Advanced CRM Integration Emerges As Key Piece Of MAP Success

Because sales and marketing teams often have different goals and focus on different metrics, the way a contact is reported and viewed with the CRM tool is often different from the marketing data base. “Data is not the same for sales and marketing and it shouldn’t be because they have two different purposes,” said Matt Quinlan, VP Operations, Loopfuse, which focuses its OneView solution is focused on bringing data into the CRM system and provide sales with all the necessary information that will help close a deal.

“You want to track the lead source as well as sales, but in different contexts,” Quinlan added. Marketers are really focused on the original source of the lead because that’s important for them to be able to apply to their ROI reporting of effectiveness of different sources of leads and how much money are they allocating to lead source a versus lead source ‘B.’”

Aligning the data for sales and marketing is straightforward, but the real challenge is to authenticate the integrity of the data, according to Bryan Brown, Director of Product Management, Silverpop. “It’s important for marketers to evaluate the lead capture forms to ensure that they are asking questions in ways that will provide clean and measurable data into the prospecting database, and eventually, into CRM,” Brown said. “For example, instead of asking an open-ended question like ‘What is your job title?’ You would ask, ‘What is your role?’ and then provide them with a predefined drop down of options.” Silverpop’s Engage B2B platform is set up so that leads that have not been sent to CRM are visible, and once a lead has been sent to CRM it can be viewed in either system. The sales teams are presented with an inline mashup that supplements the standard lead CRM screen with behavioral insights about the leads activity and likeliness to buy.

Best Practice CRM Integration Recommendations:

• Define a clear business objective: “I urge our prospects to define the business process to manage their leads before implementing and integrating,” said Christopher Doran, VP Marketing, Manticore. “If you just turn a system on, there is little value to be gained without a defined marketing funnel and sales pipeline and the handoff between the systems. “The devil is in the details when it comes to integration,” Doran said. “When choosing a solution, it’s critical that you understand how integration works and the impact it has. For example there is a huge difference between serving up data as an iFrame within a CRM solutions and actually syncing data into objects and fields. The more informed you are about these details, the more likely you are to choose a system that’s right for you.” Manticore’s platform has hard-coded integration with the company’s CRM partners, including salesforce.com and Oracle CRM On Demand, designed to enable Manticore to provide a deeper level of integration.
• Establish Rules for Sharing Data: “We generally recommend that clients use Pardot as a ‘holding pen’ or marketing database to triage and nurture leads before pushing them to the CRM (via an assignment rule or a review process),” said Adam Blitzer, VP Marketing, Pardot. “This also helps with data cleanliness, preventing duplicates in the CRM. It creates a tidy sales database of qualified leads.” Pardot is also integrated with a number of different CRM systems. The ease of integration depends on a few key factors, Blitzer said. The most significant factor is whether it is a native integration. Out-of-the-box, the company offers built in connectors for salesforce.com, SugarCRM and Netsuite. Integration with other CRM systems can be done through the API and may require a more custom setup.
• Emphasize and Define a Nurturing Process: “Most organizations do a good job at generating leads but equal emphasis needs to be put into nurturing them,” said Silverpop’s Brown. “The majority of the buying cycle of a lead is spent prior to sales picking up the phone and that’s also where companies lose most of their leads. I often tell customers that it’s okay to focus your marketing dollars on lead gen but you better focus your people on lead nurture.
  
  

Brown said too often marketers focus so much on the lead score that they miss the point — that a sales person is not as concerned with the lead score as the quality of the lead. Sales people are concerned about various prospect data, like Web page, white paper and campaign views, as well as what search phrases the prospect typed in Google before engaging with the business. “That initial search can provide significant information regarding the real interests of the Web site visitor,” Brown said.

“At the end of the day, the CRM system is a data management platform. Understanding how that data is being used at a very granular level is particularly important when taking two systems that are working with that data and making them talk to each other,” said Loopfuse’s Quinlan.