Can Data Quality break Integration between Marketing and Sales systems?

Last week I was discussing with one of my clients the criticality of data de-duplication and having the same consistent strategy for both the Marketing Automation system (MA) and the Sales Force Automation system (SFA). The question is, can we have a reliable Lead Management process that cuts across Marketing & Sales if the Marketing Automation system has clean data but the SFA system allows duplicates.

 

Some of the assumptions I am making here are:

1. There is a bi-directional integration between the two systems.
2. Marketing is sourcing new Leads into the sales process and also providing sales reps real time visibility into Leads' (and Opportunities) responses to Marketing campaigns. These could be email activities, web site activities and offline activities.
3. Marketing is getting automated feedback from the sales system on progress being made by sales both from a Lead follow up perspective and Opportunity creation and promotion perspective.

The challenges I see with the SFA system (Salesforce.com as an example) not having a de-dupe process  or a flawed de-dupe process are:

1. Ineffective sales alerts based on Lead activity: I don’t see how we can reliably notify a sales rep on a Lead’s response to Marketing campaigns. For example Joe, a Prospect, meets the criteria of a sales ready Lead and we publish Joe’s as a Lead into Salesforce.com. One of the inside sales rep’s follows up with Joe and, based on the potential deal size, promotes him for a follow up from a field rep. Best practices suggest that any of Joe's responses to follow up Marketing campaigns (email responses, web activities etc.) need to be sent directly to the rep who owns the opportunity. If the de-dupe process is not consistent the system might create a new record for Joe and this new record might go through an elaborate process and eventually might or might not reach the field rep in a timely manner. One of the big benefits Marketing can provide to Sales is to create opportunities for follow-up conversations. This purpose is completely defeated without a consistent de-dupe framework.

2. Broken SLA & ROMI reporting: Marketing Automation solutions bring two big benefits to Marketer's from a reporting standpoint.
    a. Visibility into Sales follow-up of Leads and SLA compliance: One of the big promises of an integrated (MA + SFA) solution is elimination of subjectivity (the dreaded *sales sniff test*) from a Lead follow up standpoint. Marketing can now get real insights into whether Leads are followed up with or not and is the follow up timely. This report will not work if we end up creating multiple records for Joe in the sales system.

   

b. ROI tracking: Marketing can now analyze how many of the Leads sourced by Marketing are turning into Opportunities and how many how many other existing Leads/Opportunities are being influenced by Marketing. Taking Joe's example from above, let's say the rep creates a potential sales opportunity. Joe responds to another campaign a week later and we end up creating a new record for Joe for this follow-up Campaign. The ROI report will show that we sourced 2 Leads and got one Opportunity when technically we sourced one Lead and the second interaction should be counted towards Marketing influence.

We strongly encourage our customers to a) clean up the SFA system before implementing a Marketing Automation solution and b) enforce the same data quality standards across both the systems. At the end of the day, the promise of an integrated Marketing & Sales system is to provide an organization the true integrated Marketing & Sales funnel. And this will remain a dream if the data foundation is inconsistent.

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