When To Sync Marketo Leads To Your CRM

Integrating Marketo and your CRM allows you to strategically consolidate your marketing and sales efforts, providing a unified view of leads and customers. Integration of the two systems facilitates better data management, improves process efficiency, and ensures that both teams work with the latest information. 

Choosing when to sync leads is a crucial part of successful integration. There are two options for syncing Marketo leads with your CRM: immediate sync and rule-based sync. 

Both approaches have advantages (and disadvantages) that need to be carefully weighed up before you decide on the right strategy for your organization. Here’s a summary of the pros and cons of each approach.

Immediate sync sends leads straight to your CRM almost instantlyafter creation in Marketo (in near-real time):

Pros:

• Simplicity: There’s no need to create or manage complex sync rules, simplifying the process.
• Complete visibility: The sales team has visibility into all leads from the beginning, reducing the risk of creating duplicates since leads are available in CRM right away.
• Quick access: The sales team can quickly access all generated leads, facilitating a prompt and timely response to potential opportunities.

Cons:

• Data overload: Some unqualified or low-quality leads may end up in the CRM, potentially overloading the sales team with irrelevant data.
• Incomplete information: Leads may not have all the necessary information for assignment or follow-up, leading to inefficient management.
• Additional training: The sales team needs additional training to recognize which leads are qualified and which are not ready for follow-up, increasing the initial workload.

Rule-based sync is when leads from Marketo must meet certain qualification criteria before entering the CRM.

Pros:

• Higher quality leads: Most low-quality leads are kept out of the CRM, helping to optimize the sales team’s time and resources.
• Precise focus: Only leads that meet the established criteria are synced, ensuring that the sales team works with higher quality contacts.

Cons:

• Management complexity: Sync rules need to be created and managed, which complicates the process and requires a marketing automation specialist.
• Duplicate risk: There’s a possibility that the sales team may create new leads or contacts in CRM for individuals already in Marketo, leading to duplicates and fragmented activity history.
• Limited visibility: The sales team will not have visibility into unqualified leads, potentially resulting in missed opportunities if leads are not correctly or timely qualified. That said, with proper configuration, this won’t happen.

When you’re integrating Marketo with your CRM, you need to carefully consider when to sync leads. Immediate sync provides complete visibility from the start but can overwhelm the sales team with irrelevant data. 

On the other hand, rule-based sync allows a more precise approach, ensuring that only qualified leads reach sales. The downside is that it’s more complex to manage and maintain. The key is to find a balance that maximizes efficiency and data quality, avoids duplicates, and ensures that information is always up-to-date.

Proper configuration and optimization are crucial to ensuring effective synchronization between Marketo and your CRM. There are two key aspects involved with this:

• Field mapping is vital to ensure that fields between the two systems are correctly aligned. This includes mapping fields precisely so that information transfers coherently and data loss is avoided.

• Duplicate management is a critical step. Implementing strategies to identify and eliminate duplicates will ensure that information is accurate and useful. Correctly configuring these rules is essential for maintaining data integrity.

To ensure efficient synchronization, it’s important to follow best practices. Here are four worth following:

1. Define clear criteria for lead qualification that will be synced.
2. Monitor and adjust synchronization rules to improve efficiency.
3. Train marketing and sales teams to handle integration and understand data.
4. Use data quality tools to clean and enrich systems and maintain quality.

Deciding when to sync Marketo leads with your CRM is a strategic decision that can significantly influence the effectiveness of marketing and sales teams. It’s clear that immediate sync and rule-based sync both have their own benefits and challenges. 

Proper configuration and optimization of the integration are key for ensuring effective synchronization, improving data quality, and avoiding duplicates. Your choice of approach will depend on the specific needs of your organization. By following best practices, you can maximize the benefits of integration and achieve greater alignment between marketing and sales.

Need strategic support with syncing Marketo Leads with your CRM? Speak to a specialist at Kapturall. Contact us