Justin Norris | Sr. Director, Solutions Architecture
February 3, 2021
If you spend significant time building in Marketo, you will very likely encounter scenarios where things don’t happen the way you’d expect.
For example, you may have two different Smart Campaigns – which are in themselves perfectly functional – produce an undesired result because they didn’t execute in the right order. I would say 90% of the issues I’ve had in Marketo have been some variant on this simple theme of order of operations.
Order of operations is often the difference between a stable, predictable, and effective Marketo instance and a disorderly chaotic mess.
If you aren’t constantly thinking about and controlling the order that things happen, your Marketo systems will eventually break, no matter how much cool stuff you build.
Do You Have a Race Condition?
(You may want to ask your doctor…)
Defined in Marketo-terms, a race condition is when a successful outcome of a process (e.g., a Smart Campaign) is dependent upon some other process being completed first, but those processes occur asynchronously and in an uncontrolled way. When the processes don’t occur in the right order, then the dependent process fails.
Symptoms of a race condition include:
Fortunately, race conditions are both preventable and treatable. Here’s how.
Tactics for Controlling Order of Operations in Marketo
The list of tactics below isn’t definitive, but it covers the most obvious ways to control order of operations and the ones I’ve found to be most useful. All these methods need to be used within a carefully-planned system architecture in order to work well, but that’s a subject for another post.
1) Keep Your Actions in a Single Smart Campaign
The simplest way to control the order of a series of flow steps is to keep them all in a single Smart Campaign.
Smart Campaign Pros, Cons & When to Use
Example: Form Auto-Responder
When a lead fills out a form, you want to add the lead to a Salesforce campaign, send the lead a thank-you email, and then send an alert to a distribution list. All these steps happen in quick sequence and have no other dependencies outside the campaign. So based on these requirements, a single Smart Campaign works very well.
2) Wait Step
A wait step allows you to pause your lead in a flow for a designated period of time before doing something else. While your flow is waiting, it gives a chance for other stuff to happen elsewhere in your system. Wait steps are the most commonly used (and misused) method for controlling order of operations that I’ve seen. Unfortunately, wait steps are still basically just guesses.
A wait step waits however long you tell it to, and has no awareness of what you might be waiting for. Systems are unpredictable – depending on conditions, your wait step might be too long or too short.
Wait Step Pros, Cons & When to Use
Example: Free Trial Emails
A lead initiates a free trial of a product. Your campaign sends a welcome email, then waits 30 days while the lead tries out the product. At the end of the 30 day period, the flow checks if the lead has upgraded their trial, and if not, sends an upgrade offer.
In this case, a wait step works just fine because we know the trial is exactly 30 days and we are checking their current state after 30 days before sending the next message.
3) Request Campaign
The Request Campaign flow step (and its companion, the Campaign Is Requested trigger) is oddly polarizing in the Marketo community. I find this feature inspires either passionate enthusiasm or antagonism among Marketo users, depending on who you ask.
I’m a fan of the Request Campaign. I find it the most direct and logical way of having one campaign trigger another. Additionally, a Request Campaign provides enormous flexibility in how you structure your campaigns and makes it very easy to route people through operational programs multiple times.
On the flip side, many people state that this trigger can slow down a Marketo instance. Now, I haven’t seen any hard and fast evidence or official statement that the Campaign Is Requested trigger requires more processing time than any other trigger on a one-for-one basis.
To be honest, I suspect that part of the issue is that the Request Campaign can lead to more “trigger-happy” design patterns, causing an overall increase in the volume of trigger campaigns. And that definitely can decrease overall performance, regardless of the trigger you use. However, even assuming it is a bit more resource-intensive, it doesn’t mean we can’t use this trigger; in some scenarios, it is still the most efficient tool for the job considering all the factors involved.
The main thing is to use it judiciously, which is a rule to apply to all trigger campaigns in general.
Request Campaign Pros, Cons & When to Use
Example: Centralized MQL Processing
You have a series of multiple flow actions that need to happen when someone fills out a fast track form, all of which terminate in a sync to Salesforce. You need to ensure that the Salesforce sync happens only once all the previous flow actions are complete.
Furthermore, your demand generation team is super form-happy, and you have over 100 unique form placements to deal with. You could recreate those flow steps 100 times in each form program followed by 100 “Sync to SFDC” flow steps, but this is brutal to maintain if anything changes, and makes it impossible to coordinate your sync with other processes. Instead, create a single MQL processing campaign in your lifecycle program that includes a sync flow step.
Now you can request it from anywhere you want, maintain one version of the process, and control when and how someone enters that flow. This uses only one Campaign Is Requested trigger and ensures that your process works even if a lead fills out the same form multiple times.
