Marketing and Sales have long been at odds with each other. For many companies who are looking to bridge that gap, the solution is to better integrate Marketing systems with Sales systems and work towards a more seamless flow between the two. This is very achievable goal with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and web service technologies making integration between two systems more plug and play than ever. But to be successful you need a plan. This document helps you understand the best practices and the questions you should be asking when integrating your sales system with your marketing system.

Understanding Marketing and Sales CRM Integration

In most Sales CRM systems, there are usually the following objects or buckets of information:

• Leads – These are prospects who register for the various campaigns Marketing is running.
• Campaigns – These are webinars, whitepaper registrations and any other campaign that requires the prospect to register.
• Opportunities – Once a prospect is deemed qualified by sales, they are “converted” into opportunities.
• Accounts – The account is the company of the contact.
• Contacts – Contacts are like the contacts in your Outlook or email. This can be the salesperson’s own contacts, but in addition when a lead is converted into an opportunity, typically they are then also converted to a contact which is a child of an account.
• Activities – Activity can be anything: a web visit, participation in a webinar, and other items Marketing is tracking. This is valuable information for sales because it shows them their prospect is engaged. Activity can be associated with the lead or contact.

Lead Lifecycle

• A lead is qualified and is published from Marketing to Sales.
• The sales person updates the lead status, this is communicated to Marketing so they know sales are following up on their leads.
• The lead is converted to an opportunity; the corresponding account and contact are also created.
• The opportunity results in a closed deal. The information about the revenue generated is communicated back to Marketing so they can calculate the efficiency of their programs.
• The campaign that the lead participated in is also tracked in both systems so Marketing and Sales can understand the marketing mix that is resulting in closed deals.

Deployment Best Practices

In order to have a successful integration project, here are some key things to consider:

• Is your internal tech team on board? Do they support you integrating with a system outside your firewall?
• Is your Sales CRM integration friendly? Does it have a readily available application programming interface that also has documentation?
• Is your Sales CRM onsite or on demand?
• Do you have a sandbox environment for testing, a version of your Sales system that is not production so the integration can be tested in a way that does not disrupt your business?
• Does your Sales CRM have all the “objects” or buckets described earlier in this document: Leads, Campaigns, Opportunities, Accounts, and Contacts?

Internal IT Buy In

Having an internal IT team on board is going to be critical. Somebody on your side is going to have to drive the integration project and provide access to a testing or sandbox environment.

Integration Friendliness

Different Sales CRM systems have differing levels of integration friendliness.  Some like Salesforce.com are already done, you can just install Marketbright from the Appexchange. Others like Oracle on premise require more consulting and can be more complex due to versions and customizations that your company has made.  Some systems require you to use their technology to do the integration which are not open standards based. Documentation can also be a challenge not only for Marketbright but even for the customer to get from the Sales CRM provider.

On Premise vs. On Demand

In general SaaS solutions are more integration friendly. On premise solutions very often require connecting through a firewall and the software itself is almost always a few generations behind SaaS solutions just by the very nature of the software industry. Many on premise solutions are end-of-lifed, meaning future upgrades are on hold while those companies build out their SaaS offerings.

Sandbox for Testing

Do you have access to a sandbox environment so you can do some testing of the integration on a non-production system. This again is typically easier with SaaS than with On Premise. For example, Salesforce.com makes it self-service and anybody can create developer sandbox instance for free and in under 15 minutes.

Which Objects or Buckets are Present?

Some legacy on premise Sales CRM systems do not have the leads or campaign objects. This is because most Sales CRM systems started as contact management tools and therefore only had Contacts and Accounts. Understanding which objects your system has will help you understand what types of integration are possible. Marketbright can accommodate for some missing capabilities like lead assignment, but others, like pipeline forecasting are not the role of a Marketing system to manage.
 

Once you have determined the level of integration that is possible and how complex it will be to do the integration, the next step is to understand how the project can be rolled out.  Marketbright does not recommend what we call the “Big Bang” approach which is to not go live creating leads until everything is perfect with the integration. Marketing’s job is to generate leads first and foremost and focusing on systems and process to the detriment of new lead generation for sales is a mistake few companies can justify in this economic environment. Lead generation by any means first, streamlining of process second. This is our recommendation:

Step 1 – Get Campaigns Running – During this phase the integration with sales is not complete, but campaigns are running and leads are being generated which is Marketing’s first prerogative.  During this phase a manual pull and publish between systems is typically sufficient.

Step 2 – Sandbox Testing – In parallel to the effort to get campaigns running and leads flowing, the integration team sets up a sandbox environment if available where testing of the integration can commence.

Step 3 – Go Live – Once the testing of the integration is complete the project can go live. At this time there is a onetime data synchronization performed by the Marketbright team.

If you have on premise software, integration could be complicated by several factors from our experience:

• Internal IT groups who do not want to allow integration.
• Software that does not have APIs and is difficult to integrate with.
• Long term instability of the integration because of connectivity issues and changes your IT makes without notifying your other vendors.

Luckily, Marketbright can mitigate all of these issues.

Internal IT Resistance

From a business perspective, you should be able to justify the effort internally and get support of your IT group. If not, you can try to mitigate their concerns:

If they have concerns about connecting directly to your Sales CRM: Marketbright can work with your internal IT to establish a staging table or area where data is transferred between the two systems. This is common with legacy Enterprise systems but is not ideal.  Marketbright can also work with a sandbox environment and test until your IT team is satisfied that direct connectivity is not an issue.

If they have concerns about SaaS software: There are plenty of studies that show that internal IT groups are actually lagging by comparison in terms of their availability, scalability and security when compared to SaaS vendor.  Marketbright uses Rackspace for its data center, and Rackspace has more people dedicated to network security than typically work in an entire in house IT department.  How you go about arguing this case is easy, you just have to be careful because SaaS is currently replacing internal IT job roles industry-wide, and at a very rapid pace. You may need to go higher in the organization. If you are in IT, championing SaaS is the best way to ensure your continued involvement in projects that will be around for a while to come.

Lack of Easy Integration

If you don’t have a web service API and documentation, then you’re probably dealing with a Sales CRM that is not as up to date as others. There are numerous options that Marketbright provides in this scenario:

• Marketbright deploys an integration agent: Marketbright deploys a small agent on the same server as your on premise system which creates the web service connectivity. This is the easiest option for you and the least prone to errors and connectivity issues.
• Your IT develops the web service interface: Your IT group builds the web service connectivity and provides it to Marketbright.
• Staging Table: Your IT provides a staging table and builds the web service interface to that table, and then does directly database integration from the staging table to your legacy system. Not ideal but the only practical option for some legacy systems.

Instability of Integration

Any integration is prone to maintenance requirements over time. Even Salesforce integration requires frequent monitoring for errors and updates. Marketbright mitigates this by logging and reporting any publish errors that occur and we quickly rectify the situation in a proactive fashion.