Migrating to Dynamics? Key Learnings from a Marketo Enterprise Customer

[Anonymous]

Hi Shad,

Thank you for the quick response. Our case is less standard than that. Most of our business is from used industrial equipment. Because of the quick turn around and nature of our business model, we do not use leads. Now that we're getting more sophisticated with our marketing, this will probably change but that's a lot of planning and painful retraining away. For now, we are trying to automate the qualification process so any leads that get added through Marketo can be promoted to a more useable contact record.

From what I've seen of the duplicate detection rules, you should be able to set up a similar process to the salesforce conversion process, but a bit reversed. Essentually, you set up the duplicate detection rules to match the contacts and accounts as you need and, when a user tries to qualify a lead using the dynamics qualification, the rules will inturupt the process and allow the user to merge them instead. However, as I have said, we have not used it, so if you already tried and found it does not work as advertised, I'm sorry to hear that.

I can confirm however, that the out of the box qualification does sync properly with the Marketo. I tested using 1.0.0.11 and everything comes through. Our next step is going to be trying to cheat this process into a workflow by creating a plugin to call the QualifyLead request at the contact level. After we let this process create the contact, the rest of the workflow can find any matching accounts and update/create as needed. In our situation, Marketo is the only process adding leads to our system and they are already checking for duplicates based on email, so we can just let the contact level run, but it sounds like duplicate contacts can be an issue for you.

[Anonymous]

Hi Shad,

We are 8 months into our MS CRM 2013 online implementation, and just signed on with Marketo this month after an extensive due diligence process.  In our set up of CRM 2013, we decided to forgo the use of the lead entity because an opportunity is automatically created upon conversion of the lead to a contact, and notes or activity history on the lead record do not automatically carry over to the newly created contact record.  It is impossible to circumvent the creation of an opportunity upon conversion of a lead to a contact.  

Ideally, we want all new "leads" entered in CRM as contacts -- and we'll use scoring to determine "sales readiness" and the Best Bets view to direct our sales efforts.  Once the real sales opportunity is identified by a rep, s/he will create an opportunity to follow the steps of our sales process.  It's also important for the reps to have access to the entirety of our engagement with this "lead" -- from initial capture/nurture to sales engagement -- which is why losing the early marketing engagement data/notes from the lead entity during conversion was not acceptable.

During the sales process with Marketo, we asked several times about the ability to push new "leads" in as contacts (rather into the lead entity) and were told it was possible.   Well, we are now 3 weeks into our Marketo integration and we haven't been able to find a way to do this.  Now, after reading about all of the problems related to de-duping and synching during conversion, I too am growing "nauseous" about this.

Shad, I am also a former SFDC user and the clunkiness of the lead entity and inferior de-duping process in CRM 2013 is incredibly frustrating.  Have you had any breakthroughs since March that you might share?  I really appreciate the effort you put into your original post.  I know it will save us hours of frustration as a result, thank you!

[Anonymous]

Hi Anita,

I would drop your pursuit of bypassing the Dynamics leads object. It is true that the out of the box lead qualify process does create an opportunity every time you convert a lead into a contact, but this process can be circumvented. We are actually working with new Dynamics consultants right now and one of the things they are working on is a completely new lead qualification process. Our process, which is being tested in staging as we speak, actually makes it impossible for a sales rep to create an opportunity during the lead conversion process. I can't provide more insights into how they achieved this but I can verify that it is possible to create a custom lead qualification process that meets your needs. You just need consultants that know what they're doing. I like what I've seen thus far from Webfortis so I guess I'd recommend them if you need a place to start.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Just to throw salt on the wound, we'll be migrating from Dynamics 2013 to Dynamics online in March 2015.  Supposedly, this will require us to start from scratch - a new Marketo instance, as they currently don't have a toolset in place to migrate our existing instance (which includes over 800 programs, 24 workspace/lead partitions, a complex lead lifecycle, a ton of customization, etc.).  Some of our IT folks are trying to convince us that it's not worth the effort and to instead leverage the marketing automation/digital marketing capabilities of Sitecore (which we're migrating to as we speak for our websites' CMS) or evaluate MS new Marketing module for Dynamics.  We also had a bunch of issues after we migrated from 2011 to 2013 recently.  I'm glad that there are other Dynamics users like Shad and yourself on this community so that we can share experiences.

[Anonymous]

Shad,

Thanks so much for this feedback.  Not the answer I was hoping for, but helpful nevertheless.  In your custom qualification process, are you able to pull notes over from the lead to the contact?  If no, I guess we could create a process that converts the lead automatically upon creation so that we don't lose any information during the lead lifespan.

Will check Webfortis out.

Thanks again!

[Andrea_Lechner]

What an awesome discussion!  We have a prospect using the equivelant of SFDC's person accounts in Dynamics.  Does anyone have any "gotcha" experience with how these will interact with Marketo? 

[Jeff_Hild]

I am definitely interested in this thread as well.

[Anonymous]

Thank you to everyone who's c ontributed to this post and especially Shad for starting it all...  I heard recently that there were one 10 world-wide and whilst I have not counted the number of contributors to this post at least I don't feel so alone anymore.

Dan - can you share learning from 2011-2013?  We are on premise and looking to change Q1, 2015.  Shoud I/we be afraid?

We've already been through the double heart ache of Boomi and then Native : (

Regards,

Victoria