Category: How To

Teams across industries are finalizing their 2025 budget proposals.

But how can they get their requests approved?

Lauren McCormack (Vice President, Revenue Pulse) and Brooke Bartos (Director of Marketing Operations & Analytics, InvoiceCloud) have the answers.

Last week, they hosted a practical session on creating compelling budget requests so your marketing team can get the resources it needs for the year ahead.

It features 5 actionable tips for justifying your budget, including a Business Case Template you can view and download here.

Watch the FULL recording above!

This is an important time of year.

We’re in a crucial planning season as teams across industries finalize their budget proposals.

And the question that many marketers have on their mind is:

How can I ensure these budget requests are approved by leadership?

Especially when marketing budgets continue to shrink year-over-year.

Which is why we’ve put together 7 practical tips for creating a budget proposal that leadership can rally behind.

Let’s get into it.

1. Identify Business Goals

Start by zooming out. Look at the broader business objectives that your company is trying to achieve. Whether you’re looking to enhance brand visibility, capture new customer segments, or support a major product launch, these high-level objectives serve as your guiding lights or “north stars.”

Every line in your budget should trace back to these fundamental goals, demonstrating to leadership that your proposed spending aligns with organizational priorities.
 

2. Understand Your Industry

With business goals in mind, take a closer look at market trends and competitor activities. Understanding your industry lets you emulate proven successful strategies, as well as identify opportunities your competitors have missed.

For example, should you invest in a heavily saturated channel? Or should you explore new channels that no one in your space has leveraged? Maybe there is a case to be made for both. A well-researched competitive analysis can help justify either approach.
 

3. Understand Your Target Audience

You can have the greatest campaign ever with strong branding and impactful copy. But if it’s not being put in front of the right people, it won’t produce the results you’re hoping for.

So if you haven’t already, start by developing data-driven Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) – we actually conducted an experiment on using ChatGPT to define your true ICP.

From there, identify leads in your database that match these profiles. Then, craft messaging that speaks directly to their needs, pain points, and decision-making authority.

And remember that audience targeting is an iterative process. Monitor your response rates, test different messaging approaches, and be ready to adapt based on results. Your budget allocation should reflect this commitment to continuous refinement (ie. Instead of allocating all your digital advertising spend upfront, space it out to reflect different phases of testing and optimization month-to-month.)

Note: It’s not enough to just have well-defined ICPs and good messaging; it’s equally important to keep your database up-to-date and free of duplicates. Dirty data will cause all sorts of other problems such as lost revenue and productivity, data privacy violation risks, and unreliable decision-making. Here’s how to create a data hygiene plan that works.
 

4. Determine the Right Marketing Channels

Knowing your audience is only half the battle. You need to meet them where they are. Is it most effective to reach them through social media platforms, SEO strategies, email marketing, TV and print advertising, or all of them?

Evaluate your options and allocate budget across channels that reflect both audience behavior and channel performance data.

But don’t spread yourself too thin either; It’s better to excel on a few key platforms than to maintain a mediocre presence everywhere.
 

5. Learn From Past Performance

Nothing builds credibility like proven success. Review your previous campaigns thoroughly and see what worked and what didn’t. Doing this allows you to learn from previous mistakes, recreate proven strategies, and build on past wins as you expand your scope.

When you’re presenting your budget to leadership, highlight those specific examples where strong ROI was delivered. These examples act as valuable proof of concept, showing that you can be trusted with resources.
 

6. Project Results (Especially Revenue Growth)

Building on your historical analysis from the previous tip, take things one step further by creating detailed projections for future campaigns. Leadership will have more confidence in your vision when you support it with reliable projections backed by good data.

Projected revenue growth is especially important here. Highlighting how your proposed initiatives will directly contribute to increased revenue is a language your CFO (and the entire leadership team) will understand.

It’s also a good idea to develop a system of transparency and accountability through regular check-ins – maybe in the form of a continuously updating model that leadership can monitor throughout the year, for example. This kind of thing will help maintain trust and is generally good practice.
 

7. Focus on the Opportunity

At the end of the day, leadership can overlook cost if the ROI makes sense. This is why it’s important to focus on the opportunity that your budget creates.

When you’re communicating with leadership, focus on the high-level vision. Paint a picture of the potential benefits while showing how your plan aligns with broader organizational goals.

And keep it simple! Overly technical details might lose them. Instead, emphasize value and outcomes.

Because when they trust your vision, they’re far more likely to invest in your plan.

As we’ve mentioned, marketing budgets are shrinking – which makes compelling budget proposals vital to the success of your team and your company.

In order to get buy-in, you need a convincing narrative backed by solid data. Use these tips to help you create a budget proposal that presents a clear vision for growth that leadership can confidently get behind.

And if you want to dive deeper into this topic, don’t miss our upcoming presentation called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Get: How to Secure Budget for Your Team in 2025”.

Learn more and save your spot here!

