webex Event Center integrated with Marketo.

If you can’t wait to read the details, in the end we chose to go forward with Go-to-Webinar integrated with Marketo.  We felt that Go-to-Webinar had better features and usability for our needs.  We also ran into some email deliverability issues when we were sending Webex registration confirmation and reminder emails through Marketo.  And that was a significant issue for us.

The pain points that drove us to evaluate webinar integration with marketing automation

When we first started evaluating marketing automation platforms in late 2011, integration between a webinar platform and a marketing automation tool was not widely available.  We were already using Go-to-Webinar, but we were constantly running into problems with audio issues and latency issues (e.g. complaints from the audience that the webinar slides weren’t advancing on their screen).  So we decided to evaluate webinar platforms at the same time that we were evaluation marketing automation solutions.  When we were talking to Webex, they specifically recommended that we look at Act-On because it had such strong integration with Webex.  At that time, Eloqua had just introduced their Webex Cloud Connector, but they didn’t have a cloud connector for Go-to-Webinar.  Marketo had also just started to introduce its connector for Go-to-Webinar.  Now in 2013, it seems that every marketing automation platform has integration with Go-to-Webinar and Webex.  However, those integrations still have room for improvement.

If you’re already using a webinar platform, but don’t have it integrated with marketing automation, here are some of the reasons why you would want an integrated solution.

·         Using the standard webinar registration process provided by Go-to-Webinar and Webex requires a lot of manual processes to get registration data into the CRM system.  You have to export the registration lists from the webinar platform and then import it into Salesforce.com.  With a webinar platform integrated via marketing automation to your CRM system, the leads that register for a webinar are automatically added to your Salesforce.com webinar campaign in real-time.  That gives your sales team visibility to new leads before the webinar occurs.  Without this integration, our process was to wait until the webinar was over.  We actually had to wait 24 hrs after the webinar ended to make sure the system had updated which people attended and didn’t attend before we imported the data into Salesforce.com.  We also had to worry about separating out new leads from existing leads/contacts when doing the import to avoid creating duplicates in SFDC.  And of course the inside sales team is anxiously waiting for these leads while we’re doing this.

·         The standard registration pages that come with Go-to-Webinar and Webex do not provide any ability to customize the registration pages.  You have very basic ability to add your logo and change the color scheme of the registration pages.  You can’t customize the fields or field labels shown on the webinar registration pages.  For example, one annoying feature of the Go-to-Webinar registration page is that they use the Label “Organization” for the field to capture company name.  We were constantly getting people entering their department name into that field.  By integrating your webinar platform with a marketing automation system, you can develop highly customized webinar registration pages in terms of the look of the page and the registration form.  Marketing automation tools let you make a webinar registration page look like it’s completely integrated with your website and ask custom questions on the registration form.

·         The standard registration pages provided by Go-to-Webinar and Webex are not integrated with systems that you use for analytics and tracking.  That specifically means that you can’t measure visitor traffic or drop-off on those webinar registration pages with Google Analytics or your marketing automation platform.  If you’re getting poor registration on webinars, then I would want to look at tracking data to see if you’re getting enough traffic to the registration pages and then measure how many people are abandoning the registration process to determine how to improve the effectiveness of the registration page.

Go-to-Webinar integrated with Marketo

We made the decision to move forward with Marketo and we continued to use Go-to-Webinar.  We were very quickly able to get the Go-to-Webinar connector set up.  That let us create custom registration pages and get webinar leads into Salesforce.com in real-time without generating duplicates.  All of our webinar promotion used tracking codes (URL parameters) in the link to the registration page so we could tell where our leads were coming from. 

The Go-to-Webinar integration with Marketo requires you to use Go-to-Webinar system emails for registration confirmation and webinar reminder emails.  Go-to-Webinar creates a unique webinar link for each registrant and the Marketo connector doesn’t have the ability to pull that unique link into their system.  So you have to use the Go-to-Webinar system emails to send confirmation and reminder emails.  The negative is that you can’t customize the message.  The positive is that those emails have good deliverability. 

One other note about the Go-to-Webinar integration with Marketo is that it doesn’t automatically update the Attended status and it still takes 24 hrs for Go-to-Webinar to update that.  We have to import a spreadsheet into SFDC to update the campaign member status to Attended.  To enable sales to follow up faster, we started manually tracking who attended during the webinar and immediately updating Campaign member status instead of waiting 24 hrs for the webinar platform to update itself. 

