Migrating from Marketo to Salesforce Marketing Cloud: What You Need to Know

Bobby Tichy: Welcome to the In The Clouds podcast. In The Clouds is a marketing cloud podcast powered by Lev, the most influential marketing- focused Salesforce consultancy in the world. Lev is customer experience obsessed and podcast host Bobby Tichy and Cole Fisher have partnered with some of the world's most well- known brands to help them master meaningful one- on- one connection with their customers. In this podcast, they'll combine strategy and deep technical expertise to share best practices, how tos and real life use cases and solutions for the world's top brands using Salesforce products today. Welcome to the In The Clouds podcast. My name is Robert Tichy alongside Cole Fisher. Cole, how are you doing today?

Cole Fisher: I'm doing stellar today, Bobby. Thank you. How are you?

Bobby Tichy: I'm just doing great. I really appreciate you asking. It's very thoughtful of you. Hopefully you've had a great week and we're really excited to talk about today's topic, reading and writing and arithmetic.

Cole Fisher: I can't keep it up anymore. So somebody made the mention that our podcast sounds like an NPR show. So we tried to NPR soften it up there.

Bobby Tichy: I don't know. I think that should be the opening. That could rival in the ghetto.

Cole Fisher: It could. Well, I don't know. We'll have to get some feedback on that. I think the feedback's going to be please be quiet, but I don't know.

Bobby Tichy: We'll have to pull our audience. We'll have to see what my wife and your mom thinks. Oh man.

Cole Fisher: No his wife is not my mom.

Bobby Tichy: I didn't know we were related. This is strange.

Cole Fisher: I knew we got along a little too well.

Bobby Tichy: inaudible.

Cole Fisher: This makes more sense now.

Bobby Tichy: I can't wait to see you at Christmas. Gosh. Well, thanks everybody for joining. We're going to talk a little bit about migrating from Marketo today and there's a number of different systems out there we've helped companies migrate from to Salesforce marketing cloud over the years and Marketo is one that's come up a lot more recently. It's been one that we've worked with for years. I worked at Marketo for a couple of years as well. And so I've got some behind the scenes knowledge, but I think one of the biggest things that is hard for when companies are migrating from one platform to another, is that there's always this naming convention and nomenclature that's different. And so we would just want to talk through some of those highlights. And I think the other thing too is why I think we're seeing more of Marketo now and why folks are moving over to Marketing Cloud is because their integration with Salesforce isn't as great as it once was on the Marketo side. And so as more folks are getting ingrained with Salesforce are moving more and more towards Marketing Cloud. So it will highlight the top five things to consider as you're migrating over to Marketo. And hopefully for those of you who are on Marketo now and thinking about the switch, or even just thinking about migrating in general, hopefully give you a better sense of things to think about and specific things to make sure that you're looking at when you're thinking about the switch.

Cole Fisher: So a couple of really important things to think about, and I'll say this and this is probably more true a few years ago, but at Lev a lot of our implementation work, especially for first time or new Marketing Cloud users, a lot of it felt like we were redoing implementations that have been done before, or redoing another partners or a self implementation or something like that. And a couple of the core reasons for this is because first off people are thinking of this as a lift and shift from their old ESP into the new ESP in the marketing cloud. And then once they have everything in place per their old instance, then they have this dream of, well, we'll just get apples to apples in place. And then we'll take care of getting all these new features and evolving in all these new exciting ways and taking advantage of all the reasons we bought Marketing Cloud in the first place. But the problem with that is they have an old data model, everything that was built around an old ESP, in this case, Marketo that doesn't align to what Marketing Cloud really does. And so, if you think about it in terms of lift and shift, you're really creating more work for yourself, than you're actually resolving and you don't get to take advantage of all those new bells and whistles and things like that, that spawned the whole reason you were buying marketing cloud in the first place. And that kind of brings us to the second big issue. And one of the more critical errors that we see. And honestly, one of the more common things we see is a lot of the times we look at this from an IT or technical solution lens when we think about what that implementation should look like. And Bobby, I think we were on a meeting just even earlier today where we were discussing this. And the fact of the matter is Marketing Cloud is so malleable, there's so much you can do, and there's so much flexibility in how you do it, that there's literally eight or nine ways to do almost anything you can picture. And so just because there's a technical way that you can implement something doesn't mean that's the best way. So what you really want to do is start with those overarching business goals, think of the objectives you're trying to solve and what those use cases should look like. So think about it without a technical lens whatsoever and think about it purely as what is the end state, what am I looking for and what is from the customer lens, from a strategy lens, from meeting company goals and objectives whether that's revenue or growth or engagement, whatever I'm looking for and how am I solving those problems. And then we back into it from the technical solution standpoint, because that's really where we can start taking advantage of everything that marketing cloud can offer. Again, it's so flexible and there's so much you can do with it that I feel like this is one of the worst errors we see is that we jumped the gun on solving a technical solution rather than really thinking about it from a business standpoint first. So I feel between that and the lift and shift, those are our two big ones that we see habitually across any ESP.