This is one of every marketer’s worst nightmares 👻:

Your plate is full and you barely have time to finish your tasks for the day, when your Marketing Manager asks you to upload a list to Marketo ASAP.

You get it done quickly, but your SDR says the leads have the wrong information!

The list is full of bad formatting and incorrect entries.

It’s a disaster. Some leads have already existed in your database for years and now have the wrong job titles, others have come from different sources, etc.

Fortunately, Marketo’s API has a solution – a “time machine” of sorts that allows us to revert data changes.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to roll back your data using the API.

Let’s get into it!

(This guide is for Marketo users and assumes a basic understanding of the Marketo API. If you want to learn more, check out our API webinar and an extensive API course by Tyron Pretorius.)

Note: Whenever we use the Marketo APIs, remember to obtain a Marketo API access token before anything else. This will be required to communicate with the API.

Step 1. Extract data value change activities.

First, we need to identify the recent data changes that occurred when we uploaded the faulty list. 

Using the Marketo API, we can pull a log of data value change activities. This will give us both the old values and the new (incorrect) values, allowing us to update lead fields with the original old values via the API in later steps. 

Start by acquiring the “paging token” using this code snippet:

 url="https://"+MUNCHKIN+".mktorest.com/rest/v1/activities/pagingtoken.json"
token=get_access_token()
params={'access_token': token,
        'sinceDatetime':sinceDate}
response=requests.get(url=url,params=params)
data=response.json()
nextPageToken=data['nextPageToken']

 
Next, use this code snippet to extract data value change activities:

url="https://"+MUNCHKIN+".mktorest.com/rest/v1/activities.json"
params={'access_token': token,
        'nextPageToken': nextPageToken,
        'activityTypeIds':[13],
        'listId': listID}
response=requests.get(url=url,params=params)
data=response.json()
print(data)
act=data['result']
while data['moreResult']==True:
    nextPageToken=data['nextPageToken']
    token=get_access_token()
    params={'access_token': token,
                'nextPageToken': nextPageToken,
                'activityTypeIds':[13],
                'listId': listID}
    response=requests.get(url=url,params=params)
    data=response.json()
    print(data)
    act=act+(data['result'])

 

Step 2. Isolate the old values from the list import.

Now that we have the activity log, we can pinpoint the old values that were replaced by the faulty list and extract them.

Use this code snippet to do this:

df=pd.json_normalize(act)
df=df[df['primaryAttributeValue']==field]
df=df.sort_values('activityDate')
df=df.reset_index()
df=df.drop(columns=['index'])
df1=pd.json_normalize(df['attributes'])
i=4
while i<len(df1.columns):
    df1=df1.drop(columns=[i])
    i=i+1
df1.columns=['New_Value','Old_Value','Reason','Source','Other']
df1.New_Value=pd.json_normalize(df1.New_Value)['value']
df1.Old_Value=pd.json_normalize(df1.Old_Value)['value']
df1.Reason=pd.json_normalize(df1.Reason)['value']
df1.Source=pd.json_normalize(df1.Source)['value']
df=pd.merge(df,df1,left_index=True, right_index=True)
df=df.drop(columns=['attributes'])
df=df.drop_duplicates(subset='leadId', keep="first")

 

Step 3. Update Marketo fields with the old (original) values.

We can now restore the old values to our leads using the Marketo API. This process requires a specific API call to update each lead’s information back to its original state.

Use this code snippet to get you started:

ids=df[df.columns.to_list()[2]].to_list()
camposval=df['Old_Value'].to_list()
for i in range(len(camposval)):
    if camposval[i] == None:
        camposval[i] = 'NULL'
STEP=300
a=math.ceil(len(ids)/STEP)
i=0
while i < a: 
    tempids=ids[i*STEP:(i+1)*STEP]
    tempcamposval=camposval[i*STEP:(i+1)*STEP]
    params={'action': 'updateOnly',
            'lookupField': 'id',
            'input':[]}
    j=0
    while j<len(tempids):
        lead={'id':tempids[j],
              fieldRest:tempcamposval[j]}
        params['input'].append(lead)
        j=j+1
    token=get_access_token()
    url="https://"+MUNCHKIN+".mktorest.com/rest/v1/leads.json?access_token="+token
    headers={'content-type': 'application/json'}
    i=i+1
    response=requests.post(url=url,data=json.dumps(params), headers=headers)
    print(response.json()['result'])

 
Now, when we look at our Marketo instance, all the lead values should be reverted back to what they were before the faulty list was uploaded – crisis averted!

With a deep understanding of the Marketo API, we can find efficient solutions like this to problems that would normally require countless hours of manual cleanup.

So, next time you mistakenly upload a bad list, don’t panic!

Use this guide as a framework to quickly and efficiently reverse those changes, ensuring your SDRs have the most accurate lead information possible.

If you need help with this guide or have any other questions about the Marketo API, you can book a chat with us here.

