What’s it like to inherit an existing Marketo instance?

I wasn't a new user but when I inherited a new instance one of the most important things to understand was how they typically structured their programs (so that I could come up with the next steps to improving on those), which channels/tags were being used and what wasn't really being used, and an outline of the SFDC fields that were used and their purposes.

If I had to pick just one thing, SFDC fields would be the most important to have outlined since there was a ton of garbage that hadn't been hidden/unsynced and I needed to know how the fields were used in order to properly segment the database and target the correct people.

It's pretty terrible.

You have no idea whats connected to what. Here are just a few I've encountered:

• Super old emails that are archived that are still going out
• Triggered email campaigns pointed at smart lists in the lead database (you change the smart list and a bunch of emails go out!)
• Database segmentations that are plain wrong
• Bad email compliance practices (marketing emails being sent operationally
• Landing pages that are getting traffic that have broken images, missing stylesheets, etc

What would help (some of these are available):

• created by, created date, modified date on everything
• consulting services - instance review
• ability to edit multiple smart campaigns, forms, emails at once
• being able to delete an asset, even if it's being referenced by another asset (this drives us insane!)
• access to all the reporting in RCE
• subscription to smart lists
• reporting on email complaints

I was a brand new user who inherited from a Marketo expert (she taught me a lot over a short period of time). There were other users who weren't quite experts who had used the instance prior to both me and her, so it was a bit of a mess that I'm still cleaning up.

The biggest hurdles I faced when I became the owner of our Marketo instance was:

• What services were actually included in our subscription, which took a long time to unwind and understand what features I should be using. It took me about 6 months to unwind what exactly I use, what I underutilize and what I need to get rid of (we didn't have anything set up for the Select subscription, I have no idea why that was our subscription before). This was definitely the toughest part, because the contracts really don't tell you anything, and most of the information about what is included in each license is extremely lacking or, even worse, outdated.
• Finding random trigger programs that affected Salesforce that I had no idea were running constantly, including entering a bunch of leads into an empty nurture stream.
• Because of the multi-admin adoption there were a tonne of fields that I had no idea what they did and where they were used and if the world would implode if I hid or unsynced them.

The best way to approach this question is to work backwards from reporting.  Decide what reporting exists or that you need and work your way backwards ..

Channels -->  Tags -->  Programs --> Emails/Landing Pages/ Forms --> Website/CRM/Data warehouse/ List Imports ---> Any other data sources.  By going through this process you will quickly realize what is missing and what exists, and then anything that doesn't fit into here you investigate.

I hope that helps!

Thanks,
M