15 minutes

Discover the essential strategies and develop an action plan for maintaining data hygiene and effectively syncing Salesforce CRM with Marketo Engage for revenue operations. This article provides key insights and proven methodology for Marketo Engage admins to optimize their database and Salesforce CRM integration.

In today’s data-driven business landscape, maintaining clean and accurate data is essential for the success of your Marketing and Sales operations. Poor data hygiene can lead to inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and a poor customer experience.

This article helps you understand the importance of data hygiene and provides practical steps to decrease sync issues between Marketo Engage and Salesforce CRM. Additionally, I explain how to use the Salesforce CRM dashboards to monitor and troubleshoot the sync process. This routine ensures that your Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are accurately and efficiently pushed to Salesforce for your Sales team to close deals.

From lead to close: Achieving frictionless data synchronization with Marketo Engage and Salesforce

The goal of any data hygiene process is to ensure that clean, accurate, and up-to-date lead data is being synced from Marketo Engage to Salesforce CRM. Developing this process allows your Sales team to focus on what they do best - closing deals and driving revenue. To achieve this goal, it's essential for admins to establish a data hygiene process that includes regular data audits, deduplication, and validation. This process helps maintain a clean and efficient database, ensuring that your CRM and Marketo Engage work seamlessly together. You should also regularly monitor your Salesforce CRM sync processes, and don't hesitate to address any issues that may arise.

In the following sections, I discuss my best practices to:

  1. Ensure that clean, accurate, and up-to-date data is being synced from Marketo Engage to Salesforce CRM.
  2. Reduce the risk of data inconsistencies and errors in two systems.
  3. Improve the efficiency and productivity of the Sales team.

Building a data hygiene process in Marketo Engage

Why develop a data hygiene process

Data hygiene is the foundation of successful CRM sync, ensuring that your Sales team has accurate and up-to-date information in CRM and reducing sync errors in Marketo Engage. Keeping your data clean allows you to manage leads effectively in your CRM. From my experience using Salesforce CRM, I've seen firsthand how a lack of a solid data hygiene strategy can lead to several issues:

To avoid these pitfalls, let’s review the data hygiene process. Developing a data hygiene process includes regular data audits, deduplication, and validation, to help you maintain a clean and efficient database.

Getting started step-by-step

1. Set up data standard:
2. Conduct a data audit:

If you do not have a data hygiene process in Marketo Engage, begin by running a data audit. This step helps you determine the data quality of your database and identify areas that need improvement.

3. Identify data sources:

The "Person Source" field is one of the crucial fields that help you understand the source of lead creation. Ensure that all leads are updated with the correct "Person Source" values. Here's the action plan:

4. Deduplicate records:

Use the built-in deduplication features in Marketo Engage.

5.  Validate data:

Implement data validation rules in Marketo Engage to ensure data accuracy through form entries. The product documentation has detailed information on how to set up data validation.

6. Train your team:

Provide training sessions to educate data entry personnel and to ensure that everyone entering data into Marketo Engage follows the established guidelines.

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Reference the data hygiene process documentation template and consider documenting the suggested critical elements of your data hygiene process.

Enhancing data hygiene with Salesforce CRM Backlog Dashboards

I've covered the importance of data hygiene and the critical role that it plays in ensuring data integrity and reliability for Salesforce CRM sync. Let's explore how to use the Salesforce CRM Sync dashboards in Marketo Engage to monitor and troubleshoot sync issues. These dashboards are essential tools that complement your data hygiene efforts, helping admins’ day-to-day monitoring to maintain a seamless and error-free data synchronization process.

Why monitoring is important

Here are several key reasons why monitoring with the Salesforce CRM Sync dashboards is important:

  1. Real-Time insights: The dashboards provide real-time visibility into sync status, backlog trends, and errors, enabling you to identify and resolve issues immediately. Monitoring these dashboards prevents problems from escalating and ensures that your campaigns remain that unaffected.
  2. Proactive management and enhanced efficiency:  Regular monitoring helps you proactively manage the health of your data sync, reducing the risk of unexpected downtime or failures. It also allows you to optimize performance and minimize the time your teams spend on manual corrections, leading to improved efficiency and productivity.
  3. Data quality assurance:  Monitoring dashboards help you verify that your data hygiene practices are effective. If you notice more errors or a growing backlog, you can refine your strategies to maintain accurate and up-to-date data, which is essential for successful personalization in your marketing and sales campaigns.

From my prior implementation, I've learned that the key to successful data sync monitoring is consistency and attention to detail. Here are a few pitfalls to avoid:

By consistently monitoring your Salesforce CRM sync processes, you can ensure that your data remains clean, accurate, and reliable, ultimately driving better business outcomes.

How to use Salesforce CRM Sync Dashboards in Marketo Engage effectively

To use the Salesforce CRM sync dashboards in Marketo Engage effectively for monitoring and troubleshooting Salesforce sync issues, follow these steps:

Optimize data hygiene campaigns

Key takeaways

By implementing a data hygiene process, you will be able to maintain a more seamless data synchronization with Marketo Engage and Salesforce, drive more revenue for the business, and stay ahead of the competition.

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I also designed an admin checklist to help you develop your data hygiene protocol easily in your organization. Download a copy to get started today.