If you’re a Marketo user, you’ll know that it’s great at scaling.

It offers robust templates and tokens to streamline marketing operations.

But with that said, there can still be plenty of manual work involved in the form of cloning programs, updating tokens, and activating smart campaigns.

If you’re running an instance with 10 campaigns per day, for example, that’s going to be a real challenge. And if it has 1000 campaigns per day, it’s pretty much impossible to maintain accuracy and consistency — even if you have an amazing team.

The solution: leverage the Marketo API to automate these repetitive processes.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to harness the Marketo API to save time, ensure consistency, and enable greater scalability across your marketing initiatives.

Let’s get into it!

(This guide is for Marketo users and assumes a basic understanding of the Marketo API. If you want to learn more about the API, check out our webinar as well as an extensive course by Tyron Pretorius.)

Note: It’s important to remember that we must always start by obtaining a Marketo API access token.

1. Cloning Programs

Imagine you need to create 25 webinar programs that each require unique details. This would be pretty time-consuming to manually complete, so we’re going to use the API to automate the entire process.

Let’s start with a Python script that will automatically clone your program:

def clone_program(programName,programId,folderId):
    url="https://"+MUNCHKIN+".mktorest.com/rest/asset/v1/program/"+programId+"/clone.json"
    token=get_access_token()
    params={'access_token': token,
           "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"}
    body="name="+programName+"&folder={'id':"+folderId+",'type':'Folder'}"
    url=url+"?"+body
    response=requests.post(url=url,params=params)
    data=response.json()
    programid=data['result'][0]['id']
    return programid 

 

2. Updating Tokens

Now that our programs are cloned, we need to populate them with the correct values. Using the API, we can update text tokens, date tokens, etc. across multiple programs simultaneously — saving time and reducing the risk of outdated information being sent to our audience.

Use this Python script for updating text tokens:

def updateTextToken(programid,tokenName,tokenValue):
    url = "https://"+MUNCHKIN+".mktorest.com/rest/asset/v1/folder/"+str(programid)+"/tokens.json"
    token=get_access_token()
    headers = {
        "Authorization": "Bearer "+token,
        "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"}
    body="name="+tokenName+"&value="+str(tokenValue)+"&type=text&folderType=Program"
    url=url+"?"+body
    response = requests.post(url, headers=headers)
    data=response.json()

 

3. Activating Smart Campaigns

Finally, we must bring our programs to life by activating our smart campaigns.

Use this last Python script to achieve this:

def activateSC(campaigns):
    for campaign in campaigns:        url="https://"+MUNCHKIN+".mktorest.com/rest/asset/v1/smartCampaign/"+str(campaign)+"/activate.json"
        token=get_access_token()
        params={'access_token': token}
        response=requests.post(url=url,params=params)
        data=response.json()

 

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

While the Marketo API opens up a world of automation possibilities, we need to use it wisely.

Here are a few major considerations we want to leave you with:

1. Always have a backup plan.

If you’re going to clone 25 programs, for example, make sure you can delete those 25 programs if necessary. Create a “delete campaign” as a safety net so you can undo any changes.

2. Test, test, test.

In your typical development process, you would usually build things in a lower “beta” environment where everything can be tested. In Marketo, you can’t do this. You need to test things in production to see what your results are going to be.

For example, if you want to update 100 landing pages using the API, start by updating just 1 landing page first. Did the changes to that page go through as planned? If the answer is no, you’ll need to go back and fix things before you bulk-update the next 99 pages. Then retest the change, and so on.

Automation is our friend, but we don’t want to create more technical debt — and we definitely don’t want to create technical debt that we can’t automate.

As long as we keep this in mind and proceed with caution, we’ll be fine!

By carefully leveraging the Marketo API to automate these repetitive processes, we’re:

✅ Improving consistency
✅ Enabling greater scalability
✅ Freeing up valuable time for more strategic initiatives

And if you need any help using the Marketo API, book a 30-min call with one of our experts here!

Nearly every Marketo instance will eventually have duplicate leads.

They can come from list uploads, form fills, CRM syncs, manual lead creation, and much more.

And since Marketo subscription costs scale with database size, duplicates are a major problem for your budget.

While manual deduplication is time-consuming and impractical, leaving the issue unaddressed will impact analytics, campaign efficiency, and ultimately, your bottom line.

Fortunately, the Marketo API solves this directly by allowing us to perform cost-effective, mass deduplication of leads.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how it’s done!

(This guide is for those with a foundational understanding of the Marketo API and is designed for Marketo users. If you want to learn more about the Marketo API, check out our API webinar and an extensive API course.)

1. Extract Duplicates from Marketo Using a List Export

The first step in the deduplication process is to identify and extract the duplicate leads from your Marketo instance.

In Marketo, create a Smart List that identifies duplicate leads based on your chosen criteria (e.g., email address). Once your Smart List is populated, select all the leads and export them to a CSV file. You should have something similar to the screenshot below before you export.

