Notating Complex Processes in the Activity Log
Have you ever felt that finding out why your process has failed is like looking for a needle in a haystack? We can relate! Busy MOPs professionals want efficient ways to troubleshoot complex processes and we’re here for it! Join us in this Deep Dive session to learn how Marketo Champs have used out-of-the-box thinking to create a trail of breadcrumbs for complex multi-leg processes. Learn where processes begin, end, fail, and succeed for your records by using the activity log notes you’ve created. Hosted by Beth Massura & Jimmy Spencer, Moderated by Corey Bayless.
Transcript
The group house rules in order to ensure must stay user focused and a safe space for members of Marketing Nation team to learn network and problem solvers. We ask that all mug attendees follow these rules. No self-promotion or pitching of any kind is permitted it at mug events. Don’t contact people outside of the user group without their consent and if mug members share their use cases to the user group, please don’t share that information without their consent. So this mug meeting is being recorded and to assure that we are abiding by the mug code of conduct, we are informing all user group attendees at the deep dive mug meeting on January 30 at noon CT that this meeting will be recorded and posted on the mug YouTube channel to promote training, education and future learning. If you do not wish to participate in a live recorded session, please feel free to watch the recording at a later time, which will be linked at the meeting, concludes and send us any questions you may have to. Jimmy Spencer via gmail.com or advocacy group or I’m sorry advocacy at ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ dot com. We also want you to stay connected with our chapter so you can sign up for Bevy, the new tool for ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Marketo Engage user groups. Step one Navigate to the mug URL and then step to create your account and with the email associated with your ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Marketo Engage account. What you join the chapter you will receive notifications reminders about new events that the chapter has posted. So upcoming opportunities for chapter members. So we have, as you all know, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Summit in Las Vegas, March 26th to the 28th. And we also have a press conference on the 25th. It’s just the beginning. Go ahead and sign up. You save $200 an in-person pass when you sign up by February 13th. And we also have some upcoming user group meetings. And here’s the calendar. So we have our Seattle mug, our Charlotte mug, North America virtual mug and so forth. So if you’re interested, you can see or take a screenshot of these and attend. And then we also have our international group as well. So we have our London mug, our Portugal mug, Netherlands, Japan to Japan mugs, actually. So, yeah, keep, keep, keep on creating new user groups across the world and we’ll continue to share them. So thank you for your participation. All right. Without further ado, now that housekeeping rules are out of the way, I’m going to go ahead and pass it over to Jimmy and Beth. Please let me know if there are any questions or Q&A that you wish for me to ask in the Q&A section. I will go ahead and vet those questions and then send them on over and we’ll get them answered. Otherwise, take it away, I think. Scoring. Hey, folks, my name is Jimmy Spencer. I’m a principal engineer for marketing automation app for Verizon. Long time Marketo user. Ten plus years. And then in the Champions Program for a couple of years. Now, I am looking forward to delivering some useful content with you guys and looking forward to some interaction and Q&A at the end. I hope you guys enjoy the session. I’ll pass it over to Beth so she can do an intro as well. Hi everyone and bottomless. Are our opponents are she her? I’m senior marketing operations consultant with a two most and my area of expertise is I’m more of the admin and integration side, operational processing and Marketo so that your data can be processed and get to where it needs to go. I’ve been with the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Marketo Engage Champions Program for five years now, so we’re super excited to share some tips with you today and please again bring up any questions you like and we will chat about them at the end. So I wanted to give some context for what we’re going to share with you today. So what are we actually trying to solve for when you have records coming in to your Marketo Engage instance? There’s always a lot of processing that’s going to happen online, especially for new records. You might have them go through things like enrichment to add additional data from third party vendors you might be trying to identify and stamp. Where did you get those records from so that you have that attribution information available. You might need to sort people into compliance status based on requirements around GDPR or other things like that. Standardization to make sure that the values in your fields are consistent across different records or processing for lifecycle to understand where a person is in their buying journey. And all of that might be happening in a short period of time for these new records or on an ongoing basis. There’s a lot of stuff happening. So how do we understand where in the process a person is? Are they reaching particular milestones within that processing? Are any of these processes failing or otherwise not able to succeed and move on to the next step? We’ve got to address issues as soon as they come up so that you don’t have records falling through the cracks and now you’ve got a big mess to try to fix later. And with some of these processes you might have some dependencies. So for example, if your countries aren’t standardized, you might not be able to properly evaluate the record for compliance reasons. So really important to understand where in the overall process something might be feeling so that you can troubleshoot and ensure that the process is correct going forward and to also reconcile that particular record. And