A practical, field-tested checklist for auditing Marketo instances. Built for marketing operations leads, RevOps practitioners, and consultants who need to scope a Marketo cleanup that holds up after the engagement ends.
This is not a vendor checklist. It is not a two-hundred-item best-practices list nobody reads. It is the set of questions and checks I run when scoping a Marketo audit, organized so a small team can work through it in two weeks without losing the thread.
| File | What it does |
|---|---|
01-operating-layer-interview.md |
Five questions to ask marketing, sales, and SDR leadership separately before touching the instance. Where the answers diverge is the actual audit scope. |
02-instance-health-checks.md |
The tooling-layer audit. Smart campaigns, programs, fields, sync. The visible work. |
03-lifecycle-definitions-canvas.md |
A one-page worksheet for getting marketing and sales to agree, in writing, on what each lifecycle stage means this quarter. |
04-quiet-bugs-catalog.md |
Patterns I have found inside otherwise-clean Marketo instances. Things that do not crash anything but quietly cost money each quarter. |
templates/smart-campaign-qa-template.md |
A reusable template for documenting smart campaign QA findings consistently. |
Most Marketo audits start with item 02 — the tooling layer. That is the visible work. This checklist deliberately starts with 01, because every audit I have run where the operating layer was misaligned, the tooling work came back inside a quarter.
Recommended sequence:
- Week 1: work through
01and03separately with each stakeholder group. Write down disagreements verbatim. - Week 2: reconcile disagreements in a working session. The reconciled definitions become the scope for the tooling audit.
- Week 3-4: run
02against the reconciled definitions. Use04as a parallel pass during02.
I have run a lot of Marketo audits. The ones that hold up are the ones that scope the operating layer before the tooling layer. The ones that do not, do not.
Longer notes on the framework, including how I structure the engagements: vadimkoenen.com/marketo-consultant
Related field notes on the operating-vs-tooling distinction in RevOps: vadimkoenen.com/marketo-audit-services
MIT. Use these freely, modify them for your situation, fork them and add what your team has learned. If they help you avoid a six-figure Marketo cleanup that misfires, that is the point.
Maintained by Vadim Koenen — marketing automation, RevOps, and GTM systems consultant.
- Website: https://vadimkoenen.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vadim-koenen-mba/
- Field notes & case studies: https://vadimkoenen.com/resources/
Pull requests welcome. Especially edits that come from your own audit experience — the catalog of 04-quiet-bugs is intentionally extensible.