Three myths about do-it-yourself Marketo Engage training

We’re all about sharing skills, knowledge, and expertise. 

However, we’ve also seen some interesting ideas around onboarding and upskilling in Marketo Engage based only on peer-to-peer training and teaching.

Here are three myths we want to dispel about do-it-yourself Marketo training!

1- “We’ll save money on training costs” 

You’re marketing budget is already being pushed to the limit. 

Why purchase external training courses if you already have someone within the team who knows how to use the platform? Done in-house, you know that the training will be geared towards the way your staff use the platform.

We think…

Though there are cost savings in the short term when you start training in-house, this can often lead to a number of challenges:

1. Internal trainers often simply don’t have time to pick up this additional responsibility. When faced with getting campaigns completed or carrying out training – often the latter gets pushed to the bottom of the to-do list!
2. What often happens when the internal expert leaves the business? 
3. Many employees are given the role of ‘trainer’ without the adequate training skills to effectively pass on their knowledge. Poor communication skills, lack of structure and adhoc sessions all lead to a poor learning experience.

Often, due to the ineffective and infrequent nature of the training, many businesses still resort to outsourcing the work that staff couldn’t manage themselves, which can be costly – and the staff still lack that training!

2- “Our team feels more confident using our Marketo Engage instance“

Keeping training internal means that you can bypass all the complex information and features that your business doesn’t really use. Day-to-day users of Marketo Engage are unlikely to need access to Admin features, for example, and don’t need to cover ALL of Marketo’s functions. 

Instead of overwhelming staff with a structured course covering everything there is to know, trainers can pick and choose what aspects of the platform the team will actually be using.

We think…

To some extent, this is true. Not every team member needs to know every aspect of Marketo.

The real issue is that it’s hard for someone on the inside to judge what to cut out of standard course criteria without running the risk of some major flaws. Especially if the person making the call is unfamiliar with the entire system themselves, or was never trained by Adobe-approved experts in the first place.

In addition, without guidance from certified Marketo expert, how do you know that the training being provided is following best practice? Your in-house expert could actually be passing on a host of bad habits and inefficient processes!

3- “It’s more productive for employees to learn on the job”

With the team expert committing an hour or so a week to training, new team members will be using their skills in situ and learning as they go. Even better, day-to-day tasks will also get done at the same time!

We think….

Very few people can learn just by watching a demonstration, and not every team expert has time to create, check, and provide feedback for junior members that are learning. Letting a Marketo novice loose in your Marketo dashboard – unsupervised – can also be disastrous for your campaign quality!

Additionally, learning on the job also means that there is often a lack of formal documentation or training material to refer back to.

A bottleneck around the in-house expert is something we see very often. Despite occasional training, frequent mistakes and errors made by learning on-the-job mean that all campaigns and emails end up requiring QC. That then takes up even more expert-level execution time, and things usually quickly fall apart when that staff member is out of office!

Why structured, trackable, best-practice training is the way to go

You’ll notice that all these benefits of in-house training are hamstrung by what inevitably becomes a knowledge silo. Benefits are often reliant on very few people taking on a lot of additional responsibility – likely your key platform users – to manage onboarding and training other staff. 

That’s an incredibly stressful position for them to be in, and a precarious position for any team should that expert decide to seek other opportunities!

Our Adobe-partnered, fully-online training courses can relieve the stress from your in-house experts. 

As well as gearing your training towards your unique instance, we also offer one-on-one feedback from our own certified experts, a mix of assignments, theory and quizzes, and a high-level dashboard so managers can oversee progress. 

Watch our webinar on upskilling your team in Marketo, or get in touch now for a bespoke quote on training for your team.