it can be really hard for users, especially if there is a lot happening on these records to know what to do. So you’ve identified that a record has failed to proceed through a particular process. Now what what do you need to do? Where do you need to go? What campaign do you need to address? So it can be really tricky without some guidance for the users to to know what to do if a record is failing or getting stuck. So here’s just kind of a quick snapshot of what might be happening for a new record that’s going through processing. So this particular test record, there is already a 100 items in the activity log. Look at all that stuff that’s happening. And that means that it’s really burdensome to try to sort through all that data you can use filters within the activity log to try to narrow down what types of activities are displayed to you at any given moment. But that can really make it tricky when there are processes that are going to be affecting different types of things, like maybe it’s changing a data value, but maybe you also need to make sure that they’re being sent to the next campaign so it can be really hard to identify a process, start to finish. That’s where notation fields come into play, and that’s going to be our primary topic of today’s deep dive notation fields. Our visual cues that are created using string type fields in Marketo as helpers, and you use them to denote the start and finish of complex processes that are composed of multiple smart campaigns. So we’re really trying to understand where they are in a particular process. And then that way you can use these helper fields to call out process dependencies that are not being met. You can provide guidance within the activity log for the users to follow in order to troubleshoot or record and to address any failure within this complex process. Notation fields can also be used as triggers for branching multi leg processes, which is another piece that we will weave into this presentation today. So there’s two main buckets of benefits of using this notation field method with troubleshooting and monitoring. So as users of the Marketo Engage instance, how do you expedite troubleshooting? You can use these annotation fields to quickly identify key processes in your cluttered activity logs on a record. You can remediate these issues more quickly when you’re investigating by figuring out where a particular record that has failed to process correctly, you can find processing trends in the database that should be addressed and you can identify progress of a record through this branching multiply trigger process. The second bucket of benefits has to do with user enablement. So is taking it a step further, not just troubleshoot on a single record, but giving the next stop so friendly call outs that help explain an issue and plain language such as it has missing or malformed data. You can help identify users that require more guidance or training. If there is an issue that’s occurring that might have a user component to it, you can help. If you if you notice that there are repeat issues occurring, you might be able to identify documentation opportunities to help enable your user base in the future. Now I’m going to turn it over to Jamie to walk us through how to set up these annotation fields. All right, thanks first. Okay. So the concept for annotation fields, I hope so far has has been pretty straightforward and easy to digest. You know, sort of in a nutshell, what this is saying is, hey, we’re going to use string fields to provide data to ourselves and to our users within the activity log to help make things easier. So, you know, how do we do that? Well, I think we all sort of get the idea of how to populate a string field within Marketo. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp. So, you know, your setup is going to look something like what you’re seeing here on the screen. So what you’ll notice is we have an admin processing note and you know, that’s just sort of a dummy label. You can kind of come up with your own as you see fit. That’s not the important part. The part that you’ll really want to pay attention to is the call out that we’re putting within that string field. So in this example, that is just sort of a dummy example that we put together in a sandbox. You’ll see that we’re calling out the beginning of consent processing flow. And the idea here is to call that flow out and provide enough sort of text there in order to have it stand out within the activity log to make it easy to identify. Right. We don’t want it to be just another data value. That’s clumped together in hundreds of data value changes and list ads and, well, everything else that can be in an activity log. Right? We want to sort of dress it up a little bit so that it stands out from the crowd and makes it easier for you to say, okay, well, here’s where the processing journey began, right? So I can start here and work my way up to see where things are going. The second piece of that is the end of the process. So you may have several different things in your flow, right? That data value changes, removing folks or adding folks to lists and you know, any number of other things. But the idea here is to sort of bookend that call out with an end process, call out that is really formatted in the same way. Right? You have sort of the text there to be able to have this stand out within the activity log and then you’re just calling out the end of that process. So people understand sort of the beginning and the end and they know which chunk of data that they really need to focus on in order to do their troubleshooting. So on the next slide, you’ll see an example here, and this is just an example that I sort of created, right? I generated a lot of programs and a lot of scoring and various other things to kind of put this together for you guys. And what I wanted to do was sort of show an example of what the activity log looks like and show the clutter that you can sort of expect during processing events. And like Beth said during new record creation, this happens quite a bit because folks will they’ll have scores updated, they’ll have consent updated, they’ll be filtered into various