How to integrate Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud
If your company is utilizing both Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud, it’s time to think about the best way to integrate the 2 systems to better serve your overall go-to-market goals.
Your company may be motivated to connect your Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud for a variety of reasons, including:
- Driving shared goals across departments
- Unifying your two main revenue generating functions
- Gathering insights and understanding around your customers
- Determining key messaging that resonates with audiences
- Improving communication efforts
- Setting up automated workflows
The main reason for integrating both platforms is the desired outcome of increasing customer loyalty and sales, as a result of teams and technology working better together. For more information about the benefits of integrating marketing and sales, read here.
When you’ve come to the conclusion that you need to develop an integration, here’s a few steps key steps to consider.
1) Setting your goals and expectations
Round up your sales and marketing team leaders for a conversation around the desired goals and outcomes for the integration. Oftentimes, the integration is helpful for providing more insights about customers. Then, marketing can create branded communications and approved messaging for the sales team to effectively utilize. If everything is in working order, the marketing team is providing the right tools, templates, and assets at the right time for the sales team to become more successful.
2) Prioritize your data
Before integrating Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud, marketing should have a complete understating of the the sales cycle, sales processes, and buyer stages that the sales team works through to get to a closed deal. Understanding buyer decisions and behaviors will help you create the most impactful solution.
Once this information is understood from the sales cycle, marketing can start to consider how to personalize and create targeted content based on prospects and their stage in the purchasing process. In order for marketing to improve the delivery of relevant content that drives sales, they’ll need data sets and attributes from Sales Cloud to inform what message should go out and when.
3) Map out your workflows
The next piece to consider is how data will flow back and forth between the 2 clouds. Experience Salesforce Consultants will help determine the necessary architecture to achieve your desired results. To make everything flow smoothly, the key considerations should be around timing and frequency of data updates and what data needs to be updated back to Sales Cloud.
Now is a great time to consider your entire tech stack as well. While integrating your Salesforce systems, this could be a great time to connect other valuable company data.
4) Build the architecture
Salesforce Consultants can help ensure that the data integration is working accurately, that data is being retained, and that privacy and security are carefully considered as part of the overall solution. While building the data architecture, developers can also set up the right combination of contact builder, journey builder, and automation builder for every use case that your teams need.
5) Test, test, and test again
After your Salesforce development team have executed the necessary architecture and data workflows to achieve your goals, begin internal testing with your team. Key representatives from both Sales and Marketing should observe how everything is working in an effort to optimize the solution and ensure that the proper data is being transferred. Testing should cover various email clients, dynamic data variations, automations, end-to-end testing, and A/B testing as needed.
6) Provide training for your team
Once an integration is planned, mapped, and implemented, you need to make sure that your team is ready to hit the ground running with the new solution.
They should be involved every step of the way to ensure that the solution fits their needs, and that they understand how to take best advantage of the new solution. Be sure to demo the solution multiple times and provide ongoing training.
Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud integrations take careful planning and development to get them done right, but after completed they can save teams hours and hours of time while positively impacting the bottom line. Contact us to see how we can support you team with your Salesforce development needs.