From One Power User to 10+: Xactly Uses Pendo VIA to Unlock Marketo for More Marketers

On a team of 23 demand marketers at the sales performance management solutions company Xactly, a single person is dedicated to the administration of Marketo.

His name is Griffin and he spends five days a week, eight hours a day creating smart lists, setting up webinars, tracking leads, sending emails, creating landing pages, studying open and click-through rates, and completing numerous other tasks in the marketing automation platform.

But as Xactly grows beyond its record-breaking 2018, Griffin’s to-do list gets longer. Marketing programs take longer to execute, campaigns get delayed, and a backlog of projects starts to form. Griffin most certainly holds the power of Marketo, but he’s also become a bottleneck.

Xactly’s marketing team learned of Pendo’s new guided adoption tool, VIA for Marketo, at the perfect time. Just six weeks into his role as vice president of demand generation, Brett Theiss was looking for ways to extend the power of Marketo to more marketers. He wanted the team to act more dynamically and connect with prospects and customers at key moments, like when the company earns a spot on a Gartner Magic Quadrant, releases a new feature, or wants to plan a last minute campaign.

“It takes a few weeks to get things funneled through,” Theiss says. “I wanted to feel more comfortable allowing our competitive or product marketing or demand gen teams to have immediate access to Marketo.”

The challenge prior to VIA was how to quickly and effectively train and educate his team on all of the nuances of Xactly’s Marketo environment. He wanted to provide the tool to 10 to 15 more marketers, but in a manner that ensured they followed Xactly’s email marketing practices, avoided costly or embarrassing errors, and complied with customer data privacy regulations.

A sample screenshot of a VIA guide delivered within Xactly’s Marketo instance.

Using VIA for Marketo, Xactly’s Griffin will soon deliver the rest of his team a step-by-step process for building lists, crafting templates, and creating events or webinars that’s entirely customized for the company’s Marketo instance. According to Theiss, VIA for Marketo functions much like the guided experiences offered within his Wells Fargo or American Express apps.

“They walk me through how to get to things in a really user friendly way,” he says. “What struck me is this makes Xactly’s Marketo environment easy to use for even the occasional user.”

Theiss also appreciates the ability to control the journey of his new Marketo users, delivering in-app guidance with VIA for Marketo to ensure they don’t take missteps that embarrass the marketer or the company, threaten the customer experience or generate fines (a threat of the EU’s new GDPR regulations).

After this month’s roll out of VIA for Marketo, Thiess expects to relieve Griffin of some of his daily pressures and allow him to focus on Marketo projects that warrant his level of expertise. Meanwhile, a dozen or more Xactly colleagues will unlock new digital marketing skills, while acting in real-time on creative campaign ideas.

“Trying to operate in this agile marketplace, you need people in the system doing things, versus chokepoints, Theiss says. “What stood out to me about VIA is you declare what you want to do and it just walks you through it in an understandable, common sense, step-by-step process. It’s going to help with our adoption rate in a really meaningful way.”