Which lead assignment is better? SFDC or Marketo?

I would only use Marketo's Sync Lead to SFDC assignment flow step for firms where there are very few rules or sales people. For example:

• routing directly to a small number of queues
• round robin routing for up to 7 people or so.
• sync to autoassignment rules (in SFDC) to just push lead or data updates immediately.

SFDC's assignment rules and triggers allow much more granular possibilities and can run more complex situations. If you have an SFDC admin, they can help manage this.

The answer depends on how many sales reps you have and how often your lead assignment rules change. Marketo assignment rules are easier to implement, but may become more difficult to manage if your sales team grows and your assignment rules need to change often. Also, if you're looking for a true round robin, Marketo is not the answer. You can use the "random sample" filter to send 5% of leads to Rep A and 5% of leads to Rep B, but there's no guarantee they'll get them in that order.

I'd recommend this free app from the SFDC app exchange: Round Robin Record Assignment - Salesforce Labs - AppExchange. You can modify it to work for leads. It's great because reps have control to take themselves out of the rotation if they are unavailable.

We used that app for a while, but now we're moving to a queue system instead of round robin. In other words, we'll have one queue where all Mid-Atlantic leads go and the first rep to grab the lead from the queue and call it gets to keep it.

The standard SFDC lead assignment rules also have their limitations. For example, if the lead is already created, you can't trigger the "Use Lead Assignment Rules" flag in SFDC from Marketo. So if the lead is owned by a queue or an inactive sales rep, Marketo won't re-assign it by running it through the current rules.

My preferred method is to use Marketo to tag the lead with the values I need to trigger SFDC workflow rules that assign the leads to the right queue. This gives me full flexibility to trigger whatever I need. Marketo flips a flag on the lead, SFDC checks if it's already owned by the right person and if not, assigns it to the right person.

Whatever solution you go with, create and keep a flow chart of what you need to do before you build it. This is very handy for gaining buy-in from the decision makers and gives you a quick way to answer "who's getting what leads" questions in the future. If you don't have Visio, Excel works just as well for this.

Building this logic out is fun. Enjoy

For the old leads, since you know who is the leads owner, it will be easier to set up in Marketo sync to CRM.

For the new leads, we assigned them in Marketo. You could create a "Operational" program, such as "Sync New Lead to CRM", then create queues for assign or change "Lead owner" based on assignment rules at your workplace.

Hope I understand your inquiry correctly and answered it.

Best,

Becky

We've been asking ourselves this for months - as we have a set of complex rules AND Round Robin.

We recently moved the assignment rules into SFDC, and will be turning it on next week - So I'll let you know if it's worth it!

Our Assignment Rules are now in Salesforce:

So we set up Lean Data to help us route to open opps and customer accounts, we then use several steps in Lead Assignment Rules via round robin queues.

So far it's been great, and fairly minimal work to turn sales reps on/off in the round robin assignment rules.

So moving lead assignment rules to Salesforce:

Pros:

Mediocre assignment time (3-5 minutes)

Easy to Manage

Round Robin works better than Marketo (if you have multiple choices before the random choices)

Cons:

Complex to set up

Due to the fluctuations of integration times between SFDC and Marketo, it's been very difficult to send alerts under 10 minutes.

CRM is always a best choice for this. From Marketo you can assign the lead to particular lead queue and then future using lead assignment rules in CRM you can assign the lead to specific lead owner and as mentioned in above comments, this choice will make things easy when you have big sales team.