We continued to use Go-to-Webinar with Marketo, but we were still experiencing audio issues and slide latency issues.  We were looking for a webinar platform to deliver a better customer experience and decided to evaluate Webex Event Center.

Webex Event Center integrated with Marketo

We were able to get the Webex connector for Marketo set up fairly easily.  The advantage of the Webex integration with Marketo is that you can send the webinar registration and confirmation emails from Marketo.  Webex Event Center also creates a unique URL for each webinar registrant, but the Marketo Webex connector is able to pull that data from Event Center and put it into a Marketo email.  Everything else is similar – you can create custom registration pages and using tracking codes.  However, we ran into one significant issue – the email deliverability was really poor on Marketo emails for Webex webinar confirmation and reminders.  The emails would not arrive in a timely manner or at all.  We worked with Marketo Support to set up branded links and a branded CName for our email, but it didn’t improve deliverability.  That was a significant issue.  We didn’t have those deliverability issues with Go-to-Webinar.

Go-to-Webinar vs. Event Center

Ultimately, our decision to move forward with Go-to-Webinar primarily came down to differences between the two webinar solutions.  We ran live webinars with both products.  When we ran a live webinar with Event Center, we ran into just as many complaints about the audio from the audience.  So here are the key reasons why we chose to move forward with Go-to-Webinar:

·         The Go-to-Webinar user interface lets you detach the various control panels from the user interface so you can enlarge them across dual monitors and make it easier to manage a webinar.  All of the Webex control panels are fixed to the main screen and it’s more difficult to use the different panels because they’re smaller.

·         Both webinar platforms offer polling questions, but Webex doesn’t associate answers with each person.  In Go-to-Webinar, we export each person’s responses to the polling questions and import that into Salesforce.com to give our sales people more insight to each specific lead.

·         We found that the process for transferring presenter controls was a little more complicated in Webex.  Perhaps it was because we were so used to Go-to-Webinar.

·         When Go-to-Webinar sends out a webinar registration confirmation email, it includes a link to make it easy to create an Outlook calendar appointment that contains the unique URL for that person to attend the webinar.  Sending Webex confirmation and reminder emails from Marketo can’t do that.  You could create an ICS file for the Webex webinar date and send that in the email, but it won’t be able to pull in the unique URL that each person will need to attend the webinar.  The person will have to hunt through their email to find their unique link to attend the webinar.  So we find using the Go-to-Webinar system emails for registration confirmation and reminders to be a better solution especially given the email deliverability issues described above.

·         We preferred the phone audio solution offered by Go-to-Webinar.  We use the non-toll, free option for audio over the phone.  One advantage of Go-to-Webinar is that it has local numbers that European audiences can dial into.  For Webex, a person in Europe that wanted to dial into the audio would have to call a US phone number.  The Webex audio solutions seemed designed for large corporations that provide toll free numbers or have their own phone infrastructure for webinars.

One other “gotcha” that is a Marketo issue common to both webinar platforms is that Marketo has different campaign member status progression values than what most people commonly use for webinar campaign member status values in Salesforce.com.  As a result, you’ll need to build a smart campaign in Marketo to change your webinar campaign member status values to your desired values in Salesforce.com and you’ll need to set up Salesforce.com webinar campaigns using all the different member status values that Marketo uses.  It’s a minor detail, but important to get your campaign member status values set correctly.

There were a few other minor areas where we felt that Go-to-Webinar was better than Webex from a usability perspective, but that may have been because we were so used to Go-to-Webinar.  More recently, we haven’t had any significant complaints from our webinar audiences about audio quality or slide latency with Go-to-Webinar.  So we’re moving forward with Go-to-Webinar integrated with Marketo.

I’d also like to thank Flora Felisberto for her contribution to the information in this blog post.  She did all of the testing with Webex Event Center and Marketo.

Marketo review after one year of using it

It’s been one year since we moved from Eloqua 9 to Marketo and this is an update on our progress.  Overall, I’m satisfied with what we’ve been able to accomplish with the combination of Marketo and Salesforce.com.  We’re a start-up with limited resources and we’ve been able to develop some fairly sophisticated tracking, lead scoring, lead nurturing, and triggered alerts to drive sales and marketing processes.  Other than needing a little help from a contract web developer for two items, the marketing team has been able to do everything ourselves using Marketo and Salesforce.com.

