Marketo Field Organizer Feature Explained

In the dusty, hidden corners of Marketo — where few have time or inclination to venture – you can find some very useful features. One of those hidden gems of a feature is Field Organizer. If you use Revenue Cycle Explorer (RCE) model reporting, and you haven’t tried Field Organizer, I bet you will after you read this. If you are familiar with Salesforce.com’s bucket feature in reporting, then you already understand the concept. Field Organizers let you “bucket,” or group field values together under labels you define.

You could, for example, group U.S. states under labels East, North, South, and West where you assign eastern state values (NY, CT, RI…) to label “East,” and so on. Now, before you get too excited you should understand that Marketo’s Field Organizer feature exists for one reason, and only one: to let you organize data for model reports in RCE. If you’re not running one or more Revenue Cycle Analytics (RCA) models, Field Organizers are of no use to you – but if you do, Field Organizers will help you get a lot more insight from your model reports.

RCE Model Reports tell you about your funnel conversion, velocity and volume. Marketo’s done a tremendous job collecting tons of data to help you answer questions about your funnel: where are leads piling up, how long does it take for a lead to reach MQL, what was the conversion of MQLs to closed/won month over month – you could spend hundreds or thousands of hours messing around with funnel analysis. But, without Field Organizers you won’t be able to group leads together to see how different populations of leads move through your funnel.  For the statisticians out there, think of Field Organizers as a way to analyze cohorts moving through your marketing funnel, where a cohort might be people grouped based on a specific attribute.

The Basics

The Field Organizer feature lives in the Lead Database section of Marketo, along with System Smart Lists, and Segmentation. You can create one or more Field Organizers, then push as many as three Field Organizers at one time over to RCE where they’ll show up the next day – like all RCE data you have to wait until the next day to see your Field Organizers at work in your modeling reports. Here are some examples of Field Organizers to help you get your head around how you can put them to work analyzing RCA Model data:

  • Compare funnel velocity of people interested in one product versus another
  • See the conversion rates from Top of Funnel to MQL for EMEA versus North America
  • Group MQL flow, conversion and velocity by quarter
  • Compare lead flow by range of number of employees in the company

Example: Field Organizer for Number of Employees

In this example, I use a custom field called “Total Employees Bin” from the Account object in SFDC. This is a field that sales ops established and maintains in SFDC by assigning a range value based on the Number of Employees numeric field. For example, if an employee has 550 employees SFDC assigns a value of “500 – 999” to Total Employees Bin. This field is used all the time in SFDC reports, but there is no way to make it available to Marketo RCE Model Performance Reports without using a Field Organizer.

Here is the step by step explanation for using Total Employees Bin to create a Field Organizer.


In Marketo, navigate to the Lead Database section where you’ll see a folder named “Field Organizer”

Field Organizer Feature in Marketo


Click on “New” to create a new Field Organizer

Create New Field Organizer


Choose a lead or company field for the Field Organizer — here I chose Total Employees Bin

Choose a field for the Field Organizer


The image below shows how Marketo displays a row for each unique value it finds for the field chosen. Here, we see ten values.  But notice that there are three different entries for the range 3,250 – 10,499 (highlighted in red). It simply means Marketo found multiple unique values for what should be one but isn’t because somewhere along the way two non-standard (off the pick list) values made there way on to one or more accounts. The Field Organizer will let us correct for these bad data values by assembling them under one Group.


Now create groups.  Each group is a label that we will use to drag and drop one or more of the rows to.  In reports, Marketo will group leads by looking at the Number of Employees Bin values that we assign to a Group.  So we’ll need to create Groups for “0 – 499,” “500 – 999,”  “1,000 – 3,249,”  “3,250 – 10,499,” and “>= 10,500.”  Marketo’s UI here was not terribly clear to me the first time I used it so let me share a tip.
Hit the “Add Group” button for each label you want to create, then when you have them the way you want them click on each green check mark to save them.  Once this is done, you go to the next step which is dragging and dropping rows to Groups.  One other note on the UI here, if the Marketo circles are spinning and spinning you have to wait it out because it’s busy pulling data to present the list of unique values from the database.

Create all of the Group labels


After clicking on each of the green check marks, the window looks like this

Group labels are defined and ready to use


With the Groups created, it’s time to drag and drop rows to Groups. In the image below, you see dragging and dropping >10500 to the Group >= 10,500.  Be sure to hold and drag to the numbered arrow icon to the left of the Group, and hover over it until you see the mouse icon turn from a red circle with a cross through it to a green circle with a check mark — then release the mouse.  Do this for every row that belongs to a Group.
I dragged the three variants of 3,249 over to the Group labeled “3,250 – 10,499” so that all three are counted in the one Group.  Note the number in parenthesis next to each Group label.  The numbers show how many rows you dragged over to each Group.  Wondering what the default Group named “Other” is for?  If you don’t have a Group to connect with a row, you can connect it with “Other” and all of them will be counted as a separate category  I could have put the non-conforming rows to “Other,” but I am reasonably certain where they should go so I put them where I think they belong.

Drag and Drop Rows to Groups


Next, we need to make our new Field Organizer available to RCE.  Navigate to the Admin section of Marketo, and scroll down to the section labeled “Model Performance Analysis (leads).  Click on None next to Field 1 and Marketo presents you with a picklist for which Field Organizer you want to pass to RCE.

Tell RCE the name of the Field Organizer to pass to RCE


You can select any Field Organizer, here I selected the one created above for Total Employees Bin.  Don’t let the “Sync to Lead, Campaign, Opportunity Analysis” text in the box confuse you — it’s only the top line that applies here: “Synch to Model Performance (Leads) Analysis.”  Remember the this feature only exists for this purpose.

Select a Field Organizer that you created


That’s it — we finished creating a Field Organizer for Total Employees Bin and teed it up to be available to RCE the following day. Now for the best part: what does it look like in RCE?  The screen shot below summarizes three key funnel metrics: velocity (Avg. Transition Time), volume (Flow), and  conversion from stage Raw (top of funnel) to Closed Won.  The left hand column summarizes these data points using the Field Group Organizer we created.
Now we can see the funnel for each Total Employees Bin band.  One interesting observation is, it takes a lead about twice as many days to transition from Raw to Closed Won comparing the smallest range with the second from highest range (3,250 – 10,499).  And the highest conversion from Raw to Closed Won is the 1,000 – 3,249 band.  Field Organizer revealed new insights into the marketing funnel, and that’s just small taste of what’s possible.
Field Organizer also supports date and integer field types in addition to string.   To illustrate, consider a SaaS business that collects customer usage data in Marketo, like the date users signed up for the SaaS service, or which  service plan they signed up to.  You could create Field Organizers that group sign-up dates by quarter, or one that groups users by service plan, and pass those to Marketo.

Voila - Total Employee Bin in RCE


Here is a summary of Field Organizer considerations to keep in mind:

  • Field Organizers have no architectural relationship to Database Segments in Marketo
  • They can only be used for grouping data in RCE Model Reports — they are not for use any where else in Marketo
  • You can organize lead or company fields
  • You can create and save a number of Field Organizers, but you can only share a maximum of three at a time with RCE Model Performance Reports
  • In RCE Model Performance reports, any Field Organizers you make available show up in RCE as a Dimension (yellow column or row heading), not a Metric
  • Like all RCE custom fields, any fields you share won’t show up in RCE until the next day

Go and make use of this obscure but awesome feature in Marketo to see your marketing funnel in entirely new and useful ways.

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At Digital Pi, we use technology to connect revenue to marketing efforts. We fuse marketing strategies, processes, data and applications to make marketing technology solutions work for clients' businesses.

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