Hi Guys,
First post on the community so please be nice 
Our organization is going through a massive change at the moment with lots of new pieces of technology coming on board such as Percolate and Sugar CRM. The later of the two is the one that I need some help and reassurance on. There is some differences of opinions between our IT and Marketing Automation agencies which is causing me to not fully understand what is best for our business and how Marketo and Sugar CRM will work together.
Has anyone integrated Sugar CRM with Marketo before and wouldn't mind helping out a little by answering a couple of questions?
Our IT company that we use and who is managing the integration have suggested that in the future we won't keep any records of leads in Marketo and instead they will be kept in the CRM and only pass through lead info to Marketo when we want to run a campaign or send an email out. So my questions are -
- Is it best practice to keep records in Marketo as well as the CRM or just pass leads back from the CRM to Marketo when you need to run a campaign?
- If the answer is to keep reocrds in both then by only keeping them in CRM what if any impact would it have on nurture / scoring campaigns? Our IT company seems to just think we use Marketo for simple batch and send campaigns when in reality it is the complete opposite.
- When a lead is created in the CRM should it automatically be passed through to Marketo?
Hope the above makes sense - please let me know if I need to go into more detail.
Thanks for your help!
Cheers,
Gareth
First post on the community so please be nice
I'll definitely be nice... to you, that is.
- Is it best practice to keep records in Marketo as well as the CRM
Yes.
Hire a new integrator if your current firm doesn't understand what Marketo is for. Sounds like you're in for a world of hurt with these guys. This is no place for a generalist IT firm.
Hey Gareth,
The reason to keep all lead records in Marketo is that Marketo is your marketing system of record, just as Sugar will be your sales system of record. It would be really unusual and I would say absurd to not keep permanent lead records in Marketo.
First, because it would be an operational nightmare to sync records over to Marketo to perform some campaign then to delete them all again. The level of effort would be ridiculous and there would be no gain. You might as well use MailChimp.
Second, all your rich history of activity data, web tracking, program attribution, etc. would be lost. You would be sacrificing your ability to do intelligent targeting, segmentation, attribution...you'd be taking all the automation out of marketing automation!
I agree with Sanford that you are getting some very potentially damaging advice.
In terms of integrating Sugar and Marketo - I strongly suggest you don't reinvent the wheel and build a custom integration. There are a number of established integration platforms that will suit your needs: http://launchpoint.marketo.com/platforms/integration
Bedrock Data and MUV Data are two reputable vendors.
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Justin Norris | Perkuto
This too is ominous. Marketo is in part an engagement engine, and I doubt they understand enough about this to really know what they're saying.
That said, every marketing group should decide on a period of inactivity beyond which people you're still able to market to are classified as lost and can be completely purged. This period flexes depending on activity history, persona, and observed lifecycle, but it's rarely less than a year and in my experience commonly starts at 2 years (2 years is, for example, the inactivity timeout of a Marketo tracking cookie). But that's for Marketing to decide (or to fight out with Sales 
), not IT.
Overall, I don't get such a push against keeping leads in Marketo -- except perhaps for the cost standpoint, which I assume isn't the issue. I'm an IT guy from way back (check my posts and you'll see I keep my techie's slant on just about everything) yet I never would've had the nerve, before I knew anything about MA myself, to push back like this. Weird. And they're not even saying "just use MailChimp" so it's even weirder.
cost is not the issue - we are along way off an increase in license fees even though we have grown our database by 100,000 in 2 years. I can also justify the cost due to the positive sales results I am getting out of Marketo.
Thankfully our sales team takes my advise on all things marketing / database - which is unusual so i know I'm lucky here
Honestly only storing leads in the CRM isn't something Marketo users even understand because "disappearing" Marketo leads just aren't a thing. (Maybe they've been using SnapChat too much?)
If what they're proposing is adding static lists of leads temporarily in order to send mail, then deleting the leads, there's no reason to use Marketo for that. Like you said, they seem to not understand that Marketo is weakest at simple bulk email and strongest in all other ways (nurtures, engagements, program success management, tracking content distribution, web activity, etc.).
I've never met anyone who has used Marketo solely as a repository for quickly-disappearing leads. That absence of evidence doesn't prove it wouldn't work... but it's easy to prove it wouldn't be worth the $ even if it did.
P.S. I see that Justin has posted while I've been writing. Listen to him! He has seen a bunch more clients than I have (though I think I have weirder ones, and even they don't do this 
).
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