Work on Marketo without CRM?

[Anonymous]

Is it possible to  work  in Marketo without a CRM?

[Casey_Grimes]

Hi Srikanth,

Absolutely--if you know that's the path you want to go down.

I've worked with companies who either had homegrown CRMs that didn't make sense to integrate with Marketo or ones that just didn't have a need for CRM, and they were able to use Marketo just fine. My only caution would be if you're not wanting to connect to a CRM you have now, be sure that you want to have that link permanently severed. Some of the most painful work I've done has been around systems that have been intentionally disconnected and reconnected to CRMs over long periods of time.

Otherwise, if all you need are Marketo's marketing automation functions, you can absolutely get away with just using Marketo's database.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

You need to know that, without any connection to CRM, some functionality will be missing, though. for instance:

• End-to-end lead management process
• Feedback loop on the outcomes of the leads
• Capability to use opportunity information for targeting, filtering or adapting campaigns

Some businesses do not really need a CRM / Sales force automations solutions, though. e.g. e-commerce. but often, we see the need to integrate the e-commerce platform or the ERP, so that we get some closed loop info on the business generated.

-Greg

[My_Nguyen]

Can you explain more about the missing functionality?

[Jay_Jiang · Accepted solution]

That depends on the question, do you have a CRM and are you keeping Marketo and the CRM separate on purpose? or, do you not have a CRM in the first place?

In the first scenario, SFDC integrated with Marketo, by far, provides a lot more capabilities. Other CRMs integrated with Marketo via middleware won't be quite as capable. Then again, to say capability will be missing if you use Marketo standalone may be misinterpreted because you can still have a lot of the capability but you'd be doing a lot of things Manually. A lot of the missing capability would be related to automated syncing between the two platforms.

In the second scenario... well this is a very open ended question. Do you need a CRM in your business? What kind of CRM is right for your business? What are the benefits of such CRM for your business? as you can see, that's a completely non Marketo discussion.