Integrating Marketo With Multiple CRMs

[Anonymous]

We currently have Marketo integrated with Salesforce, which is the CRM uses by our sales team. However, we have a home-grown CRM system for our customers. We are looking at the possibility of also integrating this home-grown system with Marketo via the API. Does anyone know if this is an option?

Alternatively, if we wanted to push a portion of our home-grown CRM data into a system other than Salesforce (perhaps Microsoft Dynamics), would it be possible to simultaneously integrate Marketo with both Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics?

Any insights would be much appreciated.

[Anonymous]

Hello Mike,

There are possibilities to push from a homegrown database, which I have had experience before but I'd need to know more information around it. You can send via a REST or SOAP API, and also get some help sending that over with a connector such as Dell Boomi. Things to look out for when it comes to a homegrown system is making sure the data is clean, and that the calls into Marketo are batched together. I've seen a call from a ruby on rails tool to marketo create dozens of duplicates, because it made dozens of calls about the same lead separately, at the exact same time. This is definitely something where you'll need a developer.

I don't think there is a feasibility to set up another CRM, because Marketo is 1 to 1, but you might be able to send out another call via web hook or API to that database. In the long run it'd likely be a lot less painful and more streamlined to have that data in one CRM.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Mike,

Marketo will not enable you to set up another connector than the first one you already have. But the API would authorize many things.

On top of what was already said by Amanda, the hard point will be to make sure that leads from your home grown system do not go to Salesforce, at least not if you do not want to. The implicit sync (when a lead is pushed to SFDC because of another action, such as adding it as a member of a program, which itself is sync'ed with an SFDC campaign) will be hard to avoid, as a user might trigger these implicit sync's inadvertently. So :

• If you do not mind having leads from the legacy system going to SFDC, API is a good catch, possibly with a data "mover" such as Informatica, syncfrog, sribe, talend, ...
• but if you do, I would strongly recommend that you consider the partitions / workspaces option  (if you do not already have it).

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Greg and Amanda -- Thank you both for the input. This is exactly the information I need to go back to my team with. And, it pretty much confirms what I suspected.

Thanks again.

--Mike