Bobby Tichy: I was just going to say the only other thing I would say there too, is that there's always the difference or the reasons why someone might be migrating from Marketo or any other system to Marketing Cloud, or just making a switch in general. There's always different reasons. It might be to your point business reasons. We want to increase our automation or increase personalization, or we're just not happy with the platform we're on or it's in a bad relationship with the vendor, or we don't feel like we get the service that we should, or the platform isn't meeting the needs that we have. And in any of those situations, almost always the business is leading that change. Like IT, or tech or the development team. There's certainly a part of that. And there might be certain areas when we think about Marketo or other platforms where they fall short technically, but the business is really typically driving that change. And so it's really important that as they're driving that change, they're intimately involved in the implementation of the migration, not just the selection of a new platform.

Cole Fisher: Yeah, absolutely. And when we think about it, in that manner, it's almost counterintuitive how when shopping for a new ESP goes on, we are addressing all these pain points. We are addressing the business cases and things like that. But once it's actually been selected, it seems counterintuitive that the business kind of takes a backseat role and turns it over to technical or something like that, that doesn't have necessarily that top of mind awareness of what those business cases are that we're trying to solve for. So it seems very odd that's a really common practice that once the ESP is selected, then that business case almost goes backseat for us, it's very strange. And I think the other thing is, and this is more specific to Marketo, but the whole part about thinking about lift and shift, but when we think about the entire data model itself, Marketo uses a completely different data model or a much less flexible data model than what is in Marketing Cloud. So you can really do a lot of different things in Marketing Cloud that Marketo doesn't really allow. So they follow very strict leads, accounts, and opportunity model and Marketing Cloud is entirely customizable in how you do that. And so the fact that it's a relational database and you're not using lists and your structure is completely different is something to really think about. If you're trying to do a lift and shift on leads, accounts, and opportunity for Marketo in the marketing cloud, you're going to hamstring yourself right off the bat.

Bobby Tichy: Especially because like you mentioned, no business has a predetermined data model. There's no business that we've ever worked with or any architecture that we've come across that's exactly like any other one. And so obviously if you're on Marketo and you're primarily B2B, the leads counts, opportunity model might not be bad, but even within that, there are going to be nuances and you can build out custom objects in Marketo just like you can in sales cloud within Salesforce. So you've got some flexibility there, but if you are a B2B company and you happen to have B2C and you're direct to consumer, or your B2B2C, there are all these different permutations that require different data models, or just may not require it, but it makes the job a lot easier for the marketers to do their job. And so it really can be a handcuff or handcuffs. Is that a thing? Why am I blanking on what a handcuff is?

Cole Fisher: I said, hamstrung, but you could be handcuffed to a bad data model.

Bobby Tichy: You absolutely could be. I haven't been arrested before, so I don't know if it's handcuff or anyway.

Cole Fisher: Not under your current alias, at least. So Bobby Tichy's may not, Robert Tichy, I don't know, there's a reason you're using another alias here.

Bobby Tichy: No comment. So yeah, that's a big thing. And especially when we start doing demos or start talking to folks about the data model or the way that the backend data model works within Marketing Cloud, they're always super excited about the fact that we can make it whatever we need it to be, and they can always add onto it later on. They're not tied into a specific data model if they get going.