programs, including nurtures and possibly other email blasts. They’ll have other operational elements that are running sort of in parallel. Right. But some of those processes are very important and may be identified as something that you really want to keep an eye on. Right. So for this example, we’re talking about consent processing and you’ll see the call outs here, you’ll see up again consent processing call out. You’ll also see an end consent process and call out. And as I was saying, what we’re what we’ve done here is we’ve elongated that string of data to help it stand out and to be, you know, quickly identify visually to see where this process begins and ends. I’ve also included here an alert, right. This can be placed anywhere within your processes where you may have a dependency or something that needs to be called out. You can simply add that alert to either a processing no or a separate notation field that that you put into place to sort of help users understand exactly what has happened here. You know, why has this record failed the process? You know, what’s going on? Some parts of this are easier than others, right. To put into words and to provide guidance. But it is there for you to use in case there is something that perhaps is easy to identify, easy to remediate, or something that can otherwise be called out in relatively simple terms, that someone could address. Right. I didn’t have perhaps the country feel populated, therefore the consent process didn’t complete or completed and failed. And therefore I understand what it is that I need to fix in order to push that record through again and have them successfully process. So on the next slide, you’ll see sort of another example of this. And what we’ve done here is break it out into two separate notation fields, which is sort of the process that I recommend, although you can really do it in any way that makes sense to you and, and for your processes. I like to sort of break them out a little bit just to keep the items separate, but you can do it however you’d like. But the point here is the guidance that we’re putting in to the activity log right here, you’ll see here that we have essentially an error message explaining why this process failed. And then we’re also putting in a call out to documentation. Right. So obviously, this is just dummy data. You don’t need to go to my checklist dot com to review that. But whatever applies to your organization in terms of how you organize your documentation, whether you have, you know, troubleshooting documents or checklists or whatever flavor of documentation you may have, you can put links to that within the activity log. And then when the user goes to investigate, hopefully they’re actually going and doing some investigating. They can open up that activity type within the activity law and copy paste that link into their browser to go straight to the documentation that you would send them to when they come to you and start asking questions. So on the next slide, we’re going to talk about other use cases for these annotation fields so you can sort of go beyond using them as simple bookends for your processes in call outs. And you can also make them pull double duty, right? Make them work a little bit more for you and you can use those fields to help progress people through branching, multi-layered processes. Right? There are a couple of shots to doing that. One of them is being able to provide context in terms of the processing path, right? Someone was disqualified from this process so they didn’t make it through or someone’s going through version X of the process versus version one. There’s really no limits to that because so many organizations are different, especially large organizations may have different business units. They may serve globally where there are different standards depending on the region that the record belongs to. And and, you know, just different nuances and caveats. There. Another upshot is that it’s very prescriptive, right? So in terms of moving people through multiple processes very quickly, what you can sometimes see is records that you don’t really intend to process being pulled in. Right. So there are a variety of ways that you can kind of combat that, right? You can use request campaign and you can go through great pains to be very, very prescriptive in your smart list. But another way is to use an annotation field as a trigger, right? So you’re using that field and the value that you’re inserting into it to usher somebody into the next process. And that’s especially helpful if you have a multi workspace instance, right? So if you’re serving multiple countries and they each have a different workspace or even just different business units that are assigned different workspaces, you know, whatever the case may be, because you’re logging that data value change on the record, you can essentially trigger that process using this value from copying. So for instance, something that is a processing journey for a particular record, which may not happen entirely in the copy, you can essentially trigger that and cause them to to go through those processes within the other workspaces. Just another little added benefit and again, making the field work a little bit harder for you. On the next screen you’ll see sort of an example of this within the context of Marketo and your your smart lists and your flow steps. An example here is changing the value within, say, process status for SYN for data mapping, and then triggering another process based on that data value change. So you’re changing that value for that record and then you’re triggering a separate process based on that data value change. Now, you know, like I said before, this is not the only way to do it. I think we all all understand that within Marketo there are a ton of ways that you can accomplish any one thing, but this just sort of takes things another step in terms of getting the most bang for your buck, so to speak, out of this process. So the next section is going to be caveats and tips about using these fields and things that you can sort of expect, maybe some gotchas and other helpful information that can help you go down this path