Learn about syncing Marketo to your CRM

Coordinating marketing and sales activities can be daunting and time consuming, without an automated solution to help simplify the sharing of information between your marketing and CRM systems. Marketo’s CRM Sync provides a way to seamlessly synchronize relevant information between Marketo and your CRM. With CRM Sync, leads who are nearing the buying stage are sent to your CRM where sales can act on them. Information about sales activities such as opportunities created, and one can be sent from your CRM back to Marketo. With both systems in sync, and the sales and marketing teams in alignment, you’ll be able to drive more qualified leads, target the right prospects and measure results.

CRM Sync is connecting Marketo to your CRM, so that the systems can share information back and forth. This allows you to leverage the strengths of each. When you connect Marketo to your CRM, you get all the campaign execution and analytics of Marketo driving the pipeline creation necessary to meet the demands of your sales team. Here’s an example of how the sync works. Your company uses a lead life cycle program in combination with various nurture campaigns to help move leads through the sales and marketing funnel. When a lead reaches a certain lead score threshold, their program status is set to Marketing Qualified Lead or MQL. And the lead along with their score is sent to sales in the next CRM Sync. Marketo can also send an alert to sales through the CRM Sync. Sales picks up the lead and works to qualify it within an agreed upon timeframe. Some teams agree that if sales doesn’t work the lead within a set timeframe, marketing pulls the lead back into Marketo to continue nurturing. As sales continues to work on leads, their status is synced back to Marketo from the CRM as they become sales qualified, opportunities and closed one. All of this is made possible through syncing information back and forth between Marketo and your CRM. Some of the data that can be synced includes, lead data, such as demographics, behavior, firmographics. Contact information such as job title, purchasing decision maker, or purchase influencer.

Account information such as demographics at the company level, opportunities and users.

With Marketo and your CRM Synced, you’ll be able to get a complete view of a lead, their information and behaviors in both systems. In Marketo, you can filter and trigger based on lead info synced from your CRM. Such as filled data value changes, and opportunity data. You’ll have more robust sales notifications, where you can notify sales of interesting moments, trigger tasks through campaigns, and send emails based on the activities your leads take. You can help your sales teams concentrate on the hottest leads and close more business faster by taking full advantage of lead scoring and Marketo sales insight.

You can sync your Marketo programs with your CRM campaigns to understand how marketing is impacting leads and what marketing initiatives have been influencing your leads. This can also allow sales teams to connect and engage with members of certain campaigns such as calling leads before a big event. Finally, you’ll have closed loop reporting in Marketo using data synced from your CRM. This gives you end-to-end insights into the effectiveness of your marketing programs on leads after they are handed off to sales.

Marketo has tailor made applications for salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics that you can use to set up a closed loop seamless connection between your CRM system and Marketo. You’ll add a few Marketo fields into the lead and contact objects in Salesforce. Then you’ll create a Marketo user. Once that’s done, you can connect the two systems. Similarly, in Microsoft Dynamics, you start off by downloading and installing the Marketo lead management solution for Microsoft Dynamics. Then you assign the Marketo sync user role that was created in the package install to a new user called, the Marketo sync user. This allows Marketo to talk to Microsoft Dynamics. Once that is done, you connect the two systems. The first sync of Marketo with either CRM will take a few hours to a day or two, depending on the size of your database. After that, each sync will occur every three to five minutes because only data that has changed is being synced.

After you sync your Marketo and CRM systems, you should see improvements throughout the sales and marketing funnel. For example, sales will notice that leads are more informed, have a good relationship with your brand and are more likely to purchase. Sales and marketing will gain better insight into leads from their web activities and interaction with marketing efforts. Sales should see increased conversion rates by only working leads who have indicated a high intent to purchase. Sales and marketing can see leads move more quickly through the sales and marketing funnel because they’ve provided the most relevant information at each stage of the journey. With end-to-end insights from both systems, sales and marketing teams should be able to tell what influenced buyers to make a purchase, what did not, and make improvements that affect growth of both sales and revenue.

Now that you’re familiar with how the CRM Sync feature works, let’s set up one in Marketo. -