Marketo Engage Revenue Models – Q&A

This blog summarises the Q&A section of our webinar on Marketo Engage Revenue Models from June 10th 2021. You can also read the presentation slides and the webinar summary, or watch the full webinar on-demand.

Q – How long does it take to build a revenue model?

If you break the timeframe into steps, the hardest and most time-consuming task is mapping the different stages of your revenue model, understanding the different elements of the journey, and agreeing these with your Sales team. 

Consider all the different systems and tools that you’re using as well as the customer journey itself – how these might influence throughout the different stages? That can take a couple of days to a couple of weeks if you’re really mulling it over or have a complex MarTech stack.

Getting some expertise involved can make extracting your data points in the systems being engaged much easier and faster. Otherwise, to fully build the model, we’d say give yourself about two weeks, including time to keep an eye on it and give your data time to validate and process.

After that, you just need to sit and listen to its feedback. 

Q – How long until I start seeing results?

The biggest question for most marketers! We’d suggest a first period of monitoring over three months. That should be enough time to see results and make any tweaks to ensure your model is working the way you want it to.

You can start using the revenue model straight away in terms of your campaigns; that’s the only way you’ll learn if anything does need changing once it’s set up.

Q – Can I run multiple models at the same time?

Absolutely! A business-wide revenue model can give you a huge overview of what’s going on. And you can still dive into specifics, like a new business line or product’s revenue model, whereby you can go through the same process of data points and filtering your audience to work out whether they’re in the model or not. 

It just depends on what rules you want to have in place to make sure they’re all working alongside each other, and making sure your data points are pinned down for each.

Q – Does a revenue model require Marketo to be integrated with my CRM?

For the most part, no, you don’t need a CRM integration. When you start getting to the end of the funnel, however, visibility can become a challenge. As a marketer, you can only get the sales process so far before it gets handed over to Sales, meaning that you’ll end up losing visibility if you can’t pull those updates back into Marketo Engage.

Essentially, as long as you’re feeding data back into the model to update it, you should be able to continue to drive people through. The most important aspect is being able to observe, measure and track the data points in your customer journeys. 

What bears mentioning is that you bypass the need for these manual push-and-pull updates if your CRM is already integrated with Marketo. Is that a good enough business case to integrate those two systems? We’d say yes. 

Q – How important is good data hygiene to the revenue model process?

Critical, both for having high-quality, accurate data in your revenue model, and for GDPR purposes and compliance.

The idea of a revenue model is that you want to see absolutely everything that affects progress through your sales funnel; ideally, you want your data validation rules to operate before feeding leads through your model so it’s working from the cleanest and most recent data possible.

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If you’re curious about revenue models or have some more questions about how they work, get in touch. We’re happy to help.