Like peanut butter and jelly, some things are just meant to go together. Combining the business methodologies of your Salesforce CRM and Marketo marketing platform is one of those things. Separately, each is great at empowering your Sales and Marketing teams. When you bring them together, that’s where the real power lies.
While it’s easy to get caught up in the technical requirements of marrying the systems, it’s important to step back and look at the bigger picture: the very real benefits of combining your Salesforce and Marketo business strategies.
Let’s take a look at the top five business strategy benefits of combining the two platforms.
#1 – Data Consistency Across Systems
Like an iPhone syncing to the cloud, keeping your Marketo and Salesforce systems in sync ensures data is consistent between the two systems. Data consistency allows you to leverage Marketo and Salesforce’s reporting strengths while enriching the intelligence of each system.
For example, Marketo excels at segmentation–creating business rules that categorize people into various groups for better targeting and more personalized communications. When data is consistent between the two systems, Marketo can mix in both activity based intelligence from Marketo and opportunity intelligence from Salesforce to create more powerful segments.
Additionally, having consistent data between the two systems reduces errors and manual entries, resulting in accurate, timely intelligence and improved customer engagement (more on that below!). And let’s not forget all the annoying duplicates that pop up when data isn’t flowing properly between the systems.
#2 – Real-Time Actionable Intelligence
Beyond data and reporting, the flow of information between the two systems provides real-time, actionable intelligence to Sales and Marketing.
When the systems are synced, results from Marketo campaigns immediately feed into Salesforce, giving Sales Development Representatives (SDR) insight into what assets and campaigns leads are responding to. This real-time intelligence into how leads are engaging with marketing campaigns better equips sales to deliver the right message at the right time for maximum impact.
Likewise, headway that an SDR makes with a lead feeds into Marketo, giving Marketing the insight it needs to further segment the lead and personalize messaging.
#3 – Improved Engagement with Your Brand
Improved engagement directly ties into the point above. With highly-visible intelligence available in both systems, Sales and Marketing can provide a better brand experience through timely, relevant, and customized touches. Marketing can see what Sales is doing and vice versa, allowing for customized messaging based on precisely where the lead is in the funnel.
For example, when Sales closes a deal, the record’s status is changed in Salesforce, which feeds into Marketo, alerting marketing to the activity. Marketing can then initiate an onboarding nurture campaign welcoming the new client.
More importantly, the real-time syncing means the customer gets 1) welcomed sooner, and 2) removed from any previous lists so they don’t receive irrelevant sales/marketing messaging – both resulting in improved customer satisfaction and engagement.
#4 – Streamlined Data Management Capabilities
Both Marketo and Salesforce are known for their data and workflow management capabilities; the key is deciding how you want to streamline the platforms to complement one another and support your business goals.
For example, you may want to manage lead assignment in Marketo, or you may choose to use Salesforce depending on your process structure. You may also want to create workflows in Salesforce to time stamp activities or use Marketo to perform the same function. The key here is to plan out your data management strategies to ensure the two systems are working with one another and not against one another.
#5 – Insights That Really Matter
When Salesforce and Marketo are not synced properly, many organizations run into reporting challenges. “Why do the insights look different in Salesforce than they do in Marketo?” is a common question we hear. For example, if marketing adds a thousand names to Marketo in a month but those names don’t sync over to Salesforce, reports like “New leads created this month” will obviously not match between systems.
Combining the two systems not only ensures data integrity and consistency, but it gives you the flexibility to choose reporting methods that make sense for your organization. For example, Marketo is great at providing email engagement insights while Salesforce delivers excellent opportunity-level intelligence. From closed loop reporting in Marketo, to “this week’s opportunities” from Salesforce, you can customize your analysis process to deliver the insights you need from data you can depend on.
We typically recommend using a healthy combination of both Marketo and Salesforce reporting. This allows you to find a healthy combination of analysis that offers maximum insights.
Wrap-up – Think Before You Sync
If it sounds like combining your Marketo and Salesforce strategies is a no-brainer, that’s because it usually is! But even if management gives the green light to start the process, there are still many high-level strategies to think through before actually getting down to the nitty-gritty technical stuff.
The benefits of marrying systems is clear, but to realize the full potential of a sync, you have to decide how you want to maximize data consistency, intelligence, customer engagement, data management and reporting insights by leveraging the systems’ strengths to work in harmony.
If combining your Salesforce and Marketo business strategies sounds great but you’re not sure where to start, give me a shout and we can discuss your needs further.
