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A
Anonymous
November 22, 2016
Question

Marketo Integration with Sugar CRM

  • November 22, 2016
  • 4 replies
  • 4274 views

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 -

  1. 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?
    1. 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.
  2. 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

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    4 replies

    SanfordWhiteman
    SanfordWhiteman
    Level 10
    November 22, 2016

    First post on the community so please be nice

    I'll definitely be nice... to you, that is.

    1. 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.

    A
    Anonymous
    November 22, 2016

    Thanks for your quick reply!

    Just so I can go back to both companies and sound like I know what I am talking about - what impact would it have if we only stored leads in the CRM and not Marketo?

    Do you know of any integrations that have done what our company is proposing and then had issues? I am just trying to build a case.

    Thanks again!

    Justin_Norris1
    Justin_Norris1
    Level 10
    November 22, 2016

    Gareth Lowndes​

    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.

    ---

    Justin Norris | Perkuto​​

      Zak_Pines5
      Zak_Pines5
      Level 3
      November 22, 2016

      Gareth, to reiterate what Sanford and Justin have said here, it sounds like the partner you are engaged with is "missing the point" when it comes to how to best leverage Marketo.

      I have a lot of experience setting customers up to be successful with Marketo and Sugar in unison - if you'd like to chat directly about it to bring in a "third party voice" to your discussions just let me know - I'm Zak[at]BedrockData.com

      And thanks Justin for the Bedrock Data mention, we can help with Marketo-Sugar integrations and increasingly customers are looking for a third party platform to make the connection more robust than the native connector offered by Sugar in the past.

        A
        Anonymous
        November 24, 2016

        Hi,

        This kind of response from CRM/IT people is not unusual - most of them simply do not understand what a marketing automation platform is for. Having separate databases in 2 systems and trying to keep them sync'd by using rules will only lead to headaches. It would be interesting to understand exactly why your consultants want to keep the records excluded from Marketo; are they worried about cost, syncing overhead (can be mitigated), governance (again can be mitigated by restricting edit/delete privileges to the CRM) ?

        One potential route is to explain that Marketo and a CRM are one system in reality, they just do different things with the same data.

        Neil.

          Zak_Pines5
          Zak_Pines5
          Level 3
          December 13, 2016

          Hi Gareth - Were you able to get on the same page with the IT consultants.  As an FYI I wrote this today highlighting common scenarios for the Bedrock Data connector for Marketo and SugarCRM.

          Five ways Bedrock Data provides a better Marketo-SugarCRM connector

          Best Regards,

          Zak

            A
            Anonymous
            December 13, 2016

            Hi Zak,

            Yup all sorted out - managed to get them to agree to slow down a little and look at all options.

            Thanks,

            Gareth

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