MOPs Rundown: What matters in Marketo, Bizable and Workato’s May releases

Since this is our first of a recurring feature on MarTech covering Marketo, Bizible and Workato release notes, a quick introduction about Perkuto.

Perkuto is a marketing operations agency helping enterprise and high-growth organizations expand team capacity and accelerate the value of marketing automation platforms–specifically Marketo and Workato. 

With a team of 50+ subject matter experts and more than 1,500 projects under our belt, we are uniquely qualified to share our release note takeaways with you. We’ll aim to provide both a digest of the release for context and the “so what’s in it for me” value – why it matters, what’s exciting, or specific use cases.

The month of May has been active both for Marketo and Workato.

First, we’ll cover Marketo’s May release highlights–unpacking Executable Campaigns as well as our favorite API enhancements. 

Then, we’ll share Workato’s news from Automate. From May 18-20, we experienced Workato’s first conference, Automate, along with 12,000 others across the globe. 

Marketo

Let’s start with the light news and jump into the more significant updates. 

MOPs professionals will have to change the way they access documentation. If you’re a MOPs professional, you live and breathe documentation (whether you’re creating or consuming). Marketo Product Docs have moved to the Adobe Experience League. Don’t panic–all product docs are available on the new platform. 

Account Smart Lists

In a nutshell, the concept of People Smarts Lists has been applied to Accounts. This means, Marketo users with Target Account Management access can now dynamically query company-level marketing automation and create segmentations. 

Why does it matter? 

Marketo users can segment based on demographics, firmographics and lead engagement in order to activate campaigns, nurture leads belonging to accounts, or export an account list. 

One use case that has us interested is the ability to identify gaps in your buying groups. For example, if your target persona is CIO, you can identify accounts missing this title. 

How does it work? 

A new option will show when adding a New Local Asset, as seen below. 

Image Source: May 2021 Release Innovations Webinar

As you build the Smart List, filter by revenue, employee size, industry and more as Account Attributes. 

The Account Attributes filter category works in combination with Matched Person Filters. 

For example, show me all accounts with at least 2 people who have visited my webpage within the last 90 days. Then, in your Smart Campaign Flow, send an email selecting the filter, “People Member of Account List”.

Next-Generation Experience Updates

These two minor updates have a major impact on our day to day Marketo operations. One of which is a big move for accessibility and the other, the return of a functionality MOPs professionals had desperately missed.

• Iconography and badges and larger, more colorful, and with a higher level of accessibility; including tool-tips.
• Drag and drop it like it’s hot! Marketo users had lost this functionality and were forced to right click and move assets to a folder but with the drag and drop back, so is your efficient day to day operations.

Executable Campaign Flow Steps

Executable Campaigns have been introduced as a new Flow Step & Campaign Type. 

Senior director of solutions architecture at Perkuto, Justin Norris, shares his main takeaways around the Executable Campaign feature:

• It is a promising feature that can replace some areas where we currently leverage Request Campaign, as it is more performant (skips trigger queue) and allows token inheritance from the parent campaign, which makes it even more dynamic and avoids tactics like copying program tokens into lead fields for transportability.
• The current iteration is limited in lack of webhooks and lack of nest-ability (executable campaigns cannot themselves execute campaigns). These limitations can be deal breakers for a significant number of use cases.

Still confused? Here’s a use case: 

You might use Executable Campaigns to avoid race conditions. Instead of adding a Wait Step to allow for processes to run, the Executable Campaign will fully complete a process before beginning the next. For example, think about what operational campaigns would be required to complete in order; before a lead is synced with Salesforce. 

You might also use Executable Campaigns to centralize processes. One executable campaign could be referenced by many other campaigns. It feels a lot like a global campaign. 

For a great overview of Executable Campaigns (pros, cons, and gotchas), watch the March 31, 2021 Houston MUG presentation. 

Forms Enhancements 

What are Sensitive Date Fields in Forms? If we had to bet, this enhancement comes at the request of your local information security team. 

Now, you can designate fields as sensitive and automatically disable pre-fill. This new feature allows for enhanced data privacy; offering the convenience of pre-fill for other “non-sensitive” fields without the risk of leaking sensitive customer data.

Secondly, you can enable validation to stop form submissions from programmatic sources; effectively blocking spam form submissions. 

In the same spirit of eliminating spam and/or bot activity, you can now filter bot activity from email reports. 