if you choose to. And Beth is going to go ahead and cover these. Okay. So here’s caveats that you want to watch out for. So one thing to keep in mind is the Marketo data retention policy. So every type of activity has a particular time frame in which it will be stored in the database. So you’ll want to make sure you understand the timeframe associated with different activities. Data value changes are 90 days, so that’s about three months. So you want to review these notation fields in the activity log within that time period. Hopefully you’re not waiting three months to see if a new record failed to process. But this is just a reminder that you’ll want to look at that sooner rather than later. You will still retain the value within the field on the profile of the person. You just won’t see it in the activity log anymore. So data will still be available in some form, but to make the most of the the format, as Jim showed in the example where it really visually stands out, you’ll want to make sure you do that within the 90 days and you’ll want to make sure that you use these judiciously. Because if you have too many of these notations, it’s not going to stand out anymore. The whole point is that it’s it’s going to be this this longer. Call out with details and you really want it to stand out. So if you have a notation for every single step along the way, it’s not really going to help anymore because everything’s going to stand out. So it’s just going to create some clutter. So keep those in mind as you are implementing your plan since it is a custom field within the Marketo data. Of course, users, maybe marketing users are still going to see it as well if they’re going to add a filter to a smart list or change data value flow steps, etc. So you’ll want to make sure that you protect this field to avoid just manual changes to the field value so that they’re only updated by the operational processes that you intended to. So you can use field blocking within these notation fields to ensure that the value is only overwritten by, say, the flow stop, right, as opposed to a manual change or a think from Salesforce or things of that nature. So you can really kind of protect it from, from being overwritten. So here’s a few tips to help you maximize the effectiveness of these. So as we mentioned, you’ll want to bookend your processes. So kind of have a start and finish a clear beginning and end rather than including these kind of some steps along the way that may not be as critical and use these specifically for operational notes. So this is for data processing rather than say, you know, they were part of a webinar, right? There’s going to be too many of those activities. There’s not necessarily going to need to be a lot of notes for people to troubleshoot on that. It’ll just end up being too much. But this is rather for key critical data processing tasks that you want to make sure are operating correctly for the records in your database. And Jimmy showed them the example. You can have multiple notation fields, maybe one for where it’s at in the process, and another one for alerts or other context to provide details on any troubleshooting or references that the user can use to help address any and that processing condition. So if there’s an issue, what are the details? So both have a field for start and finish, but also if there is an issue, what’s the what’s the problem? How can they solve it? When you’re adding your links to any troubleshooting docs, make sure that the URL is as short as possible so that the user can quickly get to that page. You might want to use something like FITLY to help make that URL shorter to copy. And again, this is going to help your users identify what those next steps are, how to reconcile the issue, how to resolve it. As part of this process, you’re going to want to make sure you document what you’re doing. Creating the fields alone and having them being stamped doesn’t mean that this is now automatically just going to solve everybody’s problems. If people don’t know that they exist, if they don’t know how to use them, it’s not going to do much good. So make sure you document this internally, communicate how to use it, train your stakeholders that they know what to look for and what to expect and what actions to take so that your hard work to implement these it gets used if a record does need to be reprocessed. So there might be data changes that mean they have to be reevaluated. For something, you want to make sure you reset the notation field so that the data value change activity will be logged again. So if you just kind of keep the status with or the process was completed and it needs to run back through, it may not. If there’s no change to that value when it completes again, you won’t actually know that if that has happened, you won’t see it in the activity log. So one option there is you might want to immediately clear the notation field after stamping it that will allow it to appear in the activity log, but then it’ll be ready to re stamp immediately then. Or you could have some other process, maybe at the beginning of the the process to clear it or restarted or otherwise make it ready to re stamp. So notation fields is one method. As Jimmy alluded to, there are always many ways to do similar things and Mark how to engage. So I just wanted to call out some related methods that might help you track processes within the activity. Log The first one is very, very similar, but if you use the Boolean field to identify, start and finish of processes, that is another option. So boolean field is just to follow, right? Simple checkbox and so you can check it to be true when the process has successfully completed or it’s ready to move on. So for example, if you have a bunch of requirements to ensure that things are ready before it gets sent over to your CRM, once it finishes, all those once other fields are in place, the values are in place. You can check that box operation and it’ll be ready. Of course, Process cleaning. Simple, right? Either it’s checked or it’s not. Of course cons Some of these are similar to the notation fields in terms of the data retention policy. This creates additional fields