Welcome to part 1 of my “Sales Cloud for Marketing” series, where I will discuss how to force Marketing and Sales to work together to make data that we can use.
Today’s topic: building Marketo programs that play nice with Salesforce.
To start off, let’s make sure we get the nomenclature down. In Marketo, a program is a collection of things, essentially, that all come together to send/share/receive information with people, be they potential prospects or existing clients. When I speak to the marketing team, I generally tell them that, at a high level, a program is what we might more traditionally consider a campaign.
In Salesforce, they are still called campaigns.
To be 100% honest, I don’t know why Marketo chose to call them programs, I really don’t. I’ve searched, but I’ve never gotten a clear answer. I can’t imagine it was a trademark issue…
Anyway, point is, when you think of a marketing campaign – a coordinated set of steps that are used to promote a product or service – think “program.”
First thing’s first…
You’re going to need to ensure that your channel setup makes sense in both Marketo and Salesforce. For programs that you’ll want Salesforce users to assign contacts or leads to (or report on, for that matter), you’ll want to consider what statuses people can be assigned.
For instance, if you’re hosting an event and would like sales to track members in Salesforce, they might need to know if the prospect has been sent an invite, opened an invite, clicked a registration link on the invite, etc.
You’ll control these statuses in Marketo’s Admin section, via Tags. Marketo provides a tag called Channel, where you can change different statuses, based on the channel of marketing. Your email channels might have “open” and “clicked,” whereas a webinar channel might include “registered” and “attended.” Make sure you consider what marketing and sales would need to know for each channel.
Onto the Program
This is definitely a preference thing, but we have consistent naming conventions in Marketo for our programs, and I love consistency for reporting. Accordingly, I create programs in Marketo and sync them to new Salesforce Campaigns.
If you want to have different names in Marketo and Salesforce, that’s fine – it’s just going to add a step here.
Assuming you want to do it my way, all you need do is create the program in Marketo, then go to its Summary page. Under settings you’ll see the Channel (which you cannot change), created and last edited information, and “Salesforce Campaign Sync,” which will be unset. If you click on “not set,” a popup screen will appear, from which you can select “Create New” from a drop down. And voila – you now have a Salesforce Campaign that will sync with your Marketo program.
If you want to use different names, you’ll need to create the Campaign in Salesforce and instead of selecting “Create New,” find the one that you’ve previously created.
A word of caution: If you have a lead scoring process, don’t sync any campaigns that could provide new names. This sync will overrule your lead scoring and sync the new names to Salesforce once they’re added, regardless of score.
Congratulations! You’ve created a Marketo program that will now speak directly to a Campaign in Salesforce! If your OWDs in Salesforce allow it, your SFDC users will now be able to track a person’s movement through a Program/Campaign.
Next up: Campaigns from Programs (this time, it’s Salesforce)
You say Polymath like it's a bad thing... 