Don t Gamble on Integration: 5 Ways to Improve Marketo

Transcription

1 Don t Gamble on Integration: 5 Ways to Improve Marketo 1

2 Don t Gamble on Integration: 5 Ways to Improve Marketo Don t gamble with your top of funnel activity. Connect Marketo faster with a more powerful integration tool and increase your organization s odds of producing better leads. What you do with your marketing automation implementation will determine success or failure at the top of your sales funnel. In digital business, nurture marketing is only the start of a good round. Think of Marketo as table stakes for a lead. If you want to have a better hand, you need to draw more cards. In other words, you need more tools. To be effective, marketing automation systems need to be integrated with other key sales and marketing systems. There are a lot of options on the market for integrating with Marketo but it s the way you do it that can give you a competitive advantage. With a great integration platform, you can extend the functionality of Marketo without adding extra overhead cost. In this ebook, we ll walk you through some ways that a more capable integration platform can enhance your Marketo implementation and improve your chances of getting better leads. An average company uses 30-plus cloud storage systems, and 40-plus marketing cloud apps. Sanjay Beri, CEO & Founder, Netskope Marketo is very good at ing and nurturing. Anything outside of that probably requires the use of other tools. 2

3 First the basics why integrate? To increase the odds of better leads. Without integrating Marketo with your CRM of choice, marketing and sales will be in conflict. Marketing won t know the latest status of a lead and may even treat leads as new that have already been contacted by sales. Also, if you don t integrate Marketo properly, the leads you put in your CRM will not be nurtured properly. MarketingProfs found that organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions experience 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates. The Secret to Account Based Marketing Success, MarketingProfs, 2016 Lack of visibility between sales and marketing is one of the most important reasons Marketo needs to be well integrated with the rest of the core systems in your organization. 3

4 Other benefits of integrating: More Complete Leads By connecting applications, you can populate Marketo with additional information about a lead. For example, you can connect Marketo to a lead enhancement vendor to clean, validate, and enhance each lead before it s put into your CRM. More Engaging Sales Conversations With more information about leads being captured and put into your CRM, sales can have more relevant conversations with prospects and leads. Clearer Prioritization With better tracking, you can better adjust lead scores in Marketo so your salespeople can prioritize them accordingly. Better Assessment of Marketing Efforts: You may want to source and number of clicks on a webpage that resulted in the purchase of a specific product. Or maybe you want to view the success of an online ad. When you can track interactions across multiple platforms, you get a more complete picture of your marketing efforts. Typical on-premises and cloud systems that contain lead information Customer Relationship Management (Salesforce, SugarCRM) Content Management System (Wordpress, Drupal) Events and Webinars (Eventbrite, Webex, Cvent) E-commerce Platforms (Stripe, Zoura) Financial Systems (Intacct) Social Media (Facebook, Twitter) 4

5 Third-party integration tools address many common lead-management needs. On the next few pages, we ll explain how integration helps: 1. Eliminate duplicate records 2. Improve sync time 3. Reduce human error 4. Nurture both contacts and leads 5. Optimize Marketo performance 6. Get more data back 7. Ease the work of tough integrations 8. Provide control over sensitive data 9. Transform data 1. Eliminate duplicate records. To prevent this problem, a good integration platform has the ability to automatically check to see if a contact already exists before adding it to any of your systems. Example: Let s say Dylan, already a lead in Marketo, fills out a Marketo form on your website. The integration platform automatically checks for duplicate Dylan records in Marketo and your CRM. It finds many Dylans, but none from this one s company, so it automatically creates this Dylan as a lead in your CRM and Marketo. If this Dylan was already in the system, a good integration platform would automatically augment his record with the new interaction information. 5

6 2. Improve sync time. Because synchronization between systems can be slow at times, wrong s can go out to leads and contacts because records in Marketo don t reflect changes in Salesforce fast enough. A good integration platform will sync based on triggers or events, guaranteeing that data is always up to date. 3. Reduce human error. A great integration platform should have bi-directional syncing, which means that any changes made in Marketo are also automatically made in your other systems, and vice versa. No more having to manually enter data in all your systems and no more worrying about human data entry errors. 6

7 4. Nurture both contacts and leads. Marketo only understands leads, not Salesforce contacts. With a good integration solution, you can override that distinction and make sure Marketo automatically recognizes Salesforce contacts for nurture campaigns. Example: For instance, say a salesperson enters a contact into Salesforce. With the built-in integration functionality that comes with Marketo, it will not automatically recognize it as an object for nurture. You need the business logic of a robust integration platform to ensure Marketo recognizes contacts and includes them in your nurture stream. 7