that users might see in the instance, so be sure to use them sparingly and block field updates and of course compare the notation fields. This doesn’t really provide any detailed notes or action items for the user. It’s checked or not. If it’s not checked, you don’t really know what to do next and you would still need to filter the activity log in order for this information to kind of stand out a little bit more. So this is one alternative, but you probably see that there are a lot of benefits from using the notation fields over a simple checkbox fields. Another option is to use tracker status less. So this operates very similar in that you want to track key milestones like this particular process initiated, this particular process completed, and basically you just have an add to list flow step in your process to add them to this particular list. So pros of this is you don’t actually have to create new custom fields, so there’s less clutter in the database. You’re not going to see these fields in the UI and you can see the add to to list activity in the activity log, even if the person was already on the list. So maybe that’s simpler for every processing purposes. If they run back through, you’re going to see another initiated and completed stop in their activity. Log. Cons of this particular method, of course, is that data retention policy again, adolescence, only 90 days as well. And one downside compared to the custom fields is that you can’t really see lists of membership on a record. If you navigate to a person record in your database, you might you only see it in the activity log or if you go to the list itself, you can see whether or not a person is a member of it. So this might not be helpful, as helpful in the long term because once it drops off the activity log, you’re not really going to know one way or the other for that particular record if they are completed or initiated, etc… Similarly, this doesn’t provide detailed notes or action items for the user, so unless you make your list names very long, it will be less valuable compared to the notation field and you might still need to filter your activity log because they don’t really stand out like the notations that have a bunch of call out characters to really lengthen the the value of the field. So this is just one example of how it might appear in your activity. Log with you can see they’re added to at for some progress like an editor an error list of to try to identify an issue are added to the completed list when it’s all done another method and these are kind of mix and match again some of these might work better for some scenarios. You might make a combination of these to really get the best of all worlds, I suppose. But using campaign naming conventions can help identify the order in which some of these things are happening in your processes. So Jimmy had mentioned that these notation fields are really good for complex, long processes and multiple steps, so you probably already have your process broken down into logical modular sub campaigns where you don’t have what, 50 flow steps, for example, in a single campaign, but maybe a few key pieces are happening in one campaign and then it’s requester executes another campaign and connects to all these different these different parts of the process process together. But if you use campaign naming conventions to show your intended order in which these processes should complete, in which these sub campaigns should be completed, you’ll be able to see that in the activity log and kind of validate that they are going in the right order. So, for example, starting their campaign name with one or two or one, two, one one or two, one or three if they’re supposed to have them in that order, you’ll be able to see those campaigns in descending order in the activity log. So you can see an example here that executes campaign one, a one, and then one or two happened shortly thereafter one, two, three, etc… So you’ll be able to see if if I were to see that campaign 301 was happening before campaign one or two, something’s not quite firing, right? So that’s one way that you can kind of visually follow along what’s happening with the process. Still easier with the numbering. You don’t have to remember which one gets evaluated first. Is it the annual revenue or job role? Well, you’ll know by the campaign number downsides of this method. If you are setting these up as execute executable campaigns, which of course I highly recommend that you investigate as a solution for your processing parallel processes, meaning the different processes that are happening at the same time because they are not sequential in nature. You might get some campaigns mixed together in the activity logs. That’s a little bit more difficult to follow. So maybe you have a lead source processing and and compliance processing and consent processing in between, interspersed between these different demographic scoring campaigns. So you could start to get a little confusing and a little less clear what’s happening when unless they are grouped together like this because they’re executed, you still need to filter your activity log again, because the the names of these campaigns are all about the same length. They’re really not going to stand out in the activity log like some of the notation field examples. And this doesn’t provide those detailed notes or action items for the user. So that’s kind of the theme here, is that the notation fields give you a lot more flexibility and a lot more detail in terms of what’s going on with the process and what action items the user might need to take should something not be working as expected. So on the slides, we have a few resources. So if you’re less familiar with the activity log and how to use it, there’s documentation on that and that also links off to how to filter the activity log so that you have kind of the requisite knowledge. And what we’re talking about here and creating custom fields in Marketo and that also give you access to learning how to block field updates. As mentioned, and I like to bookmark this, I reference that all the time, but the marked Marketo activities data retention policy. So making sure