Marketing Automation

Marketo Sales Insight: The Most Misunderstood and Underutilized Tool in Marketo

You heard that right. I’m making a bold statement here. Out of all the features in the Marketo toolkit, Marketo Sales Insight (MSI) is by far the most misunderstood and underutilized of them all. MSI is so often overlooked that many sales reps don’t even know it exists. This shouldn’t be the case! MSI is one of the most useful tools for improving sales performance and creating alignment between Marketing and Sales.

You may not even know what MSI can do for you, or if it’s even available to you. Read on to learn more about how you can uncover all the many benefits of MSI.

Know what your buyers are saying… Even when they aren’t talking.

What if your sales team could…

  • Know that a key prospect has just visited 12 pages on your website
  • Know when a target account has just opened an email sent by your marketing team
  • Have leads prioritized based on urgency and their relative digital engagement compared to other leads
  • Know that the CFO of a late-stage deal has just gone to your “About Us” web page and read three case studies
  • Leverage marketing created emails right from within your CRM to customize, send to your contacts, and track opens and click-throughs

You can with Marketo Sales Insight!

What is Marketo Sales Insight?

  • A way for sales to read the digital body language of leads and contacts
  • A measurable way for sales to send emails that track opens and clicks
  • A critical element in building an account development plan
  • A tool to communicate important milestones and interesting moments captured by the Marketo munchkin code, forms, and emails

MSI Best Practices & Strategies for a Successful Deployment

Getting Started: Pilot Considerations

  • Follow MSI best practices: Be thoughtful about your MSI strategy. Set up your ‘stars and flames’, interesting Moments, and which emails and campaigns you’ll want sales to leverage
  • Go where the data is: Choose pilot reps with a good volume of behavioral marketing data flowing into their sales territory
  • Phone a friend: Choose pilot reps who are marketing “friendlies”— they will be willing to work through the bumps of a pilot in a positive manner
  • Influence matters: Choose pilot reps who will positively influence their peers to adopt MSI after the pilot
  • Training is important: In our experience, each rep should go through 1.5 hours of setup and training from a hands-on trainer
  • Monitoring is critical: Marketing should closely monitor the pilot. Talk with the reps frequently. Find out how much they are using it
  • Make adjustments: Adjust the critical elements such as ‘stars and flames’, interesting moments, emails and campaigns to remove any friction with using the tool

From Pilot to Rollout

  • Leverage Pilot Reps as Advocates: Internal sales champions are critical to driving adoption
  • Activate Marketing Campaigns: In Marketo, select and activate all programs you want the reps to be able to add leads and contacts to for Marketing to include in the program
  • Activate Emails: In Marketo, select and activate all emails you want the reps to leverage in MSI or using the Outlook plug-in
  • Training and Monitoring is Critical: Just like with the pilot, only broader
  • Accountability: Ensure Sales is using it by creating and sending Smart Lists that mirror data in MSI to reps. Ask them if they have seen hot leads in MSI and are following up. Marketing leaders should do the same with their Sales peers

Nuanced Follow-Up… Not Stalking

  • Leverage this information as account intelligence to understand the level of interest and buying stage of leads and contacts
  • Use it to inform an account management plan
  • Form completions – phone and email follow-up is fine but consider the buying stage (remember that people don’t want to be sold to too early)
  • Other actions (web page visits, branded searches, email opens) – be careful here! Enable a cooling period (4-5 business days), then follow-up in a general sense

Pro Tip: Work with your CRM admin to be sure sales reps have all the right records in their ownership. The MSI widget is most useful when all leads, contacts, and accounts are assigned correctly.

Another Pro Tip: Know how many licenses of MSI you currently have available and assign only that amount in the CRM. Overages can trigger outreach from Marketo, asking you for additional dollars. If you want or need more licenses, get in touch with your success manager for more information.

Don’t have time to stop your day-to-day activities and optimize MSI? Let us handle it and we’ll be your partner on getting the most out of the most underutilized tool in your toolbox. We can make sure you have the optimal setup in Marketo, work with your CRM team to make sure it is set up correctly for your reps, and train you and your reps on how to get the most from the tool. Or, reach out to us with questions, I love to geek out about marketing technology.

Kris Latulippe

Director, Marketing Technology Practice

As a Marketo Certified Expert, Kris brings a unique mix of marketing automation and operations expertise to every client engagement.

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