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Bobby Tichy: The fourth highlight that we wanted to mention is all around the translations between Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. We mentioned at the beginning, there's always different naming conventions, nomenclatures between platforms. So there's a couple of the most common ones especially for those who are using Marketo or have used Marketo, you'll recognize some of these. On the Marketo side, a smart campaign is equal to an automation on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud side. It could also be a journey. So for those familiar with Marketing Cloud journeys can really do just about anything we want them to do at this point. There's still obviously some use cases and specific things when you use automation spore, but smart campaigns equate to automations and nurture campaign would be equated to a journey at this point on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud side. Landing page would be equal to the cloud page on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud side, within Marketo they have for their lists or their audiences, there called either smart lists or static lists. So a smart list is where a segment or a list might be automatically updated. So there might be a filter tied to it. So you need to think about this as a filter data extension or an automation or attorney segmentation, and then on a static list side, you can think about this as a data, such an audience. So it's just a one- time list that someone's built and maybe they're important to it, or they've built a query off of it, and they're not reoccurring, or they haven't built an automation to have it update on a recurring basis. A couple of other things that we want to mention as far as Marketo and Marketing Cloud is concerned, Marketing Cloud does not have lead scoring. So we know Marketo natively does because it was primarily built originally as a B2B marketing automation tool. Marketing Cloud originally built as a B2C marketing automation tool. So obviously inaudible has that capability on the Salesforce side, but Marketing Cloud does have a partner, a company called SalesWings that you can leverage. And we've had a number of different customers leverage this to utilize lead scoring within the platform. We've also built customized lead scoring elements through automations, as well as journeys. So there are ways to assign different grades or scores to contacts, even though it doesn't have native lead scoring. And then the last thing is around programs. And for those of you who know Marketo you know that term intimately, but the best example of this is on Marketo, you might have a webinar program and within Marketo a webinar program can be built as a template. And all of the assets can be copied to Marketo. In Marketing Cloud assets are built independently of one another so you'll do all that within content builder. So you can upload an image. You can create a landing page, you can do all those things, but you just organize them a bit differently. So as you're going through the implementation, whether you're working on your own or with a consulting partner or a systems' integrator just make sure you're thinking about a really nice naming convention or folder structure, to make sure you're organizing these different programs. I mean, you can still copy all of these assets and things. It's just a little bit different of a workflow than it is on the Marketo side. So number five, the last thing we want to touch on is when you're migrating and this really kind of goes back to the piece of a recommendation that we had at the beginning. This is not just for Marketo, this could be for any platform. So a couple of key things here is seeking unsubscribes between platforms. So you'll almost always dual send with the platform you're on today and the platform that you're migrating to. So what a really good idea is to make sure that you've got some kind of batch file process, or even if it's manual, once every couple of days sync on subscribes between the platforms, since you are sending from both to make sure you're CAN- SPAM compliant. Because if you're migrating from Marketo to Marketing Cloud, you're sending from both and unsubscribes are not shared in between you run the risk of CAN- SPAM compliance issues, bad deliverability, because you're still sending to people that have unsubscribed, even though they did it from a different platform. The second piece is phase migration. So do not perform a hard cut over. It's really difficult to do, just make a plan and execute against it, make sure you've got a good consultant or someone that can help you as you're going through this process. As we think about migrations and we typically think of them as starting with any kind of a batch or ad hoc email send, I'm just focusing on the email channel for now, then move to anything that's automated, then move to any kind of nurture or journey and last but not least would be anything that's triggered. So real time operational and transactional type of sense.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. And that's a really good point too, because it feels like if you've not done an ESP migration before, one of the common questions that comes from a customer is. will there be downtime during this migration? And we should probably just throw out a warning that if anybody ever tells you, yes, you should run far and fast. The reason you don't want to do this because it sounds wrong to have two ESPs firing at the same time, it was like, Oh, I'm paying for two ESPs, well you want to, for those very reasons, if you're not phasing out of one and tapering into the other, then you're going to set yourself up for a lot of problems, not just to mention downtime, but the inability to unsubscribe from the previous platform, interruptions of automations, not being able to set up a cinder reputation, things like that. That's a real problem. So if you don't have two ESPs operating at the same time during a migration you're in trouble.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And while there might be some areas where you've got to switch integrations or things like that, there really should never be a time where you're not able to do what you need to do to run your business successfully. A couple of last things, give yourself padding for the IP warming timeline. Most of the time for one IP address, it's about four to six weeks, but depending on the volume, you might have more than one IP address. So you'll want to take that into account, just make sure you give yourself some time, IP warming inaudible always run into a hiccup or two. It's not because anyone's doing anything wrong. It's just because ISP's have become really protective of their subscribers and customers over the course of the last dozen years or so. And then lastly, specifically when you're thinking about the end dates and that sort of thing, and again, this could be Marketo or any other platform once you've completely migrated off of the platform that you're coming over from. And you're fully sending from Marketing Cloud, you'll want to have about a full month before your contract ends with your current provider before you lose access. And that's the main thing around unsubscribes again, is there will be unsubscribes that trickle in either from your preference center or ISP feedback loop. So just making sure that you're grabbing those and bringing them over to Marketing Cloud is important. So just a quick recap of the five main things that we talked about when you're migrating over to Marketing Cloud from Marketo, think of your migration as a clean slate, don't just lift and shift, make sure that your business goals and objectives are front and center. And you're really solutioning towards those, make sure that you're thinking about Marketo and how it has a predetermined data model. So moving over to Marketing Cloud and having it completely customizable is a big win. And you'll want to probably reshape the way you do some of the things that you do on the marketing side. Go back and listen to those translations again, if you're going through from Marketo to Marketing Cloud, and just some of those key learnings from when you're migrating, and making sure that you're sinking unsubscribes, you're doing it in a phase fashion, give yourself a little bit of padding on the IP warming front. So jumping over to completely unrelated since it is March. And hopefully this plays in March. I mean, I guess we don't really know, or you're listening to it in March whenever you're listening to it. It doesn't matter. But favorite March madness tradition.

