Migrating to Dynamics? Key Learnings from a Marketo Enterprise Customer

[Dan_Stevens_]

Thanks Shad - I know Jep, he was our consultant when I integrated Marketo in 2011 with my prior company.  We're now working with Kristen Carmean, who has Dynamics knowledge (she deployed Marketo with Dynamics 2011 (on-premise) with her previous company).  In fact, she directed me to this post yesterday.

[Anonymous]

I know it's quite early, but it would be nice to meet you all at the Marketo User Summit next year. We may even want to get Marketo to provide a Dynamics-specific track if we get enough critical mass. I'm really surprised at the response to my post the past 24 hours. I felt like I was fighting alone the past year so it's good to know I'm not alone. Being a marketing guy with a lead gen background before I got into ops, it occured to me that I should call myself the "Portland Trailblazer". If Walt White is allowed to call himself Heisenberg, then I'm allowed to be the Portland Trailblazer : )

[Anonymous]

Shad,

Thank you so much for this comprehensive break down.  I'm in the midst of taking our organization through a Marketo implementation on top of a pre-existing Dynamics environment - recently upgraded to Dynamics 2013.

After many pre-sales assurances that the Dynamics integration should work seemlessly out of the box, our attempt to begin the install caused fatal issues in our CRM environment on the very first step. I've now begun some belated do diligence on what this integration will entail.  Your post has been tremendously helpful - thank you so much!  That said - I echo Dan's feelings of nausea.

To highlight a point you mentioned. ** Marketo binds to a single instance of CRM **

Thankfully my attempt to install Marketo's solution failed as I was doing this in a staging environment.  I would never consider doing an initial install into our production environment - and thankfully we didn't as the result was disasterous.  We have not yet resolved this going forward with Marketo - our rep suggested a sandbox Marketo instance to work out the CRM integration kinks - with hefty monthly pricetag.  I was a bit put off by that - as their "out-of-the-box" integration is a huge fail.

As our Dynamics environment has been in place since 4.0, there are a number of custom entities and workflows.  I believe that we have already hacked together solutions for merging leads / contacts and handling opportunities.  Our marketing group works mostly with campaigns, lists, and campaign responses - but we don't fully leverage Dynamics features since they are severely lacking and Marketing has no ownership stake in our CRM.

Given our customizations on the Dynamics side, and our installation issues, the road ahead does not look cheery.  I will continue to post our experience on this thread.

Do you have any specific guidance that might help as we negotiate a sandboxed environment to try to get this running?

[Anonymous]

The out-of-the-box Marketo integration with Dynamics does not yet support Dynamics 2013. I would not recommend trying to use it for your case. You may want to consider a custom integration instead.

[Anonymous]

Sorry for the delayed reply. I was on vacation last week. Thanks for the heads up on Dynamics 2013 not being supported yet. We have no plans to migrate from Dynamics 2011 o 2013 anytime soon but we'll obviously have to know the state of this integration when the time comes. As for using a sandbox to test, we had a Marketo sandbox connected to a Dynamics staging environment. It was empty when it was given to us, but you can now get a sandbox that is a copy of your production environment. I actually liked having the empty environment because we strictly used it to test the ability to test the bi-directional integration - could we pass leads from Marketo into Dynamics in the way we wanted, and was Marketo pulling back data properly form Dynamics (opportunities, field updates on leads & contacts). I think we also tried hooking up the Marketo Sales Insight module, unsuccessfully. We worked through problems with this plugin after go live in production. 

[Anonymous]

Please note that Microsoft has not officially released Dynamics CRM 2013, and the current release is Dynamics CRM 2011. The new release is scheduled/rumored to be officially launched October 20, 2013.

[Joe_Villa]

FYI CRM Dynamics 2013 is now GA for both online and on premsis.  This expert is from an email announment from Microsoft on Friday Oct 11. 

Please find linked below a message from the CRM Engineering team's VP Bob Stutz on the status of GA for CRM 2013. 

https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/crmconnection/archive/2013/10/09/microsoft-dynamics-crm-online-...


We too are working on a Marketo Dynamics integration.  We are still working on the Dynamics peice of the puzzle, as we will be deploying the 2013 version.

Thanks for all of the information about your experience.  I'm in the Portland, OR area too.  Do you attend the Portland Marketo User Group meetings?


Did you setup ADFS with Marketo?

 

[Anonymous]

Hi Joe. I attended a couple Portland user group meetings back in 2012 before Dynamics took over my life. I intend to get back into the fold as the dust settles on our implementation and look forward to meeting you there or at the Marketo Summit next year. I had to google ADFS because I never heard of it. I'd have to confirm with IT but I believe we have not implemented it after reading up on it.

[Anonymous]

Hi Shad,

Thank you for the detailed breakdown. As someone who has only used Dynamics, its nice to see your take on things.

You mentioned the issues with your custom lead qualification process, were you ever able to get it resolved? We are having the same issue and can't determine how to make our qualification dialog and workflows trigger the QualifyLead message in our Marketo solution.

Thanks.

-edited, spelling errors-

[Anonymous]

We have not resolved the duplicate record being created when a lead is converted into a contact in Dynamics. We have had a few calls with Marketo engineering and Microsoft. All parties are clear on what the issue is. We (Serena) have been asked to do our due diligence and test the out of the box duplicate detection functionality in Dynamics, which we did not have turned on originally. I'm waiting for IT to remove the custom lead qualification dialog in our one sandbox environment to test. It sounds like you may have already gone down this path and seen that the out of the box duplicate detection rules are inadequate. Can you let me know what you've discovered? Here is the way our custom dialog works. It replicates SFDC's out of the box lead conversion process.

1) First it tries to find a matching account by comparing the lead's company name to all account names in the database. It presents possible matches to the user and allows the user to select one or create a new account if none of them are actual matches.

2) If the user selects a matching account, it then scans all contacts at that account and displays possible matches. If the user selects a match it merges the lead into the existing contact. If there are no matches, the user is allowed to bypass and create a new contact at the account.