8 5. Optimize Marketo performance. A good integration platform gives you the flexibility to choose what fields you want synced, reducing the amount of data and thus, the time it takes to move that data back and forth. You can also send a single API call to your integration platform that can then orchestrate operations and make subsequent calls in parallel, freeing up Marketo to perform other tasks more quickly. Slow downs can occur with as few as 150 triggers and 100,000 leads. With regular cleaning and good systems design, it is fairly easy to keep your system running fast. Josh Hill, Load Balancing in Marketo and Marketing Automation, Marketing Rock Star Guide 8

9 6. Get more data. With the native integration that comes with Marketo, you get limited data back from the systems you connect to. But with a great integration platform, you can select which fields of data you want to capture and increase the information you collect about each lead. 7. Ease the work of tough integrations. If the integration you are looking for isn t on Marketo s marketplace (LaunchPoint), it s considered a custom integration. But a good integration platform gives you a low-code path to connecting apps, even with homegrown or obscure applications, which will save you an incredible amount of time and coding. 8. Get more control over sensitive data. By setting up certain workflows, a great third-party integration tool can help you selectively expose certain data to a vendor without giving away any personal identifying information (PII). 9. Transform data. Marketo doesn t have the native ability to transform or translate all data types and formats, but not all systems communicate in the same language. You need a layer in-between, like a great integration platform, to handle the transformation so you can get the data into a format that Marketo expects from any system or application. Example: When you connect Marketo to Webex, you get attendee information, but you don t capture crucial information like how long someone watched or if they asked a question. To capture this detailed information, you need a third party integration solution. Let s say you only want to send company names and domains to your data enrichment vendor. Before you send the data, you can route it through an integration platform to strip out all the personal identifying information so you re not liable, but more in control. 9

10 How to enhance the capability of Marketo and increase your chances of better leads: Not only can a third-party integration platform fix common issues, a good one can also enhance Marketo s native capabilities without increasing your company s overhead: Improve lead quality Target your audience more effectively House all the data about leads in one system Provide closed-loop reporting An integration platform can let you put an end to one of the most common complaints marketing hears from sales: These leads aren t complete enough. On the next few pages, we ll expand on the list above. NOTE: these use cases are only possible with a robust integration platform. They will not work with the out-of-the box integration tool that comes with Marketo. 10

11 Process TIBCO Integration Marketo Data Entry Event Validate Base Data Augment Relationships Address Database 1. Improve lead quality. Salesforce Cross Reference TIBCO Integration Augment Relationships Name Validator API Name Lookup By connecting a data enrichment vendor to Marketo, you can enrich and validate the data at first point of contact, saving sales time spent tracking down important information that is often missing from lead records. This makes it exponentially easier for them to identify customer pain points and greatly speed the sales process. Process Marketo Remove Duplicates De-Duplicate Records How TIBCO Cloud Integration enables Marketo data de-duplication, cleansing, and validation. A side effect of cleaning your data early: Saving your company money. Research and advisory services firm Sirius Decisions estimates that... the cost of each record increases exponentially throughout the customer relationship as follows: $1 to verify record upon entry, $10 to clean and de-dupe after entry, and $100 per record if nothing is done. 11

12 2. Target your audience more effectively. This is another way that connecting a data enrichment vendor to Marketo to improve lead data quality can benefit your organization. More information about each lead helps you segment more effectively and execute more targeted messaging. And, the better the integration platform, the more information you can gather about each contact, thereby increasing the effectiveness of your message. 3. House all the data about leads in one system. This may sound simple, but to anyone in sales who has to click back and forth between systems to get the full picture of a lead or prospect, it can be a huge time saver. Not to mention the information that might be excluded about a particular contact or lead because someone missed it or couldn t find it. 12

13 4. Track leads all the way from first contact to a closed deal. Marketo Campaign Lead Click Data TCI Spotfire Database Campaign Behavior Analysis Identify Trends or Patterns This is also referred to as closed loop reporting. Basically, it s a form of consolidated activity monitoring, something that you currently cannot do in Marketo because leads pass out of Marketo into your CRM so you cannot track them. To really understand what happens to a lead during its entire lifecycle, you have to join together the transaction train that started in Marketo but typically finishes in your CRM. A great integration platform can pull Marketo and Salesforce activity into a single database, set up an analysis, and use that to report on the entire activity of the lead. This will give you full visibility of everything the lead did from day one to the day it closed. Benefits of closed-loop reporting: Adjust Campaign Configuration Identify Areas for Improvements Complete view of customers with the combination of both sales and marketing data Reduction of costs because you see which channels are working and which are not, giving you the ability to increase your ROI More efficient marketing budget allocation based on campaign performance Better results by identifying areas where leads are not converting and therefore the work needed to remedy them How TIBCO Cloud Integration enables closed-loop reporting: By tracking leads all the way from open to close, you get insight into lead behavior that you couldn t see in your CRM or Marketo alone. Organizations that allow marketing visibility into post customer activity increase profitability per customer by an average of 28%. Driving Revenue through CRM Integration, Marketo 13

