Lead Assignment through Marketo - Best Practices and Process | Community
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Ajay_Sarpal2
Ajay_Sarpal2
New Participant
September 15, 2016
Solved

Lead Assignment through Marketo - Best Practices and Process

  • September 15, 2016
  • 3 replies
  • 12351 views

Hi, Everyone

We’d like to leverage Marketo to assign leads to appropriate lead-owners based on territories once a lead becomes MQL. Could someone please share his/her experience on how to do this in Marketo? Although, our Marketo instance is synced with SFDC but we still want to leverage Marketo to assign leads to appropriate lead owners.

Looking forward to your response, and any help in above subject will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks and best regards,

Ajay

Best answer by David_Gaible

Hey Ajay Sarpal​ sorry for the delay. Cascading assignment rules would look something like this! These smart lists would just be the logic that determine which reps get which leads.

3 replies

P
pierceu25628284
New Participant
November 24, 2016

Hey Ajay,

IMO the initial problem here is your sync delay. Although clients with larger instances (in the millions of records) can experience lags, 4 hours is way longer and there are likely some things you could do in the short-term to fix the lag. Low-value but high volume smart campaigns like opens emails, or visits webpages can really wreak havoc on a system and provide little value to anyone. We just recently helped someone that was experiencing day long delays in their instance everytime they sent out an email blast to be able to use Marketo as it was intended again.

So - before making a work around for one issue, I would start at the root cause.

SFDC lead assignment is more powerful than Marketo's, so if its not working it was either not setup correctly in SFDC or SFDC is not getting the data it needs to assign properly. This is very possible. Given you are assigning based on country, I would consider setting up some data management programs based on the inferred state/country if state/country is empty. This will ensure you at least have the data and the assignment should work.

Anyways, there are a couple of tips. Hope that helps.

Ajay_Sarpal2
Ajay_Sarpal2Author
New Participant
November 28, 2016

Thank you, Pierce!

David_Gaible
David_Gaible
New Participant
November 9, 2016

Hi @Ajay Sarpal​ - it can be done! I strongly second all the recommendations to have Salesforce handle lead assignment, but I've been in a situation where we handled complex lead assignments within Marketo.  The rules you have are thankfully fairly simple - just create some smart lists with the logic, and then use cascading assignment rules to assign the correct owner before forcing the sync to Saleforce.

Ajay_Sarpal2
Ajay_Sarpal2Author
New Participant
November 9, 2016

Hi, David

Thank you for the valuable suggestion. I can definitely create smart lists in Marketo. Could you please show some examples with me about the flow steps for this scenario? how to design the workflow? If you can share the picture with some example of workflow - it would be really appreciated!

Thanks and best regards,

Ajay

David_Gaible
David_Gaible
New Participant
November 9, 2016

Sure thing. It was at a company I'm no longer at, so I'll mock up something similar this afternoon and post some screenshots.

P
pierceu25628284
New Participant
September 22, 2016

Hi Ajay,

Good question.

The first question I would ask is, why do you want to set them up in Marketo?

Although this is definitely 'possible', we always recommend that our clients set lead assignment up in Salesforce. It's simply a much more robust and powerful lead assignment engine than Marketo.

Knowing the answer to 'why' would help recommend the optimal solution.

Ajay_Sarpal2
Ajay_Sarpal2Author
New Participant
September 22, 2016

Hi, Pierce

Thank you for the swift response. We’ve two issues here:

1. There is a severe lag between our instance of Marketo and SFDC. The lead scoring is not updated even after 4 hours in SFDC – we’re using the custom fields to score our leads including total-lead-score is a custom field too. This means MQL stage is not getting updated as quick as we want in SFDC. Could you please suggest on how to get this fixed?

2. The lead-assignment-rules in SFDC are not set properly, and our Sales Ops team is suggesting us to disable SFDC rules and create them in Marketo.

Here is what we’re looking to achieve in Marketo:

1. AE XYZ : (Lead: CountryEQUALSUnited States,US,USA,United States of America) AND ((Lead: State/ProvinceEQUALSNJ,New Jersey,NY,New York,PA,Pennsylvania,VT,Vermont) OR (Lead: State/ProvinceEQUALSAl,Alabama,AR,Arkansas,DE,Delaware,FL,Florida,GA,Georgia,KY,Kentucky,MD,Maryland,MS,Mississippi,NC,North Carolina,SC,South Carolina,TN,Tennessee,VA,Virginia,WV,West Virginia)) AND (Lead: Lead OwnerEQUALSMQL)

2. AE ABC: (Lead: CountryNOT EQUAL TO,United States,US,USA,United States of America) AND (Lead: Lead OwnerEQUALSMQL) AND (Lead: Prev OwnerNOT EQUAL TO00GF000000757wB) AND(Lead: Geo RegionNOT EQUAL TOAMERICAS)

Should you need additional details, please let us know.

Best regards,

Ajay

Guy_Goldstein6
Guy_Goldstein6
New Participant
September 22, 2016

Hi Ajay,

Like Pierce, we generally recommend to our clients that they handle lead assignment in Salesforce and not through Marketo. There are a number of reasons, but the simplest is that you have to work very hard to twist Marketo into making complex decisions at a single point. It's certainly achievable using a series of smart lists and a large choice, but Salesforce is far more elegant (and Leandata is even better, but I'll assume we're still between SFDC and Marketo).

Based on your comments, the lag you are experiencing sounds as though it may be the result of your natural sync cycle. Marketo natively syncs updates with Salesforce on a rolling sync cycle with a 5 minute gap, this means that if the cycle you are on takes 15 minutes, and there's a 5 minute wait, it may take 20-30 minutes for updates to be pushed through.

If this is the case, you can "force sync" leads when they become MQLs using the "Sync lead to SFDC" action - This essentially tells the lead not to wait it's turn and to sync straight away. This should help resolve the MQL lag, which will allow you to go back to leveraging Salesforces easier to manage assignment rules.

If you also need to have the data in Marketo, there is a classic maneuvre - The SFDC double sync... Where you sync to SFDC, wait 2 minutes, sync to SFDC. This has the effect of pushing the data to Salesforce, giving Salesforce a chance to update the record, and requesting the updates back. It's not pretty, but it's been a staple of the Marketo Admin's toolkit for at least the past 7 years and it gets the job done.

Hope this helps,

-- Guy

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