I'm Looking For Initial Implementation Tips & Tricks?

There are many, many resources at your disposal. I found the best way to learn was just being in the platform and learning what every asset and program does. The Product Docs (Welcome to Marketo Docs - Marketo Docs - Product Docs) were a great place to start with the fundamentals.

Hello Kevin,

Here's the things I would do:

• Agreeing on a naming convention for your programs and assets like WC-YYYY-MM-Name of the Program (WC = Web Content)
• Creating Programs templates that would be clone over and over, leveraging tokens, triggering the right programs status and so on.
• Making sure you have good operational program to ensure long terme email deliverability (Marketing suspend leads who bounced more twice for example)
• Creating good emails and landing page templates with an easily understandable name.
• Centralizing forms, scoring, interesting, moments.
• Organizing a monthly meeting for your power users and sales/marketing team to agree on next steps and sync about best practices.

And of course, there is many more, but those are guidelines

Hi Kevin,

Alexandre's list is a really nice place to start. Adding on a few to think about/implement:

• Come up with a standard list of lead sources in the beginning, usually between 10 and 15 sources (webinar, tradeshow, partner referral, website direct, etc). Ideally these would be set globally and automatically in a program with smart campaigns, but at least let your team know that every lead should have a source and once it's set, it should never change. That's why it's a "source" field, not a last activity field.
• Have scoring centralized in it's own program, don't build it into individual programs because it will not be standard or easy to track down the road.
• Have a meeting with your team to come up with channels, what statuses to use, and what statuses will denote success. Think about all the different campaigns your company has run recently and plan on running in the future. If you are stuck on figuring out how to separate channels, think about what you would like to easily separate in reporting when you want to see what channels touched leads who turned into revenue. Not having a clear idea of what channels to use when causes large issues in reporting, because they are very difficult to manipulate once leads are in programs.
• Use roles/permissions to your advantage. If some people are just uploading lists, then only give them permission for that until they get permission errors while trying to make other changes. Then you can prevent errors and keep track of who is able to update what. I believe that the less people in the instance the better off you will be, so try to centralize roles (list uploads, email builds, report builders) as much as possible so that things are not being done in 10 different ways.
• Lastly I wanted to re-emphasize getting a program naming convention and folder structure down from the start. It makes a huge difference down the road.

Good luck!

Nate

Hi Kevin,

Everything listed above is spot-on. One thing to come on top from a platform and scalability perspective is if you are syncing with CRM, to not bring all fields over in the initial sync. Customers often struggle with sync performance due to superfluous fields or objects which are not necessary to the Marketer.

Have the Marketing team provide a list of needed criteria to run their campaigns and review it with IT. It's better to start with fewer fields and periodically add more then to start with everything and have that unnecessary overhead.

I just wanted to say thank you to each of you for your input... These are very helpful for a first time 'installer'. I am planning a series of process doc's for my team of 'super users' that will discuss naming conventions and lead management (with a focus on 'source / ownership'). If any of you have any process docs that you can share, I will gladly reciprocate when I am finished with ours.

Thanks again!