This exported list will serve as your reference for the deduplication process (and provide a backup in case of any issues.)
 

2. Define Your Winner Criteria and Deduplication Rules

Before we start merging leads, it’s crucial to establish clear rules for determining which lead will be the “winner” (the consolidated lead that will remain after merging several duplicates). We must also define rules on how to handle conflicting data.

In our case, we want the oldest lead to be chosen as the winner to preserve the original acquisition date. But at the same time, we want to maintain paid media as the lead source.

Feel free to define your rules and criteria as needed – you may want to maintain the most recent phone number, job title, subscription status, and other characteristics as well.
 

3. Deduplicate Leads Based on the Winner Criteria

By now, we should have an exported list of duplicates and a winner criterion. The next step is to perform mass deduplication through the Marketo API (learn more about accessing the Marketo API here) using the following Python script:

deduplicate:def deduplicate(winner,losers):
    access_token=get_access_token()
    url = f"{BASE_URL}/rest/v1/leads/{winner}/merge.json"
    headers={
        "Authorization": f"Bearer {access_token}",
        "Content-Type": "application/json"}
    params = {
        "leadIds": losers
    }
    response = requests.post(url, params=params, headers=headers)
    return(response.json())

 
This will examine groups of duplicate leads, determine the winner based on your criteria, and merge the leads using the Marketo API.
 

4. Update the Winner Lead with Data from the Losing Leads

After merging, we need to ensure that any data we want to keep from “losing” leads (such as paid media as a source) is consolidated into the single “winner”.

Here’s a Python script that will update the winner based on our deduplication rules:

def update_lead(leadid,field,value):
	access_token=get_access_token()
	url=f"{BASE_URL}/rest/v1/leads.json"
	headers={
    	"Authorization": f"Bearer {access_token}",
    	"content-type": "application/json"
	}
	params={
    	'action': 'updateOnly',
    	'lookupField': 'id',
    	'input':[{
        	'id': leadid,
        	field: value
    	}]}
	response=requests.post(url=url,data=json.dumps(params), headers=headers)
	print(response.json()['result'])

 
The last thing we need to do is run a Python script that will execute all these functions together (prioritizing the oldest lead as the winner and paid media lead source):

df_aux=df[df['Email Address']==email]
    leads=list(df_aux['Id'])
    winner=min(leads)
    leads.remove(winner)
    deduplicate(winner,str(leads)[1:len(str(leads))-1])
    if (df_aux['Lead Source']=='Paid Media').sum()>0:
        update_lead(winner, 'LeadSource', 'Paid Media')

 
And that’s it! Now, all of our duplicates have successfully been merged with data from our deduplication rules preserved for each one.

By taking advantage of the Marketo API to implement an efficient deduplication process for your Marketo database, you’ll be maintaining good data hygiene, which improves marketing effectiveness and leads to direct cost savings.

And while this guide provides a solid foundation for deduplication, every organization’s needs are unique. You may need to adjust the winner criteria and deduplication rules to best suit your specific requirements.

If you need help implementing this deduplication process or have questions about optimizing your Marketo instance, book a 30-minute chat with us here!

TLDR: Bloated, inaccurate databases cause all sorts of problems: lost revenue and productivity, risks of data privacy violations, and unreliable decision-making. Everyone from the CEO to your SDRs should think critically about data hygiene. Standardize how data is collected and handled across systems and conduct periodic audits to check the quality of your data. This will drive the business forward, allowing teams to support each other and reach customers as effectively as possible.

Data runs the world, and it also runs your business.

Many leaders know this and have strategies for data hygiene and protection, but too often, the enforcement of policies and best practices is inconsistent.

This creates a culture where teams don’t know how to collect, handle, and categorize data, and lack insight into why data hygiene is so important.

The results? Inaccurate data and bloated databases—sources of pain for people in many different roles and threats to the revenue and reputation of your business.

If you’re feeling the strain of dirty data, this article for you.

You’ll learn to explain to leadership the deep impact of bad data and influence a shift to a data-centric culture, suggesting policies, practices, and perspectives on data that help everyone in the team do their jobs more effectively.

 

The damage of dirty data

A database filled with entries that are inaccurate, outdated, miscategorized, or duplicated has a profoundly negative effect on the business.

People doing tactical work burn hours to correct and clean data.

Concerned with the quality of their information, SDRs get distracted from reaching out to people, which slows down the sales cycle. CX-wise, missing pieces of information compromise your interactions with customers, who’ll know when your outreach is less than seamless.

Between marketing operations and sales operations, bad data and unclear accountabilities cause infighting, as teams blame each other for disarray. Everyone who needs reporting, from C-Suite downwards, simply cannot surface or grasp the performance and impact of their work.

With a messy database, extracting the insights to fuel strategic decisions becomes a near-impossible effort.

