engagement nurture vs Traffic Cop

Hey,

As is so often the case, there are advantages and disadvantages to both systems.

The traffic cop system provides you with crazy control over everything that's going on, but it gets pretty complicated pretty quickly and you've got to do a lot of 3D mapping to keep track of where it's all going.

Engagement programs are a piece of cake, they are super simple to use, but they lack any sort of customization... When you want to start making them do "clever" tricks you have to start really bending reality to make it happen.

Personally my biggest issue with engagement programs is the selfish cadence... where it's based on the admin's local time rather than user local time... i've always gone to a great deal of effort to try to ensure a great customer experience for people I'm communicating with and getting an email at 2am because they happen to live in a different region to your Marketo admin...

That said, the simplicity has it's own value, and the fact that you don't need to spend hours building out new tracks can save you weeks or even months of development time.

In other words, if you want to do something sophisticated, you're going to have to leverage the traffic cop system, if you're looking for something quick and straight forward, engagement programs offer the perfect solution.

Now if only we could get someone to reveal the formula for engagement score :)

Generally, yes, convert these to Engagements. How you do this depends on the system setup.

1. Create an Engagement for Nurture 1
2. create streams
3. add content as appropriate
4. Now you need to look at your traffic cop and replicate the Entry and Exit conditions inside Engagement 1. You still need a campaign to Add to Engagement, Stream=X for both Engagements
5. But since you have potentially 2 Engagements, you should have at least 1 campaign outside of both that manages the Entry to each Engagement. Again, this depends a litte on the criteria, but that's usually what you need to do.

I compare this process to moving (assuming you like where you are moving). Once you have gone through the hassle of packing, moving, reorganizing and organzing again, you are sitting in your your new pad and things feel so much better.You've gotten rid of all the old stuff and haveyour life organized with new stuff.However, it takes time and energy to get to that point.

I recently lived this with a project so very familiar with the process.

The benefits of engagement programs
- Reportable assets with engagement scores
- Streamlined processes for efficiency
- Flexability (Add and remove content easily, skip content, etc)
- You no longer have to say "traffic cop"

A few things to add to what Josh said...

• Disable to old traffic cop to ensure leads aren't getting two sets of content. This may be tricky depending on your traffic cop.
• Consider using Programs with an exclusion status so leads that got content in the old traffic cop campaigns don't get it again.
• Update a new Qualified for Nurture list to qualify future and existing prospects for nurture communications.Related to Josh's entry comments.
• If desired, use the opportunity to revamp your conversation with prospects.
• Figure out which stages you want to target (early, mid, late etc).
• Do you want to FastTrack prospects to different tracks to speed up buying process? If so, develop transition rules (if score >200, move to mid stage)
• Do you want to auto-move prospects from one track to another when content is exhausted?
• Do you want to pause (at Oppty?) and restart content (Recycle) to ensure communications are muted at the appropriate times?
•  

Traffic cops vary pe