#40 How to make the most of Marketo, ft. Chris Willis

It was in a SalesOps role with McKesson that Chris first came across marketing automation, specifically a marketing automation platform called Marketo. Back then, as an unseasoned Marketo admin, he wasn’t introduced to many best practices. It was only later at Elekta, where he set up Marketo net new, that he stood up his first lead lifecycle, campaign, and lead management processes.

Drawing on his background in SalesOps, Chris knows the value of a clean hand over between marketing leads and sales. It’s something he champions in his current role at Trimble, where he’s responsible for operational consistency and helps a group of really effective marketers become even more effective by being more consistent, and following the Marketo workflow.

In this episode of the Unsubscribed! Podcast, Chris discusses Marketo as a workflow engine, how it helps your marketing processes run more effectively, and makes your campaigns repeatable and predictable. He also tells Pierce about the importance of email, and how the back and forth over email design can eat away at your time, especially when HTML is involved.

For Chris, Knak enables marketers to do more and follow creative email best practices without the need for highly niche HTML coding skills. It also allows Chris’s team to create highly unique execution templates which are asset neutral. Whilst creative execution of landing pages and emails gets done in Knak, marketing processes are handled through Marketo. Freer experimentation, and a process of continuous improvement, ultimately leads to better outcomes. In his experience, companies which A/B text their emails are more successful than those that repeat the same formula over and over again.

Listen to the full podcast to hear the full story of how Chris makes the most of Marketo email using Knak. Plus, get Chris’s take on the great centralization versus decentralization debate.

Follow Chris Willis on LinkedIn.