Have you ever been involved in (or contemplated) migrating from one marketing automation platform to another? Does your company currently support multiple platforms, maybe due to acquisitions?
Have you ever prepared a home to be listed? Or helped someone else clean out/prepare their home for sale?
I’ve done a number of both in my life, and it occurs to me that there are a lot of similarities!
Let’s start with the items that you’ve accumulated. In your platform, you have leads, contacts, campaigns, emails, images and so on. At home you have all your belongings; the things you treasure, collect and so on.
How much have you collected over the year(s)? Have you been good about keeping your instance/home clean? Decluttered? Or has life/work taken over and you just haven’t had the time to go back and do the deep cleaning? Are you attached to certain items and you just don’t want to part with them? I’m talking about you – leads from 3 years ago that haven’t engaged with us, ever. Or maybe college textbooks?
Have you maybe migrated from a previous marketing platform, in a hurry because of a time crunch, and just brought “everything”? My husband and I were moved by his company from Illinois to North Carolina. His company paid a moving company to box up everything (and I mean everything!) It was great to not have to pack, but this also meant no cleaning out occurred before the move. We ended up with boxes in the attic that were NEVER opened.
Many companies are acquisition oriented these days. Their growth strategy is to acquire one or more companies each year. If you work at one of these companies, then you know all about what I’m talking about!
Is your instance up to date? Are you utilizing the latest features/functionality offered by your platform? Are there some things that were built a while ago that might work more efficiently if you gave them an overhaul? A refresh? Likewise, at home, are your light fixtures the originals from when the house was first built? Maybe you’ve done some faux painting? Maybe the wood floors could use a re-staining/polish?
A couple years ago, my husband and I were ready to put our house on the market, the plan was to downsize now that the nest was empty. But we had some work to do first. Do we go it alone? Or do we hire professionals to help us? Over the years, we’ve bought and sold many houses; but we decided for a job this big, we need to hire professionals. Boy am I glad we did!
The realtor and staging crew walked through the house with us. They brought an experienced, unemotional perspective to the tour. They pointed out all the work that needed to be done – declutter here, repaint there, update these light fixtures, use these paint colors to showcase your home. They gave us our to do list and gave us strict deadlines. If we wanted to list the house on a certain date, this is what needed to be accomplished running up to that date. They were willing to do all the work, let us do most of the work and/or divide and conquer to meet the deadlines. We went with the later plan – we did a ton of the work and had them do the things that we didn’t feel comfortable taking on.
The final results were fabulous, our home never looked so good! And we got more than asking price for the house (ROI.) 
Platform migrations can be dealt with similarly – go it alone or hire a professional. Do all the work yourself or let the professionals do some or all of it. Each approach has its pluses and minuses, but I’ll save that for another post!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this fun comparison of your marketing automation platform to your house. If you are feeling motivated to do some decluttering and/or upgrading, here are some posts you might find helpful:
https://digitalpi.com/resources/digital-pi/marie-kondo-your-marketo
https://digitalpi.com/resources/digital-pi/marketo-migration-defined