4) Static Lists
Static lists can be used in almost the exact same way as Request Campaign. Instead of a Request Campaign flow step, use an Add to List flow step. Instead of a Campaign Is Requested Trigger, use the Added to List trigger.
There are some benefits to doing it this way. Static lists can be deployed quickly and in an ad-hoc way, and disposed of just as easily. Lists also provide some additional insight that can be used in your operational reporting, since the list keeps a running count of people who have passed through the process. The main drawback is leads can only be added to a static list once. If you use the fast-track form example above, what happens the second or third time someone fills out the same fast track form?
To make sure your process doesn’t break, you would need to ensure you have additional automation to remove the lead from the static list when the process is complete. This is extra overhead and it creates the possibility for error (plus sets you up for more potential race conditions).
Static Lists Pros, Cons & When to Use
Example: Send Alert After Owner Is Assigned
When someone fills out a fast-track form, you want to send an alert to the owner if the record has an owner in your CRM (we’ll use Salesforce for this example). However, at the moment the lead fills out your form, they may OR may not already have an owner assigned.
If they do have an owner assigned, your campaign should send the alert to that person. If the owner is not yet assigned, you need to wait until the owner is assigned (an outcome controlled by several other processes in other systems) and then send the alert.
Campaign #1
The first campaign checks if the lead has an owner; if it does, the alert is sent, and if not the person is added to a static list to identify them as someone waiting for an owner.
5) Program Statuses
Program statuses are another very flexible method for controlling order of operations. The flow step is Change Program Status and the corresponding trigger is Program Status Is Changed. You can also use the “Member of Program” filter with specified program statuses.
Program statuses can be especially elegant when you are trying to coordinate a multi-stage operational process since the various stages of your process can map against the statuses of a program channel. For operational channels, make sure to exclude them from reporting and keep all your program statuses at the same number.
When a process is complete, you can easily move someone back to the first status if you want them to move through the process multiple times.
Program Status Pros, Cons & When to Use
Example: Lead Scoring Threshold
You have a single operational program set up to score your leads. Your scoring program has a defined score threshold. Leads reaching the threshold should be transitioned to MQL. Additionally, your program needs to allow leads to be recycled, at which point there is a holding period where they are not eligible to reach MQL status again.
After the holding period, their behavior score is reset to zero and they can reach MQL again.
Program Channel
ProgramCampaign #1
When the lead reaches your scoring threshold, change their program status to “Reached Threshold”. This should serve to activate a trigger in a central lead lifecycle processing campaign, (like the MQL flow above) which will handle everything associated with routing the lead to MQL.
Additionally, the other program statuses serve as a filter to ensure that leads who have already reached a threshold or are in purgatory after being recycled do not get re-processed.
Campaign #26) Data Value Changes
If you are orchestrating processes that involve updates to lead data, data value changes are a very natural way to connect them. There are many possible use cases here; the send-alert-after-owner-change example above is also a good example of a process triggered by a data value change since the Salesforce process of assigning an owner triggers the alert in Marketo when the owner value updates.
But there are a few restrictions here – most obviously, a field must exist in your schema in order to trigger off a change to it. For ad hoc use where a field isn’t already involved, it would be better to use another method, such as adding someone to a static list.
Data Value Change Pros, Cons & When to Use
Example: Data Enrichment for Lead Routing
You and your SFDC admin want to team up to create some automated lead assignment rules. To route leads properly, you need some key data values to be populated – and you don’t want to kill your form conversion by adding a bunch of new fields. Enter a new data enrichment vendor, who provides you with a webhook that you call in Marketo when the lead is created to enrich them with data like company size, headquarters location, and industry.
Your SFDC Admin sets up assignment rules so that when the leads sync to Salesforce they will get sent automatically to the right reps based on the enriched data. Huzzah! However, at first, you run into some problems. Both your data enrichment webhook and your lifecycle flow for new leads trigger off of “lead is created.”
You need to find a way to make sure that the leads are not sent to Salesforce until the data enrichment webhook has finished pushing in data. This can happen almost instantly or take 1-2 minutes depending on how the enrichment vendor’s API is behaving. The answer is to chain these actions together using a data value change.
Campaign #1
Your data enrichment process actually becomes the first step in your lifecycle processing, because it needs to be complete before you take any other action. So when the lead is created, you call your webhook.
Of course, this is an oversimplified example and in real life, there are other things to consider. For example, if your enrichment webhook fails for any reason, you need a backup to ensure the lead is still processed. But you can see how this method is a lot more bulletproof than a wait step.
You are essentially guaranteeing that your sync is not going to happen until the enrichment is complete.
Wrapping Up
Obviously, there are about five different ways of executing any of the examples I mentioned above. Those ways aren’t all created equal, but there’s room for people to prefer different methods for various reasons. That level of flexibility and freedom is part of what makes Marketo great.
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