Here are some of our key accomplishments using Marketo and Salesforce.com:

·         We built a robust tracking system that allows us to identify the source of leads and associate that information with the Salesforce.com campaigns that the leads interact with.  We built a set of javascript cookies that allow us to capture tracking codes in URL parameters and store them in the lead’s browser for 30 days.  The cookies work on both Marketo and non-marketo web pages.  This lets us understand where our leads are coming from and which investments and campaigns are the most effective.  Ultimately, this gives us the ability to develop cost per lead and cost per opportunity metrics.  In the coming months, we’re planning to expand our URL parameters and cookie tracking capabilities to capture more insights and to enable more complex testing scenarios.  For example, to be able to test which link positions in an email (pre-header, banner ad, email body, call to action) drive the most clicks, one would need a separate tracking code (i.e. url parameter) to be able to measure that.

·         We built lead scoring models using both Marketo and Salesforce.com.  We have a sales qualification scoring model that was built using Salesforce.com formulas and we’re getting ready to deploy a demographic (i.e. fit ) scoring model based on Marketo smart lists and smart campaigns.  In the coming months, we’re planning to add behavior lead scoring models.  Probably the most compelling part of developing the lead scoring model was the group exercise that was used to develop the sales qualification model.  The group process helped get everyone on the same page in terms of what a qualified lead is – and that eliminates/reduces the discussion between marketing, inside sales, and field sales on lead quality.

·         We launched a series of reports and real-time alerts that are based on lead behavior and downloads to enable inside sales to follow up quickly on lead activity.  Research shows that you can significantly increase sales’ ability to connect with a lead if sales attempts to contact that lead within a short time following lead activity (e.g. when a lead downloads a whitepaper, then try to follow up within 5 minutes).  We’re in the process of testing those research findings as they apply to our business to improve our ability to connect with leads.  On the alerts, we’ve found that in some cases, Marketo is a better vehicle for initiating an alert because it doesn’t distinguish between a lead and a contact in Salesforce.com.  Whereas in Salesforce.com, you always have to develop separate alerts for leads and contacts.  One of the challenges we’re facing is trying to measure the time it takes inside sales to respond to lead activity.  The plan is to develop a salesforce.com apex trigger to be able to identify the first sales follow up activity that occurs after a lead action occurs.

·         In email marketing, we use Marketo for sending mass emails, email nurturing sequences, and personalized emails (e.g. Dear Fname, From: Lead Owner).  One of the painful lessons we learned was to make sure your database is clean before you start sending personalized emails – in terms of Lead Owner names, job titles, email addresses, and phone numbers.  In the coming months, we plan test using triggered emails as a way to improve conversion and connect rates (i.e. emails sent automatically in response to lead activity).  In general, we haven’t seen a lift in conversion rates by using nurturing sequences versus our control email treatment.  We tested email nurturing sequences by vertical and geographic region.  We plan to continue testing nurturing sequences and triggered emails.

·         On our landing pages we’ve deployed lead scoring questions using progressive profiling.  If you’re not familiar with progressive profiling, it lets you expose leads to different questions with each incremental registration.  This lets you get more data in the registration process without creating forms that are so long that they would impact conversion rates.  Using progressive profiling, we’re able to complete our sales qual score model questions after two downloads.  In the first registration, a lead gets 3 out of 5 qual score questions and the remaining 2 qual score questions on the second registration.

·         On the salesforce.com side, we built a series of analytic snapshots that let us see trend data.  We created analytic snapshots to see how the lead funnel and opportunity funnel are changing over time.  At the present time, this is more of a management tool than a forecasting tool.

Going back to the original premise of this blog, evaluating marketing automation packages, here are some of my recommendations:

·         Consider your level of expertise using marketing automation and CRM solutions.  Then consider both your short-term and long-term goals for these tools to try to understand what the total cost of ownership will be to achieve those goals.  For example, will you be able to do it yourself or will you have to hire an external consultant every time to want to expand the functionality that you’re using in the marketing automation package?