14 5. Automate Tasks. A good integration platform can be set up to help automate many of your lead generation tasks. When a user fills out a form on your website, your integration solution could be setup to automatically notify several parties at once. You can also use a good integration platform to consume and process a compelling business event (opportunity or risk) from one system and alert one or more other systems and users. Example: When someone signs up to trial software on a website there are a lot of things that need to happen outside of marketing. The trial needs to be provisioned, the user needs to be verified (location, occupation, a check if they ve trialed before), and others. Getting the lead into Marketo is just one of those workflows. With a great integration platform, the entire process could be automated. The primary benefits of operations automation cited most often were cost reduction, productivity, availability, reliability, and performance. Automated Operations: 5 Benefits of Automating, Helpsystems 14

15 How do you choose the right tool to connect Marketo to everything? Platform. Platforms have three major advantages over out of the box integration tools: The extra capability to execute business logic enhances the functionality of your systems, they provide a single place to manage all of your integrations, and they are made by vendors dedicated to your integration needs, so they can help you address problems quickly. Bi-directional syncing. It s crucial that your integration solution has a connection that works bidirectionally, meaning every time a lead is added to Marketo, it is also added to your CRM, and every time a lead is added to your CRM, it s added to Marketo. Pre-built Marketo Connector. Choose an integration platform as a service (ipaas) vendor that has a prebuilt connector to Marketo, so the effort to integrate will be minimal. Easy to use. You can now find integration platforms that operate in web browsers and have drag and drop interfaces. These require no coding to perform integrations and yet they are very powerful. Continuous syncing. This is a crucial feature if you want Marketo to be up-to-date at all times. Some solutions only update in batches at regular intervals, so be careful to choose one that has continuous syncing to ensure that the data you are working with in all of your systems is always the most current. Agnostic platform that can work with any solution. In today s world, most companies operate in a hybrid IT environment. You need to find a platform that is flexible enough to support all types of deployments (cloud to cloud, cloud to ground, hybrid cloud, etc.). Low cost of entry. Since integration platforms do not need to be installed as hardware, and you don t have to manage their infrastructure, you can find a really good integration platform that has all of the above attributes at a reasonable subscription-based cost. Syncing of potentials, accounts, tasks, and contacts. You need to find a solution that can be enabled to recognize all non-standard fields of potentials, accounts, tasks, and contacts (not just leads) in Marketo. Sales works with prospects at all levels of the funnel, shouldn t Marketo, too? You don t need coding or a tech background to set up or manage your Marketo integrations. When you realize all of the potential that comes from integrating Marketo with your other systems, you will want to establish those integrations as soon as you start working with Marketo. TIBCO is a popular integration Marketo partner. We can help you create powerful bidirectional integrations to maximize the value of your marketing solutions. 15

16 Summary When you realize all of the potential that comes from integrating Marketo with your other systems, you will want to establish those integrations as soon as you start working with Marketo. With this guide, you will be able to make a more informed choice when searching for a data integration tool. TIBCO, an established Marketo partner, can help you create powerful bi-directional integrations to maximize the value of your marketing solutions with our ipaas, TIBCO Cloud Integration. It allows you to connect to Marketo from any software: CRM, CMS, , and others, both in the cloud and on-premises. We get you up and running quickly with an extremely fast time to market. And, if you need changes, you can make them yourself right from the interface. A developer or business user can learn TIBCO Cloud Integration within a few hours. You can stay in your own environment and work with your preferred programming language. When you re integrating Marketo into your company s network, don t gamble with your leads by settling for a costly or rigid solution. TIBCO gives you a flexible, powerful, and affordable solution for all your integration needs, even as they evolve. Try it out for yourself. Don t gamble with your organization s leads. Connect Marketo with a great integration platform and increase your chances of better leads. 2017, TIBCO Software Inc. All rights reserved. TIBCO and the TIBCO logo, and TIBCO Cloud are trademarks or registered trademarks of TIBCO Software Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names and marks in this document are the property of their respective owners and mentioned for identification purposes only. 16