Did you hire a full time fully dedicated Marketo Admin?

We're < 100 employees, so I handle the Marketo admin and data management tasks (part time), but most program tasks (e.g. creation (mostly by cloning) of programs, landing page, email, share button, etc. ) are delegated thoughout our marketing team.

It's been 2 years since we deployed the platform, so my recollection is not real clear now.  I went through the 3-day online training course, which was very helpful.  We were up and running in a couple of weeks and my discusssions with the enablement person were unstructured and probably not as informative as they could have been in part because I didn't know what I didn't know. 

The onboarding process may be very different now.

We have over 725 employees - with about 45 currently in the solution ranging from designers, to marcom, to marketing managers, developers, to executives.

I managed the initial deployment but we are looking at a resource to be the central admin - due to bandwidth. I would not recommend letting there be numerous people in charge of admin/config unless you have a very strong change management procedure - especially if you have your instance connected to a CRM solution.

I'd encourage you to consult your rep and success manager and get a clear understanding of what is included and could/should be - those hours are for your benefit and theirs to ensure that you can get up and running quickly. You can also tailor the engagement if needed with additional professional service hours.

There are also numerous partners that can facillitate if you only need occassional tweaks - all the way up to outsourcing.

Ron,

It completely depends on the size of the marketing team and your firm.

When I first deployed Marketo, I was the global admin and regional marketer and then cross-trained everyone on using the system, but no one else had admin powers. You need to make sure only a highly trained marketer or SFDC Admin has that level of access. They need to understand how Marketo+SFDC work and how they work apart. Admins should be comfortable being the tech support for marketo before you call Marketo.

Larger teams or firms with larger systems issues will need someone who is a CRM/Marketo Admin who knows how to handle API/jquery. Some teams I've seen have SFDC Admins, Marketing Admins, and a Web Guru/HTML guy and then marketers who run various programs.

I found the training hours Marketo offered to be a bit helpful for the non admins. I did not try to "accomplish" anything during those sessions because I had already defined what needed to happen. I'd use them to help train the rest of the team.

As I discuss in the Marketing Rockstar's Guide to Marketo, any system should have clear rules around Naming and Organization and any upload procedures.

Ron,

I did almost everything.  We have a small marketing group so I set everything up in marketo except for syncing Marketo & SFDC. We were up within a week or 2.  That's long nights and weekends of reading and being totally immersed in marketo.  But now I'm tasked with having to clean up our dupes, inactives and bad records. (not the fun stuff). The biggest help for me are  the people in the community: osh Hill, Elliott, Eric Hollebone and Jep Epstein.  Our enabler was helpful, but once our hour is up and you're not quite done with the project at the hand, you're out of luck.  My boss experienced that, but one of the consultants I worked with did see me through my completing a task so that was nice. 

We are a company of around 1400 and we have 2 dedicated marketing automation specialist - myself and another. I am the lead admin and the other specialist is an assistant admin. We also are the ones building out 90% of everything but we are not creating the content. We use a submission form and process for having a campaign launch. They submit everything, we execute. I do all of the back end data campaigns, managing webforms, creating/updating templates, etc as well. 

Our implementation was smooth and easy but that was only because I was a Marketo user at a past company and had already implemented Marketo before. We used our onboarding time for more complicated setup with our revenue cycle modeler.

Glad I could be of help Michelle!