If you can’t trust your data, you can’t trust your decisions.

Bad news for the productivity, revenue intake, strategic potential, and inter-team collaboration of your business.

Then factor in some more explicit financial costs. You’re getting charged for your database per row—bloat = dollars spent.

Excess data also heightens the risk of breaching data privacy compliance requirements.

EU regulators have issued an average of €1.4 million per fine to companies in breach of the GDPR, so if your database includes old and duplicate records of people who’ve opted out of communications or asked to have their data deleted, you need to clean up ASAP.

The larger your tech stack, the greater the likelihood (and consequences) of disordered data.

Coming up with and implementing a system for data hygiene may seem like an effort that’ll slow you down in the short term, but it’s the smart choice every time over tolerating a messy database and all its chaos and revenue loss.

 

Develop a hygiene plan

Data hygiene is a company-wide project—everyone from the CEO to your SDRs is responsible within their remit for thinking critically about how they handle data and contributing to policies.

How does data enter your system?

The first thing to think about is how data enters your system. Your sources are often things like:

• enrichment tools
• CRM data
• web forms, and
• purchase lists.

But could also include people like SDRs manually inputting information.

Verify the source

With each new entry, verify that the source is reputable and the data is both factually correct and accurate (e.g. checking for spelling errors and duplicates). And take extra care with data obtained from gated content—in the earlier stages of the cycle, people are more likely to offer untrue or incomplete information to easily access your content.

Standardize your data types

Lots of different people touch data when it’s in the system, and without a strict policy on how to handle and categorize it, things can quickly get out of hand. Standardizing the data types you collect and fields used across your systems can help to ensure you’re handling only the most relevant information and organizing data consistently.

Form a data compliance team

To further help keep things clean, advocate for a dedicated data compliance team. This team comprises a board of people who assess the impact of introducing any new field, data type, or source into your database.

Review your approach to data collection

It’s also worth interrogating your approach to data collection. More data doesn’t necessarily make you better informed, and it’s certainly not worth the excess storage costs and risks of violating data privacy requirements.

Additionally, not all data created or data sources are equal. You may have one or several usual suspects for creating bad data. Get ahead of it by shutting those sources down so you’re not creating bad data to start with.

Ask of each piece of data you solicit:

• What’s the purpose, use, and relevance to your goals?
• What categories of information are relevant to your customers and prospects?
• What information do Sales need to move through the cycle?

Auditing your systems and data on a regular basis (e.g. monthly, quarterly) is crucial to determine what your baseline for hygiene should be. This is your opportunity to detect and remedy any flaws in your database.

Steps you can take to improve data hygiene:

• delete old and unused records
• remove white spaces
• merge duplicates together
• check your integrations are tight, and
• ensure your records are enriched with the correct information from quality sources.

 

Dealing with data

The way you handle data can make or break your business.

Dirty data results in losses of revenue, productivity, and decision-making power—to avoid the fallout, C-Suite should treat data hygiene as a priority initiative for everyone in the organization to partake in.

Clear, enforced policies that standardize how people collect and handle data across systems, and periodic audits to check the quality of your data and sources, will drive the business forward and allow teams to support each other and reach customers and prospects as effectively as possible.

Struggling with systems and data in disorder? Drop us a line. We’re here to help.

By taking advantage of the Marketo API:

Marketers unlock a gold mine of data that can support overall strategy in a major way.

But this can be intimidating for folks who haven’t used the API before.

This is why we decided to present:

“Marketo APIs: 3 Easy Ways to Activate Your Data”.

Our goal with this event was to make the Marketo APIs more accessible for marketers and demonstrate easy use cases that add a ton of value.

Hosted by: Lucas Machado (Director of AI & Automation, RP), Corey Bayless (Director, Prudential Financial), Lauren McCormack (Vice President, RP).

The FULL recording is available  above.

Here’s a brief overview of what we covered.

After a quick introduction, we started by covering API fundamentals including what APIs are, why you should care, and Markto API basics.

From there, we covered not 3, but 5 Marketo API use cases!

1. Extract Bulk Activity Logs

This is a simple, but very powerful use case. While Marketo allows us to extract individual activity logs, it doesn’t allow us to extract them in bulk. Bulk logs are useful for analyzing email data, uncovering why opportunities were created, and much more. Watch above for a step-by-step walkthrough on how to extract bulk activity logs using the Marketo API.

2. Revert Data Changes

If you’ve ever been in a situation where you uploaded the wrong list to Marketo — or if the data was badly formatted — this will be a lifesaver. In the webinar above, learn how to use the Marketo API to reverse the data changes from a list upload. 

3. Create Programs

Marketo is great at scaling. But there can still be a lot of manual work in the form of cloning programs, updating tokens, activating smart campaigns, and so on. If you’re running an instance with 100 campaigns per day then it will be pretty much impossible to keep track of it all. Fortunately, we cover how the Marketo API can be used to automate many of these manual processes — saving you time and enabling greater consistency and scalability. 