·         Marketo is a great platform for some who wants to "do it yourself."  You can do sophisticated marketing automation and tracking without requiring a dedicated admin with specialized programming skills.  I found that the “fast” (e.g. free) implementation was moderately effective and the key to our success using Marketo was premiere support.  You can read my previous posts, but the value of Marketo premiere support was that they helped us learn how to use Marketo to solve our specific business needs.  You get a named support agent and fast response time.  It’s an affordable solution and I would highly recommend Marketo premiere support for at least the first year.  In terms of implementation time, we were using Eloqua 9 and it took us two months to get everything transitioned and running on Marketo before we were ready to shut off Eloqua.  However, you have to keep in mind that we were doing the Marketo implementation in our spare time when we weren't developing and executing lead generation programs.

·         Eloqua is a powerful package, but almost everything requires custom javascript programming to be able to implement it.  For example, to capture a URL parameter using Query Strings in Eloqua requires custom javascript on the landing page.  In Marketo, configuring a registration form to capture URL parameters is a simple picklist process.  In my opinion, Eloqua requires a dedicated system administrator with javascript programming expertise to be able to leverage the platform (or a big budget to be able to fund that through consultants).  If you’re looking at Eloqua, I encourage you to consider the cost and time to deploy it initially and then try to plan for what happens after the consultants leave and you want to change something or take advantage of another feature – try to evaluate the total cost of ownership from both a budget and expertise perspective.

·         Act-On is an easy-to-use and affordable marketing automation platform with basic functionality.  It has a simple user interface and you can get started very quickly.  Whereas the implementation and training with Eloqua and Marketo takes weeks.  If you have limited resources, expertise, and goals for marketing automation, then Act-On is a great solution.  For example, if I just wanted to: send emails, create basic registration pages, integrate registration with a webinar platform, and implement a basic lead scoring model, then Act-On is a great solution.

For all three marketing automation packages that we looked at the analytics are lacking.  I still do most analysis by exporting data from Marketo and Salesforce.com into excel.  All three packages have limited abilities to segment groups of data by activity and data ranges.  Previous blog posts describe the challenges that I’ve faced in trying to analyze engagement levels to create different segment treatments based on engagement level.  For example, none of the packages made it easy to identify all leads that have clicked just zero, one, and two times in the past 90 days. 

In Marketo’s case, the analytics are designed for looking at an individual lead’s behavior instead of groups of leads’ behavior.  Marketo captures every activity that a lead does in a lead activity log.  The activity log is great for discovering and debugging what an individual lead has done.  However, you can only export activity logs for one individual at time.  That means if you wanted to analyze the activity logs of everyone that converted into a won opportunity, you would have to export each individual activity log and then combine them all into a single dataset to do that analysis.  If Marketo could make it possible to export activity logs for segments (i.e. smart lists), then it would be a much more powerful platform for analysis.

Overall, after one year, I’m happy with the choice that we made to use Marketo and I would choose it again given the resource constraints that a start-up works within.  Moving forward, I’ll try to continue to post interesting things that we develop and deploy in Marketo and Salesforce.com.

Marketo update March 2012

It's been a really long time since I posted an update to this blog on implementing Marketo and I've learned a lot.  I've seen lots of limitations and lots of cool functionality that is fairly easy to implement once you get used to doing things the way Marketo requires you to do them. 

I would still say that the Marketo user interface is weak, but it's gotten a little better with the March release.  You can move and rename some types of files, but then there are others that you can't move or rename - meaning if you want to rename it, then you have to clone it and delete the old one.

Here are a couple key learnings:

