To purge or not to purge, that is the question

[Akande_Davis]

Hey Marketing Nation,

When my company first implemented Marketo we had a ton of dirty data and as a result got blacklisted a few times within the first 4 - 5 month of using it. This caused us to get a lot of spam filters (spamcop, mimecast, etc.) and reduce our deliverability for key contacts within our database. The hard bounces from spam rejections led our CRM to having a lot of 'invalid' email addresses (we use SugarCRM for reference) which in turn upset the salespeople since they knew that many of these contacts were legitimate, valid contacts. Mind you, even before all of this, data cleanliness was an issue and SugarCRM's connector is anything but stellar.

As we look toward the future, we plan on bringing in a third party solution so that our CRM and Marketo can sync with less of a headache and we are implementing some alerts so that our sales team can know when hard bounces related to spam occur.

My question is this - the head of our CRM team feels that the best way to move forward with this third party solution and some of the new processes is to purge the Marketo database and essentially start from scratch with the sync.

I'm not sure what solution would be presented in contrast to that, but I wanted to pick everyone's brains and see if you encountered something similar or have a recommendation for a good third-party solution.

Thanks for the help!

[Josh_Hill13]

There are a lot of threads on data cleanliness. I suggest you look at those as well as blog posts from RingLead, Openprise, and similar vendors.

You should be able to clean up the data using tools like that w/o deleting all of Marketo. And you should clean up your CRM at the same time, even if your choice is to delete what's in Marketo. If your CRM isn't clean, Marketo will never be clean.

But if the data you have in Marketo isn't that valuable to you, sure, purge it all and reconnect the systems later.