Launching Marketo before you integrate with CRM? A few things to consider…

[Anonymous]

For many reasons clients sometimes need to get campaigns up and running in Marketo before CRM integration tasks have been completed.  If you find yourself in this position, there are a few things you’ll want to consider. Let’s take a look…

• Duplicate records
  • Duplicate records will exist in Marketo after the CRM sync and require a merge and data clean up. You can manage this two ways:
    • Manually in Marketo
    • Via Marketo’s Easy Merge Service

Note: Some clients decide to delete leads that have no activity (e.g. did not click in an email) to minimize the duplication clean up.  Additionally, for those leads you decide to keep, you will need to create a merge process and determine what data is the master/most up-to-date.

• Fields and Field data
  • Prior to the integration, you will need to create Marketo custom fields for any CRM fields you need to duplicate in Marketo in order to run your campaigns
  • After the integration, you will need to:
    • Map data fields
    • Move data
      • Create Data Management programs to move data within the Marketo custom only fields into the similar field created by CRM
        • Example: Copy data from mkto_field A into CRM_field A; delete data from mkto_field A
    • Hide mkto_custom only fields from which you moved the data and are no longer needed
    • Update any/all programs using mkto_custom only fields to be the CRM fields
    • Update any List Import templates to reference the CRM (and not custom Marketo) fields

• Lead Reporting/Sales Alerts
  • Pre-integration:
    • There is no closed loop reporting
    • Alerts and “lead routing” rules need to be maintained in Marketo
    • Sales visibility into campaigns/lead records is limited; Marketo is not intended to be a CRM and as such there is no “Account view” and no place to manage notes or activities. That being said, you can take advantage of Smart Lists subscriptions to provide some insight, as well as create alerts.
    • Information sharing between the two systems is manual (list exports/imports)

And remember, prior to uploading leads and running your initial campaigns be sure to review and activate/schedule all Operational campaigns (e.g. Data Management, Scoring and Interesting Moments).

Thanks to Jodi Florence​ for her input on this blog post.