Tips to Succeeding with Microsoft Dynamics and Marketo

Need Some Tips with Microsoft Dynamics and Marketo Integration?

CRM software is now the number one software market in the world. Analysts predict the CRM software market will balloon from more than $36 billion in 2017 to $80 billion in 2025. The marketing automation software industry is expanding as well, with 2024 revenue estimates coming in at more than $14 billion.

For many organizations, these two powerhouse tools sit in siloes, unable to share data to drive real insights. Marketing and sales teams either miss out on valuable information or have to manually input data from one system to the other if they want to get a broader picture of their target market. 

Connecting your marketing automation and CRM platform is a great idea to solve this issue, but how do you do it and get the most out of your integration? We’re offering up our top tips to succeeding with Microsoft Dynamics and Marketo to get you started on the right foot.

First, let’s look at both platforms to understand exactly what they do independently from each other.

 Microsoft Dynamics

Microsoft Dynamics is an impressive cloud-based CRM tool that contains a set of related products geared towards specific industries, such as retail and marketing. Microsoft markets Dynamics as a solution for intelligent sales and marketing to turn prospects into customers, proactive customer service to exceed customer expectations, connected field service, modern finance and operations, and connected commerce.

Marketo

Marketo is a leading marketing automation software solution that helps companies streamline and measure their marketing workflows for new and existing leads without wasting time and money. It contains a central marketing database, an engagement marketing engine, an analytics engine, and a martech stack with collaboration tools for businesses to stay connected to buyers.

The Big Lie

Would it surprise you to know that on average, marketing leaders spend anywhere from 30% to 39% of their time each week on manual tasks?

The knee-jerk reaction may be to buy more automation tools, but the same study found that marketing teams with more tools actually spend more time on manual tasks than those with fewer tools. Wait, what?

The problem isn’t with a lack of tools. Marketers often fall victim to the sales pitch that says they need yet another martech tool to solve their woes. Unfortunately, that approach often only results in wasted spend and frustrated marketers.

Related: Work Smarter, Not Harder: Optimize Your Martech Stack

Our best tip to succeeding with Microsoft Dynamics and Marketo is to connect them. The key is to integrate what you already have so you create a seamless, supercharged system made up of multiple tools. By doing so, you not only get the data you need to inform decisions, but you dramatically reduce manual efforts to speed time to revenue.
Here’s what chiefmartec.com says, “When you use martech tools that aren’t deeply integrated, you’re the one who ends up doing the work of integration – cutting-and-pasting data and content, mapping concepts from one tool to another, figuring out how to stitch together disconnected analytics and workflows. It’s manual, time-consuming, hard to maintain, [and] prone to error.”

What Are The Benefits of Integrating Microsoft Dynamics and Marketo?

As with any CRM and marketing automation integrations, you can achieve great benefits when you connect a Marketo to Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration. The goal is to get the systems “talking” to each other, sharing data back and forth, and generating analytics that spur conversations, empower teams, and optimize campaigns.

With better business intelligence, you can increase corporate performance because you have a way to measure results – not just the results of sales efforts, but how marketing efforts improve (or not) sales performance. 

What can this do for both sales and marketing? It sheds light on what’s working and what isn’t so you can focus on high-value strategies and cut the cord on ones that aren’t moving the needle. When systems share data, your people aren’t spending so much time trying to get the information they need from disconnected systems. 

More Tips to Succeeding with Microsoft Dynamics and Marketo

Integrations are one thing, using a tool that gives you ultimate control over those integrations and data flows is another. Our next tip to succeeding with Microsoft Dynamics and Marketo is to do more than integrate: use a tool that brings the data to life.

Improve CRM data management

The tool should foster better CRM data management. Unlike native integrations that typically only offer basic data sharing between systems, you want a tool that gives you the ability to determine where, when, why, and under what conditions the data should move. 

One of the most important factors people often forget is that the data is useless if it isn’t clean. The tool should automatically cleanse, transform, and translate the data so it works in both systems, despite its original format. Otherwise, you’ll have the last name first in your email campaigns, for instance.

Make personalized marketing efforts personal

Everyone says they’re investing in personalization, 89% of digital businesses, in fact. But how do you do that if you don’t have a complete view of your customer? If you’re relying on disconnected data, you’re likely missing the mark on personalization. 

Use an integration tool that allows you to own the customer journey with a personalized marketing experience. You need an accurate picture of the customer across channels, so integrating Microsoft Dynamics and Marketo the right way will ensure you get the analytics you need to truly personalize your marketing with highly relevant, timely messages on customer-preferred channels.

Related: The Official Playbook for Sales & Marketing Alignment

Marketing teams can leverage the analytics and reporting from the integrated systems to prove their value to sales. Likewise, sales can boost their business impact when they utilize marketing insights. They know who to go after and how to close deals faster.

Time to Revenue

The ultimate goal of any business is to improve time to revenue. The longer it takes your teams to get the information they need to be effective, the longer that time to revenue will be. To speed time to revenue, you need an accurate measurement of how long it takes prospects to convert to customers, and that begins with understanding where demand comes from.

Here’s where time really becomes an issue. Getting this information is nearly impossible without the right tool. Those manual efforts of pulling different pieces of data together from multiple systems skyrocket. Spreadsheets and pivot tables take over without much useful data to justify the work.

The Vertify process and toolbox is a game-changer, combining data collection from Microsoft Dynamics and Marketo with powerful analytics tools for automated insights. Marketers can see every touch, every impact to gauge how marketing efforts lead to actual revenue. And in the end, that’s how you succeed with Microsoft Dynamics and Marketo. Download our video on how generating revenue can be a team sport.