Before an email is delivered to a recipient, a bot can interfere and send false signals to Marketo. 

A nice feature of this is the ability to see bot activity in the last 90 days for Admins as well as a date stamp for when the bot activity filtering was enabled. 

Email performance reports may show less engagement as a result of this filter but it’s the right move to make. We recommend annotating the change to reference in the future. 

New and Enhanced APIs

Starting with this release, you can connect Marketo Engage with MS Dynamics using Web APIs. This should come as great news for MS Dynamics users.

The 3 news APIs released include:

• Bulk Custom Object Extract API – retrieve custom object records using Smart Lists or Static Lists as filters
• Program Membership API – full create, read, update and delete support for program membership records
• Custom Fields Metadata API – create and update custom fields on lead records programmatically. 

Plus, a lengthy list of APIs have been enhanced from bulk lead import API to enhanced delete program.

So what are we excited about? 

Perkuto consultant and API subject matter expert, Paul Ferrer, shares his main takeaways around the new and enhanced APIs:

• Bulk Custom Object Extract API – Not only do you now have improved access to custom objects, this will enable more refined data transfer between systems and allow for cleaner reporting. Filtering on Smart Lists is especially exciting as it allows your extracts to be less complex and more dynamic at the same time – a double whammy!
• Program Membership API – this may be a little less broadly used, but it allows for external sources to update and/or read program membership. This could be especially useful if you’re using a piece of software such as Workato to sync two or more systems and want to track progress in Marketo as well as the external systems.

Bizible

Bizible announced their BETA program for the LinkedIn integration, including their Lead Generation Forms. 

If you’re interested, we recommend reaching out to Bizible to join the BETA. In the next release, Bizible promised to share a full demo. 

Workato

May was a big month for Workato. With their first annual conference, Automate, they announced two major developments. 

Workato HQ

Workato’s Automation HQ will help bridge communication around automations across the organization or as stated in the recent press release:

“A set of advanced capabilities in the Workato platform that companies can use to accelerate the scaling of automation across the enterprise with speed and efficiency – all from a single platform. It empowers teams across an organization to work with the agility of a startup while tapping into the resources and shared knowledge of the enterprise. It also provides IT teams with the essential centralized tools to manage users’, data, connections and recipes across multiple workspaces in an organization.”

Automation HQ provides the necessary tools for empowering all teams with centralized governance including federated workspaces, business operations console, advanced lifecycle management, and custom communities. 

Why does it matter? 

We can only imagine the number of Workato recipes that will stack up across an organization. Placing focus on how organizations will manage their automated processes from start to finish is a big play and will set a solid foundation for organizations to scale and become more efficient.  

Workato Accelerators

The essence of the Workato Accelerator is a fully-packaged solution for a broad set of automation use-cases. The standard set of business logic and workflows allow users to leverage the knowledge of the community. 

P.S. Workato Accelerators are included within your standard Workato pricing. Hey, sounds like, free, to me.  

Image Source: Workato 

What inspired the Accelerators?

The learnings from Workato’s customer base have driven this set of templatized, packaged assets which include pre-built recipes, custom connectors, data models, and more. Plus, Workato plans to provide an instructional guide on how to use them. 

A continuous stream of new accelerators will be released over the coming months. 

So what Accelerators will be released first? 

• Autonomous Operations Framework – standardized framework for error handling, logging, and automated retries for Workato recipes. Available now.
• Campaign Launchpad – designed to help Marketo users launch campaigns in minutes versus time consuming data entry. 
• Intelligent Invoice Processing – intelligent invoice processing to download attachments from emails, extract the data, and automatically create records in your downstream system (i.e. SAP).
• ELT Pipeline for Snowflake – enables you to ingest data from your SaaS and on-prem Apps and ingests in a standardized way into your snowflake environment.
• Approvals Bot for Slack and Teams – takes all of the approvals from all of the applications, consolidates into a single view in a Slack or Teams bot and allows approvers to approve requests in one place.
• Enterprise Data Hub: provides you with a standard way to cleanse and manage frequently used records (employee data, customer data); a centralized, cleansed, audited and redistributed downstream to systems.

Why does it matter?

Leveraging the community and learnings from the customer base to build and allow access to standardized and proven templates is exciting for Workato customers–allowing them to accelerate value from Workato and expand the usage across the entire organization. 

MOPs Rundown is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Perkuto, a marketing operations consultancy.