A few weeks ago, we discussed the benefits of fully syncing data bewteen Marketo and Salesforce. Keeping your systems in sync is a best practice that will help boost efficiencies, improve Sales visibility and increase reporting effectiveness.
Today, we examine the flipside of this argument with 5 things to consider before syncing Salesforce and Marketo completely. In my opinion, the benefits of a full (or almost full) sync far outweigh the cons but here are 5 things to consider.
1) Too Much Noise Going to Reps
“These leads aren’t ready for Sales, we don’t want Sales getting bogged down with leads that aren’t ready.” This is the reason I hear most often. Examples include media buys and trade show attendees who are not yet ready for Sales. No Sales rep wants to call 200 trade show attendees that just wanted the SWAG.
If your organization has a proper lifecycle setup correctly, this should not be an issue. A best practice is to sync everything and hide the non Sales-ready leads from Sales. Use a top-of-the-funnel status of “Prospect,” “Raw,” “Unqualified” or something else to filter these names from the rep’s views. Only show the leads when they become Sales ready (MQLs).
2) End User Leads
Organizations may have have a business model that contains a freemium model for end users, and a B2B model that feeds leads to Sales. This decision requires a ton of thought but if those freemium users are never going to turn into revenue, you might consider creating some kind of filter to keep them out of Salesforce.
For example, we have a client that has thousands of B2B prospects and millions of end user/freebie users. These freebie users will never become B2B customers so the client wants to keep them out of the system. We have a model built to sync over the B2B users and keep the free users out of Salesforce database. The model is not perfect as some freebie users get in and some B2B prospects stay out–however, the model is working for now.
3) Spam and Bad Leads
So a spam bot hit your site and you now have 100 ghfedtgc@gmail.com leads. Or, there is some obviously bad lead like Micky Mouse who just signed up for a webinar.
Some organizations elect to let these through for SF campaign tracking while hiding the leads. Another option is to suppress these leads from reaching Salesforce as part of the master sync campaign. Keep them in Marketo for tracking and then eventually delete per a data retention policy.
4) Legacy Systems
Another reason could be integration with some legacy systems. We have one client that is syncing data among four systems. In general, syncing between multiple systems is a complicated process so we have run into more than a few issues with the Salesforce sync due to the other systems. The goal is to still fully sync data but complexities can arise.
5) Slow Adoption to Best Practices
If your company is still using flip phones and ISDN, switching the model might not make sense.
To summarize, keeping data synced between Salesforce and Marketo is a best practice. However, you may want to make a few tweaks along the way to optimize your lifecycle.
The post 5 Considerations Before Syncing Marketo and Salesforce appeared first on RevEngine Marketing.