4. Deduplication

Nearly every Marketo instance will eventually harbor duplicate leads. They can come from list uploads, form fills, CRM syncs, manual lead creation, etc. And since Marketo subscription costs scale with database size, duplicates are a major problem. Fixing them manually isn’t realistic either simply because of how long it takes. The Marketo API solves this directly by allowing you to perform mass deduplication in your instance. 

5. Data Pipelines

Our final application uses the Marketo API to import outside data into static lists within your Marketo instance. This is extremely useful because not all SaaS platforms have code-free integration with Marketo. The API offers users a way to get data from those platforms (such as Oracle or Snowflake) into their instance without a ton of time-consuming manual coding work to keep Marketo lists up to date. 

Be sure to check out the webinar recording above for an in-depth demonstration of how to apply these use cases.

And if you have any questions about the Marketo API, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!

 

 

TLDR: Migrating to a new marketing automation platform is a demanding project. We’ll help you plan it carefully to get the results you want.

Why migrate platforms? The decision to migrate to a new marketing automation platform is one to treat with care. You might be looking to solve the pain points of your current platform, gain more advanced features to support your growth, or see more value for money by focusing on specific capabilities.

Why it’s a heavy lift: Moving to a new marketing automation platform can get strong results and revitalize how your marketing team performs, but this isn’t a project to underestimate. Migrating to a new platform is a technical, resource-intensive effort that requires careful planning to yield results with minimal disruption.

What’s in this article for you? If your CMO or Marketing VP is pursuing a new marketing automation platform, this article is for you. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Set realistic expectations on timelines and performance.

➡️ Advocate for the processes.

➡️ Understand how to execute the project correctly.

 

Size up the task

Before you get off the ground with a platform migration, your marketing operations team needs to be clear on the demands of the project. Leadership might assume that features shared between platforms will translate identically from one to the next, and therefore expect a much faster turnaround than what’s feasible.

There are a few points of guidance you can give to address the project scope.

👉 Migrating to a new platform means rebuilding your marketing automation system from the ground up. This means you can’t resume with your new platform exactly where you left off with the previous one.

👉 Present how key features differ between platforms to leadership and your team.

👉 Determine the pieces you can migrate cleanly versus infrastructure to build anew, similar processes versus functions the team needs to relearn.

Before your team starts building any infrastructure, Marketing’s evaluation should deepen until they’re able to set priorities for the migration.

Some of the key questions that should be answered at the initial risk assessment, include:

• What assets and programs are critical to migrate?
• Which prior integrations will you need to reestablish?
• How deeply will you need to clean your database?
• Without historical data on your new platform, how will you interpret the first few months of reporting?

 

Time it right

Naturally, a significant project like this will have productivity consequences for the team.

 

“You’ll want to budget 12-16 weeks to get your assets and database from A to B.”

 

You’ll want to budget 12-16 weeks to get your assets and database from A to B, accounting for all stakeholder approvals.

While your team handles the migration and gets to grips with the new system, advocate for this to be a cool-down period for campaigns, events, and other intensive projects like rebranding or moving to a new website.

After all, Marketing will be best set up to succeed by ramping up to normal only when they’ve mastered the new system.

To make that happen, highlight the need for a dedicated team to help with training and project support. Whether your experts come from SOPs, MOPs, or IT, they need hours in the week scoped out in advance to assist.

Continuity is another key thing to account for.

Base the timeline for your migration on the contract with your current vendor. A crossover period between the two platforms, where you gradually dim the switch on your current system, is essential to prevent from going dark. To stay up and running, suggest to leadership that you begin the migration with at least a month left on your outstanding contract.

Ultimately, your planning should conclude with key stakeholders all on the same page about the work to come. Encourage your team to contribute to a project management resource that breaks down tasks and responsibilities, dependencies, tactical elements, and required buy-in.

This, along with agreed-upon and documented definitions for key terms and processes (e.g. lifecycle modelling, lead qualification criteria), is crucial for your team members to work in sync with one another during the migration.

 

See it through

Once your migration’s in motion, effective project management is vital to ongoing success.

 

“A delay in one area of the migration has consequences for other moving parts.”

 

A delay in one area of the migration has consequences for other moving parts, so encourage your team to participate in weekly sync calls, sprints, and targeted meetings to share status updates and proactively keep on top of risks.

As the project progresses, all of the stakeholders involved in the migration are going to be learning about how your new platform works; to help with onboarding and knowledge transfer, have them contribute to a resource that outlines how all new processes and functionalities work.

A platform migration is a project made of many different factors—from timelines to training, priorities to vendor contracts—and the closer your team collaborates to understand the task at hand, the better the odds are you’ll put together a plan that works.

No matter the size of your organization, migrating to a new marketing automation system is a complex and resource-intensive process. For any support you need with planning or executing a platform migration, we’re here to help.

