Create an Account Suppression List in Marketo.

As with any system, there’s learning curves and pleasant surprises. Some come after a while of head banging against table, while others present themselves more gracefully.

After moving to Marketo and getting the basics up and running we ran into some challenges.

In an effort to optimize the spend of our demand generation programs, we needed to ensure that we weren’t duplicating leads from Accounts & Customers that were already won or at 90% in the Opp stage. There’s a case to be made for expanding current accounts but for now we wanted to ensure we’re not wasting our money getting more leads from accounts that are customers.

To create a ‘check’ against leads from existing accounts & customers, first step is to create a suppression list of domains. Easy enough in Marketo — create a smart list of all current customers or ‘Opps’ that have been won and download it as an excel file. Use a formula like” =RIGHT(email,LEN(email)-FIND(“@”,email)) to get the domains from a list of emails.

Now you have a domain suppression list.

Now for the fun part. Within Marketo, you can’t directly set up a script that says:

‘Anytime a new lead is created in the system, check against these domains to see if it already exists and then flag it’

But you can create something that does that using Programs & Smart campaigns:

1. Create a Smart Campaign. Call it ‘existing opp/customer check’
2. Add a trigger ‘Person Created’ so it fires everytime a new person is created. This is important otherwise you’ll have to set it on a recurring schedule. Marketo smart campaigns need a trigger to fire automagically.
3. Create a condition based on how you upload/add leads to your Marketo instance. In our case, we add them to Channel Master Lists. So the condition is ‘If person was added to list within the last 30 days’.

This is the bit where you check against domains.

Note: Since within Marketo you can check with ‘contains’ you should concatenate ‘@’ before the domains. Otherwise if by random chance someone’s name is the same as a domain name on your list, it would flag those as well.

In the flow step:

1. Add ‘Add to List’
2. Create a condition within ‘Add to List”
3. If ‘email address’ contains (copy paste list of domains with @ appended before them)
4. Create a local program list and set the flow step to add them to the list.

Here’s what happens. If a person is created in Marketo, it will fire the smart campaign to check if the email address contains the @domain from your suppression list. If yes, they get routed to the list.

Questions? kamil[dot]rextin[at]gmail[dot]com

Written in collaboration with Sibil Samuel and Tara Robertson.