Jim Sibley gave a presentation on best practices when it comes to work with the two systems together.
Your first question should be, “What are we trying to solve?
- Sales (examples)
- Prove Marketers value
- Horsepower
- Information – data provided from Eloqua to Salesforce
- Service
- Communications – great communication tool to talk to existing customers
- Automation –
- Information
- Customer Experience
- Branding
- Responsiveness
- Consistency
- Do More with Less
- Automation
- Data Integrity
- Integration
- real time or batch integration are options but it gets back to “what are we trying to solve?”
Next put your organization of this into pillars for business transformation
Here are some common ways to organize
Sales
- High lead conversion – sales would be happy to give you the marketer data if you give them value in response
- Rapid lead conversion
- New logo acquisition
Marketing
- Communication – Marketing needs to communicate.
- Responsiveness – how you use your data will translate to the specifics of your architecture approaches
- Analysis
- Targeting
Service
- Retention – good opportunity to retain customers as you resolve service issues
- Improved social – this data will help you take action on it to your existing customers
- Experience – help improve the overall experience
- Growth – use it for up and cross sell
What must integration with Eloqua do for my enterprise?
Quote: Sharing data is an unnatural act (Dr. Didier Bonnet)
- Unified customer experience
- Engaging customer communications
- Internal communications
- Collect and communicate
- Drive sales and awareness
Where to you begin?
- Start with business transformation.
- Articulate the customer experience – define it to make your case
- Determine your customer needs (internal and external). Find out what Sales needs. Find out what your consumer or customer need.
- Define the data
- Data sources
- Owners
- Quality
- Sequencing
- Mastering
- Make it actionable
- Align it for analysis
What will success look like?
Here are some ideas but you need to figure out your own
- Your internal customers are asking for more
- Your analytics show the needle moving in the right direction
- Your data is improving
- You are able to rapidly pivot
Do I need a partner? (of course my answer is yes but you need to determine it)
You can do it alone if your team has years of experience implemeting CRM. Also if you have the busienss and technical skills then ou are good to go.
use a partner if you need help. That help would be team extension. It would be someone that is strong in the process or the technology.
Bottom Line: Be a transformation leader!