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TLDR: Ideal customer profiles (ICPs) characterize the customer groups that best fit your services. ICPs aim to help businesses sign more profitable deals with shorter close times. Sales and marketing create ICPs by analyzing data from past customer engagements and deals, coalescing around a shared set of customer profiles to target. Marketing operations helps sales and marketing evaluate whether the data supports the personas created and guide them to refine the ICPs with each reporting cycle.

 

What is an ideal customer profile?

Ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are sketches of the buyers who best fit your services.

ICPs are similar to buyer personas, though they tend to characterize groups of customers rather than individual buyers. In theory, these groups are the easiest to close deals from and the most productive for sales and marketing to focus on in their initiatives.

Accurate ICPs help revenue teams do more deals in larger sizes and with shorter times to close.

But when sales and marketing teams create ideal customer profiles in poor alignment with each other, guided by personal biases over data, they risk approaching the wrong prospects with disjointed campaigns and processes that don’t attract business.

In this guide, you’ll learn to explain to sales and marketing what it takes to create ICPs that work—a data-driven approach with 100% alignment.

 

ICP 101

How to get started with ideal customer profiles: Ideal customer profiles begin with data. By analyzing past customer engagements and deals, sales and marketing can identify the most common traits of customers interested in your products and services.

A team will use a variety of behavioral identifiers (e.g., types and topics of content engagement, webinars and events registered) and demographic identifiers (e.g. job title, region, company, industry) to craft ICPs along with sales data.

Sales and marketing use these insights to create personalized content, messaging, and processes to attract increased business from these groups.

Note: We also conducted an experiment that used ChatGPT to help us define our ideal ICP – and the results were pretty fascinating! Check it out here.

 

The goal of ideal customer profiles:

The goal of ICPs is to help businesses sign as many deals as quickly as possible and as profitable as possible.

Factoring in additional metrics like monthly recurring revenue, time to close, retention rates, and deal size can help sales and marketing succeed by focusing on the prospects most likely to engage positively with the business and return sustainable profits over time.

 

How to know if your ICPs are right:

There’s no magic recipe for crafting ideal customer profiles, but if sales and marketing are coming up with many disparate profiles, it suggests that your targeting efforts aren’t specific enough.

To get results, both teams should unite around a shared set of ICPs.

Without close alignment, sales and marketing might have completely different ideas about which customer groups to pursue. When marketing’s campaigns and messaging aren’t in sync with sales’ processes and understanding of the buyer journey, it’s unlikely that your efforts will strike a chord with any particular customer profile.

Between your sales reps and marketing colleagues, your revenue team might be a broad tent of past experience and expertise with different industries and customer segments.

Personal experience can lead your team to infer the best customer traits and groups to target, but data is the only reliable basis for your ICPs.

Past success stories and sector-specific knowledge can be helpful starting points for creating ICPs, but sales and marketing need to validate any assumptions by looking at past engagements and deals.

 

The overall theme with creating ICPs:

More alignment means more success.

Sales and Marketing should use the same bedrock of data to target shared customer groups with campaigns and processes that complement each other.

 

Continuous success

Ideally, ICPs lead sales and marketing to meet and exceed their targets:

• Marketing creates campaigns that generate better MQLs.
• Sales develops these MQLs into higher rates of opportunities, conversions, and accelerated conversations.

To validate that your ICPs are working, encourage your team to think of ICPs as projects of continuous refinement, where each new reporting cycle is an opportunity to reevaluate if the data justifies the personas that Sales and Marketing have created.

MOPs comes to the table as a valuable source of guidance.

By analyzing the composition of your database and where deals come from, MOPs can pinpoint the percentage of leads, opportunities, and closed sales that meet your teams’ profile criteria and advise on the most optimal ways to segment your customer base.

With the latest data, consulting sales and marketing at regular intervals can help answer a range of decisive questions including:

• How are particular ICPs performing at different sales cycle stages?
• What profile characteristics can you tweak?
• How might you account for ICPs in industries (e.g. government, education) that are significant seasonal buyers?
• Are there any metrics not currently accounted for that are emerging as influential?

Whatever your reporting cadence—weekly, biweekly, monthly—a continuous process of analysis and adaptation is how your ICPs stay relevant.

Sit down with sales and marketing regularly to go through the reports, and you can encourage a well-informed and agile process of decision-making, where teams can pivot fast in response to ICPs that aren’t yielding results.

 

The takeaway

ICPs are valuable for Sales and Marketing to identify and refine how they target customer segments, but executing them effectively requires 100% alignment between teams and continuous analysis of engagement and deal data.

By working closely with MOPs to arrive at data-driven decisions, Revenue teams can create campaigns and processes that win more lucrative deals with shorter close times.

For any guidance with creating and executing ICPs, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

TLDR: Getting a new tool often seems like an attractive solution to a pain point, but without careful planning and an audit of the solutions in your stack and on the market, another tool to manage = another problem to solve.