• I built out some really cool landing page and tracking functionality integrated with Marketo.  We've been able to create a cookie that captures a parameter from a tracking link so we can maintain the source of leads whenever they convert on our website and landing page forms.  The business benefit is that this tracking infrastructure makes it easy to see in Salesforce.com exactly how many leads or campaign members were driven by a particular lead source so you can measure conversion rates and return on investment for every marketing campaign investment.  That means if someone hits a landing page with a tracking link, the tracking data is stored in the cookie.  Then if that person navigates away from the landing page to visit our website before they convert, and then they come back to a form to convert up to 30 days later, the tracking data stored in the cookie is captured by the registration form.  In addition to this, there were some challenges due to limitations in Marketo in passing lead source data into Salesforce.com campaigns.  Fortunately, Salesforce.com just released cross-object workflow in their Spring 2012 release and I was able to develop a field update workflow on the Campaign Member object that solved that issue.  I'm planning to create a separate post with a ppt that explains this tracking infrastructure.
• We spent a lot of time working with the Marketo integration with Go-to-Webinar and learned a lot of painful lessons.  The pain that we experienced was bad data and the integration crashing a couple times.  The integration works pretty well once you understand the constraints and how it behaves.  Unfortunately, the Marketo docucmentation on this topic and lots of other topics is really poor.  For anyone planning to leverage the Marketo integration with Go-to-Webinar or Webex, here are a few key lessons:
• The main benefit of the Marketo integration is that you can start using your own registration forms on your website to register people for webinars.  That gives you the ability to customize the webinar registration questions, to automatically add leads to salesforce.com when they register for a webinar, and the ability to track conversion and drop-off rates on webinar registration pages.
• The Marketo integration to either Go-to-Webinar or Webex is designed to work with one Marketo program.  We were promoting a webinar with 3 different partners and had set up three different Marketo programs pointing to the same Go-to-Webinar event so we could track the leads separately for each lead source.  This started out fine, but then all sorts of problems occurred.  The connectors kept crashing.  Then the Marketo program started combining campaign members in SFDC from the different programs - effectively defeating the purpose of separate programs.  The bottom line - you can only set up one Marketo Program synched to one SFDC campaign and one Go-to-Webinar Event.  The ability to associate different lead sources that might drive traffic to the webinar required the tracking infrastructure that I described above.
• Marketo's Go-to-Webinar integration uses the Marketo Webinar Channel.  What that means is that your SFDC Campaign Members will be assigned member statuses by Marketo and it will cause all sorts of problems if you try to use SFDC campaign member statuses that are different from what Marketo uses.  My advice, use what Marketo uses for webinar campaign member statuses.  We tried using different ones and wound up getting all sorts of error values in the campaign member statuses.
• On the negative side, I've had some really poor experiences with Marketo Basic Support.  My experience with Marketo support is that they are under pressure to handle lots of cases so they point you to documentation that explains how the functionality works and then they close the case.  What they don't do is take the time to tell you how to apply that functionality to solve your specific issue.  And since they closed the case, you have to open a new case to try to get that answer.  And even if you get that answer, there's no guarantee that it's right.  I've had multiple experiences with a Marketo Implementation Consultant doing paid consulting for us where he's told us to do a certain thing to solve a specific issue only to find out later that it didn't really solve the problem.  I would consider that another example of Marketo people understanding how some functionality works, but not really understanding how to solve your specific business issue.  And the challenge is how much bad data you create or how much data you lose going through that learning curve.  To try to address this issue, we decided to sign up for Marketo Premiere Support where we get a named support agent and access to more senior support people.  So far, it seems to be working, but I'll weigh in on this in a few more weeks.

What's my overall opinion of Marketo at this point?  It has some nice, powerful functionality.  It's definitely easier to use than Eloqua once you get used to the Marketo user interface and workflows.  It also has plenty of warts in functionality and the user interface.  The analytics are really poor.  Marketo is designed for looking at the behavior of individual leads.  It's not designed for analyzing the behavior of groups of leads.  The Activity Log is really helpful for debugging individual leads because you can easily see what happened or didn't happen at the field level.  Overall, it seems to be working okay and we're finding ways to work around the deficiencies.  In my opinion, Act-On has a basic product that is very easy to use and the question is whether they can add more robust functionality to catch up with Eloqua and Marketo.  Sigh,.....If I could ever get some VC funding and some good software engineers, I think I could define requirements for a SaaS marketing automation platform that could blow away Marketo and Eloqua with the right combination of ease of use plus functionality.

Marketo Analytics are disappointing

Yesterday, we did our last Marketo Quick Start session with our implementation consultant and the session was focused on Analytics and Subscriptions (Reporting).  Unfortunately, it was the most disappointing session that we've had.  In the sales process, I felt like I was very clear in terms of the types of analysis that I wanted to be able to do in Marketo and I was assured that it was possible to export the data from the Marketo Lead Management module into Excel and I could the analysis there.  I was really disappointed to see that the analytics capabilities are really limited and the user interface was not intuitive at all.

The user interface required you to know to click a specific button in a specific part of the window and there was nothing in the workflow or intuitive about the user interface that would lead you to take that action.  The terminology on the screens is unique to Marketo and has little relevance to Salesforce.com terminology.  The more I deal with Marketo, the more I feel that the user interface is almost as poor as the user interface in Eloqua.  I would give Eloqua an F for its user interface and Marketo a D for its user interface.  Now I understand why Marketo wouldn't let us do a free trial of their product because we would have realized that their "ease of use" is not that good.

