Switching from Microsoft Dynamics to Salesforce

[Anonymous]

We integrated Marketo and Microsoft Dynamics a couple of years ago. The integration was a very slow process and took over 6 months, largely due to our requirements for customisations within CRM. This is now working very well and heavily used within the business, but our Sales team would like to replace our CRM system with Salesforce. We are unclear about the amount of work this is likely to cause from a Marketo perspective, and the potential impact. We are a small team with limited technical ability, and we found the original integration with CRM very challenging.

Does anyone have any experience of this? Can anyone advise on the kind of impact this is likely to have on our existing Marketo / lead nurturing process and any historic data?

Many thanks

[Chris_Johnston]

Hi Emma, when switching from Salesforce to a new Salesforce instance, you cannot do anything but get a new Marketo Instance. I am 99% sure that this is the case for going from a Dynamics to Salesforce instance as well. This will be a major project to undertake. I work with the Salytics team (a Gold Digital Services Partner) of Marketo and we are currently engaged in multiple refreshes of Salesforce instances which has also meant Marketo. We'd be happy to have a call with you and talk about the project. There are a lot of things to consider, far too much to express here but it is definitely a huge undertaking, and will have a big impact on the data that you can keep.

Feel free to reach out to me chris@salytics.com and we can set up a time for you to speak with myself and our Founder who is leading a project where a fresh Salesforce & Marketo are replacing their existing Salesforce and Marketo instances. The existing (and new) is part of a complex stack with more than a dozen integrations and over a million contacts in their database.

[Andy_Caron3]

Hi Emma,

I have been an Admin for Marketo instances with both CRMs. Can you give me a little bit more detail about some of the types of customization you did?

Without the full use case, this is what I can tell you:

Personally I've found the integration with Dynamics to be much more labor intensive and "clunky" than the SFDC integration. Additionally, there are a lot of limitations with the Dynamics/Marketo relationship. Examples: inability to sync dupes if both leads are already synced to Dynamics leads/contacts, inability to write activities into CRM, etc.

Any existing programs inside of Marketo would be fine, but you would need to consider things like, are you using Campaigns, and if so at what level. You'd need to sync over all your campaigns into SFDC which means you would lose the date it was added to the campaign and start fresh.

If you're migrating from one CRM to another, you wouldn't lose anything in Marketo, but you wouldn't have the historical data from Dynamics without porting it over.

Custom fields would be another big one, as you already have those in Marketo. If you need a field in SFDC you would need to create it there and then it would sync down to Marketo, meaning you could end up with a lot of duplicate fields that would have to be migrated and then hidden.

From the sales side, is there a Sales Ops team that would be handling the migration, or would that also be you? If it's another team, do they have a strategic plan, if so is there opportunity to alleviate some of this in their migration process?