Best practices for data flow & management

Wow, that question is really quite broad. I would start with some follow up questions:

• What data points are you collecting?
• Do you have an integration with CRM?
• Also as dictated by your CRM, but also from a Marketo perspective, which fields need to be normalized?
• Generally, what is the data quality you are receiving on entry?

In general, I would say you can leverage forms functionality to get data in clean there. An example would be to provide a picklist for the country field of an address instead of free text. List uploads is going to be an educational topic with your Marketo users. So there are ways to minimize the need for normalization, but depending on what is required there are ways in which Marketo can be helpful to normalize after creation.

In addition to updating form pick lists and list import templates you could utilize smart campaigns to normalize data. For example create a campaign to standardize state values (e.g. CA is normalized to California).

Some common fields to look at to normalize data are:  

• Province/State
• Country
• Product interest fields
• Person Source fields
• Job Title/Audience fields

Just another idea for a normalization flow:

Collect "Job Title" on a form as a free text field. (That is usually the case, as you can't really foresee what job titles your audience might come up with). And then normalize "Job Title" into "Job Role" by using a filter like Job Title contains "marketing" to set "Job Role" to "Marketing". And also normalize Job Title into "Job Seniority" by setting Job Title contains "director" to Job Seniority = "Director".

So you transform a "Director Marketing" into two clean values in Job Role and Job Seniority which you can use for scoring or segmentation - much better than you could with that free text mess in Job Title.