There’s a joke out there that if you ask a consultant any question, the answer will be, “It depends.” And I definitely DO give that answer all the time because I’m contractually obligated to do so seemingly simple questions are often more complicated than they might appear on the surface. And when you ask someone who’s been in the game a long time, many factors come into play before I can recommend a solution to a specific problem. The market you operate in, your team’s skill, what your board of directors cares about, and what CRM permissions you and your team have… variance in all of these and more- can change what I think the optimal path forward is.
That said, over the years, there are a few MOPs’ opinions that I have come to believe so strongly that I am almost willing to deal in absolutes. (Don’t worry, Obi-Wan) Here are my top 5 MOPs opinions that I Will Die on This Hill to Defend™️:
1. A custom object is the single BEST way to track your funnel performance metrics
Yes, it’s better than simple date stamps. It’s better than using an operational Lifecycle Campaign. And yes, there’s a learning curve. But when you get it set up correctly, the reporting is magic.
I won’t go into too much detail here, but using a custom object in your CRM to track your funnel is superior. You can better track multiple sales cycles, and capturing point-in-time data (think, “What was the value of field X at stage Y?”) becomes easy.
It also becomes easier to tie in SLAs with your team. A custom object doesn’t have to take over your entire CRM function like other solutions. It integrates across Leads and Contacts (and Accounts, Opportunities, Campaigns, etc.), allowing all your reporting to live in one place.
I only sometimes recommend this to clients because it can be expensive to set up and maintain. It may not be worth it if you don’t have many people running through your funnel multiple times. However, it remains simply better than all of the alternatives.
>>Related: How to Use a Salesforce Funnel History Custom Object<<
2. There are ONLY 2 correct ways to set up your Campaigns in Salesforce (and you should almost certainly choose Option 2). Anything else is WRONG:
Either create one Campaign per combination of Channel and Offer (e.g., My Awesome eBook—LinkedIn, My Awesome eBook—Paid Search, etc.) or one Campaign per Offer and infer the Channel from UTMs captured on the Campaign Member. If you mix and match Channels and offers at the Campaign level, you will have a bad time. You’ll either arbitrarily choose one over the other or double-count, and your reporting will be a mess. Pick a lane, and stay in it.
>>Related: How to Structure Salesforce Campaigns for Attribution<<
3. Global forms >>> individual forms for each asset
By using global forms across your website, you can simplify form management and maintain consistency while still delivering personalized experiences. The key to achieving this lies in utilizing hidden form fields or scripting on the landing page to dynamically redirect users to different thank you pages based on their responses or other criteria. This simplifies your scoring, shortens your development time to spin up a new page, and–most importantly–makes it easy to maintain a consistent experience across your forms. If you suddenly change the picklist values for Job Role, would you rather have to update 6 forms or 423? Some MAPs support this architecture better than others, but global forms are the way to go.
>>Related: How to: Use Global Marketo Forms with Unique Thank You Pages<<
4. A wait step to “allow time for X to happen” is unacceptable in almost all (>99%) cases
It does not guarantee that X has actually happened. Whether it’s in your MAP or the code on your website… do better. Don’t let me catch you doing this. Very rarely do you have no alternative besides a wait step. You can find a better event to trigger off of, and it will make things both more reliable in their execution as well as easier to troubleshoot when things do go wrong. Whether using an executable campaign in Marketo, triggering a field update, or adding an event listener instead of using setTimeout(), there’s almost always a better way. Don’t be lazy.
5. Take the time now to set up your processes in a scalable way
It is always worth it to spend 10 hours now to save yourself 10 minutes a hundred times in the future. It’s easy to think, “Oh, this will just take a few minutes. I’ll do that manually.” If “manual process” doesn’t set off your spidey sense as a Marketing Ops professional… you might be in the wrong line of work. Whenever I get a new task, I always think about how likely I am to need to do this same thing again in the future. Then I’ll think about the variations that might change each time and craft a process/template/code so that I can set those variables, clone/run my code/etc. and Away. We. Go.
>>Related: How to: Use Marketo My Tokens and Templates to Scale Webinars<<
A bonus corollary: it’s often cheaper to just hire an expert than struggle through it yourself. Yes, I *can* write Velocity, but for use cases beyond the simple, the opportunity cost is usually higher than just contracting it out to Sanford Whiteman… 😂
What *strongly held beliefs* do you have? If you’re looking to supercharge your performance metrics, streamline your campaign setups, or ensure your forms and automation work at their best, then you’re in the right place. Share your MOPS opinions and annoyances you have with me at this year’s MOps-Apalooza 2024 where I’ll be speaking yet again!
If you’d like to hear more of my takeaways and MOPs opinions, check out my recap blog from my time speaking at MOps-Apalooza (the #1 community-led annual conference for Marketing Ops and RevOps professionals).