that you understand how long these activities will appear in the activity log for people so that you can plan out your strategy for being able to track issues and track processing along the way. So that’s the that’s our presentation. So we would love for folks to ask questions or if you have other ideas that you’ve tried, feel free to share. We we have plenty of time for Q&A. Yeah, absolutely. And everyone should have the ability to come off mute. If you have a question, feel free to engage with us here. You can also, of course, type it in the Q&A and we’ll go through them. We’re very, very excited that you guys joined us. And if you have any questions, we are here and more than happy to answer them. This is definitely sort of a process that a lot of folks haven’t heard of or haven’t used. And so we know that there’s a little bit of newness around it. And, you know, we do have a lot of folks that I’ve seen register that are perhaps from, you know, smaller, smaller organizations that perhaps could benefit from using something like this and sort of like a modified version. So please do let us know if you have any questions to. Ask a question. Yeah. AM All right. Looks like you have a question as well. So we’ll go to that one next. I’m so I noticed in your process status field, how many notation fields do you recommend is the right amount if you’re going to follow that process? Yeah. So what I recommend is generally trying to keep it as lean as possible and just, you know, as a user, as an admin of your instance, you can kind of tell which processes are the most problematic, right? Which ones give your users the most amount of trouble. You know, perhaps there are a lot of folks who get lists from another part of the organization that are generally missing data or. There could be an issue where you know that there’s a hole in one of your processes somewhere and you know you’re working to fix that process. But because you haven’t quite worked out the kinks yet, you have some standardization issues, right? So those sort of problematic areas, I would recommend using sort of that additional notation field to give that contact in terms of okay, for the marketer who maybe doesn’t understand all the nuance that goes into all of this processing, that happens for record, right? Whether it’s, you know, whether it’s consent or pushing some of the sales or doing a sales alert or, you know, whatever, whatever it may be, you know, lots of installs have tons and tons of processes. And as the admin, you’re understanding sort of where the problem areas lie. And using the notations for those particular instances I think makes the most amount of sense. The upshot to using sort of two different flavors of that field is that you can sort of separate them a little bit and use a different format, right? So for instance, in the book in processes, I will generally use like a carrot with dashes to wrap the call out for the the bookends of the process. And then I’ll use something akin to like back slashes or some other text character there to denote an alert or a notification within that separate field. So they look a little different. They’re formatted a little differently and people can sort of identify them as such, assuming that they’re understanding what they’re looking at and you’ve got the documentation and all that stuff makes sense. Yeah, for sure. I think if I pull anything out, it seems as though you have a different notation for the processes that are being run. So a sales alert is going to be a little bit different than a consent status mapping process. Start essentially. So yeah, that makes perfect sense. Thank you for that. All right. So we’ll jump to Rico. So any tips for applying some of these enhancements retroactively? I’m thinking from an improvement rather than an overall approach. Yeah, absolutely. So fear not. You really don’t have to do an overhaul to implement these. You really can add them to a lot of your existing processes, especially in terms of the pure notations. Right. So in terms of, you know, the bookends, if you’re using those to sort of branch things, of course you have to re-engineer a little bit. But as simple notifications, there’s really no disruption to your active processes because you’re really just adding an additional change data value at the bookends of this process. And so there’s no real disruption there because it’s just a new data point that you’ve introduced to the system where you’re putting some values in there. Additionally, like for the alerts and things like something for a dependency, right? Perhaps you have something that says, well, someone’s a member of this smart list, you know, right. This value to this field. And if they’re a member of this smart list, you’ll write a value to a different field, right? Like so, for instance, if you’re if you’re making delineations between like GDPR and regular consent values, you may use a regular alert there as a choice within the existing flow step. Right? So for instance, you know, some processes you may have a choice where there’s a change data value happening and you can actually utilize the default there, right? So what you’re doing when they don’t qualify for either, instead of allowing that last option to default to do nothing, you can actually do a data value change right there that says, okay, well, they didn’t meet either of these criteria. So internal word that says, hey, they didn’t qualify for either of these lists. So heads up, you know, maybe the country value is missing or, you know, some other criteria wasn’t met. And that’s also an easy way to add this to your existing processes without really requiring any engineering. Now, if you’re in a new instance or you have a need or a desire to really go all out with these processes, I would say that the best step to take is to really plan out, hopefully in a sandbox, if you have access to one or some dummy campaigns that you sort of clone off your existing processes. But to really plan out the changes that you’re going to make because you will have to do some deactivation and some re-engineering and then bring things back online. Generally, if I have to do something like that, what I will do is I