Why bring in new tech?

When your team has a pain point or stress-inducing process to iron out, adding a new tool to your stack often seems an attractive solution. Perhaps leadership brings experience of using a certain tool to solve the problem at hand. They might know of comparable companies using a piece of tech and benchmark your stack against theirs. Or, they’re excited by the promise of results — ‘plug-and-play’ accessibility, increases to revenue and productivity that justify the investment.

How to assess new tech:

Beyond the hype, however, these flashes of inspiration alone aren’t solid enough reasons to adopt another new tool. As we write in the Martech Optimization White Paper, careful planning, evaluation, and an audit of what’s currently in your stack are crucial to identify the most sensible solution for your business. Without these, more tools can easily add complications, go to waste, or run counterproductive to what you’re trying to achieve.

What’s in this article for you? In this guide, we’ll help you influence a more critical approach to tool adoption to maximize the return on your dollars and your time. You’ll learn how to:

➡️ Assess new technology adoption

➡️ Understand the demands and challenges of a new tool

➡️ Evaluate your current tech stack and the options on the market

 

The real demands of new tools

Sometimes, leadership will advocate for a tool they’ve used in previous companies.

While the solution may have the correct capabilities to solve the problem at hand, selective experience with a tool can cause decision-makers to view it through rose-colored glasses.

If they only began to use the tool after the implementation or ramp-up period were completed, they’re likely unaware of the more challenging elements of getting off the ground. You need to ensure the solution that leadership advocates for has the correct capabilities to solve the need at hand.

Concerns to address before adoption

 
👉 Downplayed complications during sales process: During the sales cycle, the complications of running a tool are often downplayed. Vendors might portray a solution as “out of the box” with minor setup, or demo a version of the tool with features, integrations, and reporting already well-established. In reality, the baseline you see in demos won’t be there when you first configure the tool. Ramp-up periods can be prohibitive, and 6 to 12 months down the line, you might be miles off achieving the results you were promised.

👉 Stagnation in your tech stack: When the effort involved in managing a tool far outstrips expectations, and you haven’t planned to inherit the responsibility, that tool can sit in your stack gathering dust. Before leadership takes the plunge, advise them to wait until you’ve gathered feedback from current customers—get a real shot of truth about what it takes to onboard, implement, ramp up, maintain, and get results from the solution.

👉 Assessing impact and viability of new tools: Leadership needs to know if any shift in headcount occurs from using the tool, whether customers are using it to accomplish what you’re aiming for, and the renewal vs. churn rate past the initial contract. Before your CMO reaches a decision, they should be able to answer key internal questions: What are the hours involved with adopting this tool? Who’s responsible? Do we have the budget to give that person additional compensation or to hire someone new to run point? Given our investment, what kind of revenue and productivity lift can we expect?

Tools are vehicles for results – to get anywhere, you need a driver.

Getting a handle on the practicalities will help leadership identify if a tool is right for your needs or viable for your resources.

 

Evaluating your stack and the market

Mid-to-large organizations often lack a deep understanding of what’s in their tech stack.

When departments have the size and autonomy to buy their own tools, there might be significant overlap between the functionalities of tools owned by different teams.

If this is the case, leadership should explore the possibility of adopting a solution that your organization already uses.

Start by reviewing any documentation that outlines the tools in your workplace. If your organization already owns the functionality you’re after, speak with the tool owner and spend some time using the solution to get a sense of how appropriately it addresses your needs.

An important point for leadership: You might find a tool that facilitates what you’re looking for, but not in the most competitive or sophisticated way.

For any internal or external tool you assess, establish where it stands in the market

👉 Is this solution best-in-class or tertiary in its lane?
👉 Can this tool evolve with your business and perform long-term?

C-Suite’s are after the greatest possible ROI, and that comes by choosing the tool you’ll need five years from now.

To justify any technology investment, leadership needs a clear case for how it adds value.

Confidence in how a tool’s functionalities and integrations work is crucial to making that assessment.

If there’s a risk of integrations or data flows breaking down between updates, for instance, flag this to leadership. Any manual processes or convoluted workarounds a tool introduces compromise your ROI. Conversely, a tool that’s less adept at generating revenue might save the team significant amounts of time — productivity gains that prove ROI.

 

The bottom line

The martech boom shows no signs of slowing down, which means plenty of noise to cut through.

Approach tool adoption with these principles, and you’ll make every dollar and hour count.

 

✅ Be intentional with martech investment to work smarter and achieve more.

✅ Balance your current and long-term needs.

✅ Size up the options in your stack and on the market.

✅ Determine the ROI from adding a new tool into the mix.

✅Plan carefully for how you’ll use it.

For any guidance on evaluating your tech stack or the martech landscape, Revenue Pulse is here to help.

P.S. Want more ideas for improving your tech stack? Get a copy of our Martech Optimization White Paper