Cole Fisher: And I love me some March madness.

Bobby Tichy: Is it all around the NCWA tournament? Is it just because you like spring? What's the highlight of March?

Cole Fisher: If I'm being perfectly honest, part of it is the fact that things are falling out a little bit. I do enjoy the spring time. So things are looking up, the days are getting longer, I enjoy that part, that only amplifies what's going on because I think the Thursday, Friday of March madness is the two most exciting days in sports. And this is coming from mostly hockey and football and stuff like that, a big fan. But when it comes to college basketball, I don't get really into college basketball the whole season leading up to it until conference playoff time, because I need to know the seating and I get super into the brackets and starting a pool with friends and stuff like that. And losing terribly because every year I remember the one year that I got four for four on the final floor and I was like," Oh, this feels good." Where I missed five or six total games the entire time I was on point. I started putting money on this and now I've just been losing ever since. But I love that idea. There's so many games, there's almost an infinite number of possibilities a 0% chance of getting a perfect bracket, but so much excitement, so many upsets and stuff like that. So mine is probably feeling out the brackets, things like that. Although this year I'm starting for my first time, the tradition of what's called beef steak. So at St. Elmo's downtown, they have all you can eat, all you can drink and games on. And I guess it's just-

Bobby Tichy: That's cool.

Cole Fisher: You wear an apron because apparently you need it and I've not been here yet, but apparently it's great. And I don't know if you know this about me, Bobby, but I love food. So I'm going to do some work.

Bobby Tichy: I don't know. I might have to make a trip up for that. That sounds awesome.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. What about you? What's your favorite?

Bobby Tichy: Well, before we go there, how many brackets you usually fill out?

Cole Fisher: Well, I usually only do one, if I'm in multiple pools, I'll do slight iterations of it on the games that I was less confident or the ones where I think I have lower odds of winning, I'll pick more bold upsets. So I'm like, I feel like that 11 seed could make it and I'll pick them this time. And I know everybody does that, but then everybody's got both iterations of this game. So they're like, inaudible I called that. Yeah. It doesn't matter. If you missed it in four out of your five brackets, you can't brag about that. That's not fair.

Bobby Tichy: So it sounds like you got about three dozen you fill out each year. Are you also a multiple fantasy football league guy?

Cole Fisher: I didn't play fantasy football this year. In fact, the first time I ever played fantasy football was at Salesforce. And I just thought," Hey, I don't know the first thing about fantasy football." And I'm too much of a Colts fan to what I thought would be to pick intelligibly. And not because I couldn't pick any Patriots. I wouldn't take radio over luck at the time. And I was like," Well, I'm on a new team here. This'll just be a way for me and I'll pay the 20 bucks or whatever." And I'll probably get owned in this league and it'll just be a way to make friends and meet people. And so I named my team first place, assuming I'd get last. And I ended up winning and needless to say, I did not make any friends out of tha because that backfired, although I did win. So that was fun.

Bobby Tichy: I love the idea of people not knowing you and then logging in to see the standings and be like, who's this jerk, this arrogant guy who is winning everything and his name is first place for his team?

Cole Fisher: That's totally how it came off too. And I assumed I would get dead last with that name. And it would be the irony. And I'd be the lovable loser that everybody could get along with.

Bobby Tichy: Well, if anybody knows you, they know that you're truly arrogant and just the worst. So I'm not surprised.

Cole Fisher: All facts.

Bobby Tichy: I couldn't agree more on the Thursday, Friday. I usually take those two days off of work or I'll just work in the morning and then right at noon, I'll turn on the TV and just watch the whole day and order wings or just something like that, where you're just sitting and eating and drinking and just not thinking about anything else it's such a fun day. I don't do brackets anymore. I did them for a long time and I think it was probably 10 or 12 years ago I stopped doing them. And the main reason was because I couldn't enjoy the games and that's why also I quit fantasy football about a dozen years ago is because I'd be like, I want this player to do inaudible I don't care about the game. And so I just stopped doing it. So that way I could enjoy the upsets and the last minute buzzer beaters and not have to be upset with the team I picked loss or something like that. So I thoroughly enjoy it so much more than I did before. I miss actually filling out the bracket though because it was such a fun thing to do. After selection, Sunday, you go in, you pick all the games and stuff. And for those three days before the tournament, you're like, I'm going to win this whole inaudible thing.

Cole Fisher: I got this.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, exactly. Well, thanks everybody for listening. We really appreciate it. As always, you can message us at intheclouds @ lovedigital. com. If you've got any topics or subjects that you want to hear about or anything like that. And we'll talk to you soon.