will clone my processes, I will them, right? So essentially I will make a condition of processing through those that someone has my email address, right. Or some other lock mechanism to make sure other folks are going through it. I will lock that process and then I will run various test records through it to ensure that everything is going as expected. And assuming that it is like you have a thorough testing plan and you’ve accounted for all your various scenarios, what I will do at that point is I will deactivate the existing process and then activate the new process that I’ve created. So you can really go either way. I generally go with the second option, but sometimes for various reasons, maybe the first option is better, but they’re both viable in terms of planning it out and making sure that everything is going to work as expected. When you introduce sort of these new features. I would chime in to that. As we alluded to, there are a lot of complementary or alternative ways of doing things. And Mark also, so for the purposes of kind of retroactively evaluating how people were processed and if there were errors, I’m a big fan of monitoring smart loss. And what I mean by that is a smart list that say this person met the conditions to be processed in a certain way, but they are they don’t have this particular value in the field that would have been stamped as part of that process or vice versa. They didn’t meet criteria to be processed like that, but for some reason they ended up with this value. So it’s kind of looking for a mismatch between how they should enter a process and how they came out. And that is good for ongoing monitoring at the the macro level where you can see from the process standpoint what records are having some trouble and then you can help troubleshoot that. And that’s kind of an inverse view compared to with the notation field approach is more you’ve got this record that you’re looking at and you want to see how they related to the process. So looking at it from different angles and looking at a different time periods, so notation is more immediate monitoring, smart Listens is more going, it’s complementing each other. You don’t have to do one or the other. You can do both, and that can really help you understand, Is there something wrong with this record? Is there something wrong with my process? Is it a little bit of both? So I highly recommend considering any and all different methods to help monitor how your processes are running and you can basically keep an eye on what’s happening within your operational processes from all these different standpoints. So that’s what I’d recommend to supplement both. Absolutely. That’s a great call out there. And on that note, like this said, use all methods at your disposal right? And something to consider is if you’re incorporating something like a string field along with these other processes, don’t forget that you can also use that data at sort of a more macro level in terms of doing things like creating monitoring smart lists and reports based off of the smart list, right? So, you know, you really can, depending on your formatting and how much thought you put into how you’re going to organize these, you can really put together a set of robust reports that will show you your processes sort of from a higher level and really help you identify those trends that may need to be adjusted. So methods is spot on there. Use them all if you’re able to or you know if it’s appropriate for you and make it work for you as much as possible. In terms of reporting out to yourself and to the team in terms of this is what we’re seeing within the instance in terms of processing failures or issues in processing. And that really just sort of charge is that user enablement, right? Because you’re able to easily or more easily anyway identify those holes that you have in the bucket or even, you know, perhaps individuals or teams that perhaps are a little bit newer to the instance, or perhaps they’re just a little bit newer to Marketo in general. It really helps you sort of hone in on things a lot more quickly. So that’s a that’s a fantastic call out. And building on that in terms of what kinds of reports you might use, people performance reports are so helpful in that regard. If you group by a particular custom field, then you’re going to get a list of what are all the values and how many people have that value. So in this example, if you’re grouping your people performance report by one of these annotation fields that is identifying, you know, maybe that maybe that alert notation field where the person couldn’t go through standardization for some reason you can get that information in that report format and see how many people had that error. You can also have a subscription set up on that people performance report. So maybe that will go to the the manager of your Marketo team so that they can monitor at a higher level of what’s going on in the instance where some of the other users might be troubleshooting, particularly at any given time. So great college, I mean that’s really flexible and there’s additional tools you can leverage these notation fields for, not just in the activity log. Great, great. Well, thanks so much, everyone, for joining this has really been great. We really appreciate you guys hanging with us to the end. And the questions that we got were were great. I don’t see any more. Oh, we have another one coming. Oh, thank you, Carissa. Appreciate that feedback. So, yeah, this has been a great session. Please feel free. I think my contact information was on one of the earlier slides. Feel free to reach out to us. Feel free to engage with the champions on LinkedIn or other avenues. Marketing Nation. We’re always here to provide feedback and on different approaches or, you know, lend our expertise where we can. So we really appreciate that engagement and really urge you guys to continue to engage with us. I think we’ll go ahead and in the presentation there, we will, as I stated earlier, have the recording put out on various channels for you guys to consume. Thanks again. Thanks, everyone for joining us today.
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