Back to the Analytics.  If you want to do some basic reporting, Marketo Analytics and Subscriptions are fine.  Subscriptions is simply Marketo's term for a report that runs on a regular basis and is automatically emailed to you.  In general, most of the reporting that is available in Marketo can be replicated and with better detail in Salesforce.com.  What Marketo is good at is looking at individual lead, contact, or opportunity behavior.  However, if you want to do any analysis of groups of leads, contacts, or opportunities to identify trends and averages, then Marketo doesn't do that very well.

We tried to look at two analyses and Marketo's reporting on both of them were not very useful. 

1) We wanted to run a report on new leads that came in from the website, what date they were created, and what specific content or form on the website generated the lead.  Marketo could easily show us how many website leads were created and what was the source of each lead.  However, when we tried to get the system to show us the create date in addition to that data, Marketo couldn't do it.  In salesforce.com, I would simply run a report with Create Date, Lead Source = Website, and Lead Source Name to get that information.  Marketo was unable to break down the data along those dimensions.  It could only generate a table showing the aggregate leads in that timeframe by the source of each website lead.

2) This is a more complex analysis, but my expectations had been set that Marketo could export this data into a spreadsheet where I could analyze it.  I wanted to do an analysis based on engagement level.  This engagement activity analysis can be used to segment your database to identify leads that are highly engaged and leads that have low engagement so you can potentially drive different marketing programs based on a lead's level of enagement.  Example, for someone that is unengaged, then send really interesting subject lines just to try to get them to open an email and click through or send them a survey to try to understand what they're interested in.

So we tried to run a report to identify all leads based on number of email clicks that they've done.  Example:  Identify all people that have never clicked thru on an email, all people that have clicked once, all people that have clicked twice, etc.  The only filter that was available in Marketo do this analysis was "clicked email a minimum of X times."  So if I want to get a list of everyone that has clicked only once, I would have to run three reports (everyone clicked mininum zero times, everyone clicked minimum 1 time, everyone clicked mininum 2 times).  Then I would have to use Excel VLOOKUP to compare all three spreadsheets to find only the people that have clicked one time.  Our database is so big that doing that analysis with 200,000 records would be painful.

Here are a couple other issues with Marketo reporting/analytics that people should be aware of:

• Marketo doesn't have a way to filter out data based on IP address.  What that means is that when you're visiting your landing pages and clicking emails to for testing, your visits and clicks are going into the Marketo reporting.  Marketo doesn't have a way to filter visits from your IP addresses from their database.  What that means is that your visit data is going to be inaccurate.  Marketo's position was that your number of visits will be small relative to your total visits so the level of error should be acceptable.  Really disappointing that you can't filter out your testing from the Marketo data.
• It's not practical to analyze the data in the Marketo Activity Log.  Marketo has an activity log that tracks every activity on a lead record including clicking emails, site visits, downloads, and field value changes.  So if an address is updated or information is entered into a field, that goes into the activity log.  This is great if you want to look at an individual.  The activity log is useless if you want to do any analysis to identify trends.  Example:  Analyze all Leads that converted into Contacts over the last 30 days to identify what activities drove conversion across those people.  Marketo is designed to look at each person individually.  It doesn't have the ability to analyze that group of people to identify any trends.  So I run the Activity Log report and it generates 100 people that have converted from lead to contact over the last 30 days.  It provides a list of each person.  You can click on each person and will display the detailed activity log for that person.  The activity log contains every single change that occurred to that lead.  So you have field value changes in addition to activity.  There's no way to export that list for all 100 people in the report.  What I would have to do to do any trend analysis would be to export the activity log as a spreadsheet for each individual resulting in 100 separate  spreadsheets.  Then I would have to combine all 100 spreadsheets to be able to do the trend analysis that I'm interested in.  You could do it, but it's not something that you would want to do ofter or with large numbers.  I was expecting to be able to export the data for all 100 people into one spreadsheet and to be able filter out field value changes - not possible in Marketo.

If we had done the Analytics and Reporting Quick Start at the beginning of this pilot project, we might have bailed at that point.  However, we're so deep into Marketo now, that we're probably going to just deal with the poor analytics capabilities and find manual workarounds.  If Analytics is important to you and you're considering Marketo, I would encourage you to look at the Analytics and Reporting aspects of Marketo early in any evaluation or pilot project.