“The goal was to implement Marketo with a tight integration to our Freshworks CRM, providing us with end-to-end visibility of the suspect, prospect, and customer pipeline. Over time we hope to use the system to automate more marketing processes and optimise results.
Working with Exelement was the right decision. They instinctively knew what we wanted to do and how to configure FreshSales, Marketo, and the synchronisation to make that happen. They were patient and generous with their time and expertise throughout discovery, implementation, and the anticipated bug fixing required to bring the solution into production. We’ve ended up with both a great baseline solution for our business and the transferred skills necessary to make the most of it,”
Mark Baker
CMO, Infront Finance
Infront Finance offers solutions in the financial services industry and is one of Europe's leading providers of market data and software for wealth management and trading.
Some of the main challenges Infront faced were ultimately related to having limited insights on leads and customers throughout the buying journey, as well as lacking the tools and resources needed to scale marketing and sales processes and create efficient lead management ways of working.
Key pain points:
- Lack of an efficient lead management workflow to handle leads from first interaction to lead qualification, lead handover and distribution between marketing/sales, etc.
- Lack of visibility into the customer journey. Sales had limited insights into marketing initiatives influencing the buying journey, and marketing lacked critical sales information on leads and opportunities to feed the marketing process.
- No marketing tools to orchestrate personalised and scalable marketing initiatives with leads and customers.
- Unable to track success and ROI of marketing activities.
Discovery
The first step of the project was the discovery phase. Several workshops were conducted to understand Infront Finance’s core business, marketing and sales processes, as well as integration needs and Infront's data processing requirements. Understanding Infront’s processes and the needs of different stakeholders across the organisation was essential to defining the foundational setup of Marketo, the integration between systems: Marketo<>Freshsales<>Salesloft, and how the data should flow from system to system.
As added benefits, we also established which tool should be used for what, and how to best leverage their individual strength as functionality can sometimes overlap. The discovery workshops enabled more knowledge sharing within Infront’s organisation, as it gave different stakeholders the opportunity to align and discuss today and tomorrow’s marketing and sales processes.
Marketo Setup
The next step of the project was to design the Marketo setup based on the findings in the discovery phase. During this phase, Marketo operational programs were designed so that all persons that enter the systems or “are interacted with” are handled in the correct way.
- Lead lifecycle program that leverages data from all involved systems.
- Lead scoring program based on behavioural and firmographic data.
- Subscription management program.
- Integration management program.
- Data management programs, such as language segmentation, country segmentation, clean up programs and internal alerts.
During this phase we built Infront’s own Center of Excellence for cloneable best practice marketing programs. We also designed branded assets, such as email templates, landing pages and custom forms according to Infront specifications.
Integration Setup
During the integration design and setup, we worked closely with Infront’s CRM and sales ops teams, in combination with extensive research to establish the correct flow of data between systems.
In addition to field mapping (which is standard practice in integration projects), there was a clear need to define:
- What information/data values should be stored in each system.
- Which data to synchronise (not all persons in the CRM should exist in Marketo).
- Current field usage in the CRM system, what data is reliable and what data is legacy.
- Determine if any new custom objects, data value sets or fields needed to be created to allow sales and marketing to have the right information at the right time.
The integration flow and data mapping was set up in Exelement SyncCloud, using a combination of batch campaigns running every 5 minutes to handle the majority of updates and webhooks for transactions in (close-to) real-time.
The flow was built to ensure that only the correct data entities were synchronised between systems at the correct time.
Training and Support
An important part of the project was to ensure proper skills transfer to equip Infront marketeers with the knowledge to start working in Marketo, including setting up campaigns, defining smart lists and flow steps, reporting capabilities, and more. This required creating an interactive, hands-on training plan and in-depth 1:1 sessions to facilitate a proper handover of the instance to the marketeers.
In addition to training sessions, a detailed documentation library on how the Marketo instance was set up was included in the delivery to enable knowledges haring and encourage more stakeholders in the organisation to learn and leverage Marketo as much as possible.
The implementation of Marketo and the multi-system integration has transformed Infront’s lead management process and streamlined ways of working.
Take for example a form fill-out on the website. This automatically checks if a person already exists in Marketo or if a new lead record should be created, which in turn triggers a series of operational programs. These programs handle everything from the double opt-in process to lead scoring and assignment to relevant marketing program subscriptions. Automated emails are sent at the right time to keep individuals engaged and informed.
Once a person meets the necessary criteria to be pushed to the CRM (is a qualified person ready to be handled by sales), the person is synchronised to Freshsales, where the leads are distributed and assigned a salesperson according to region/territory. If a person needs to be handled by an SDR, they are automatically sent to Salesloft. SDRs can then log all meetings and calls in Salesloft, which is synchronised back to Freshsales, along with any updates inlead progression – which is also shared with Marketo.
When a meeting is booked, the SDR hands over the lead to a salesperson who already has all the necessary information directly in Freshsales. After the meeting, if the person is converted to an account, deal, and contact, this information is shared with the other systems. This triggers updates in Marketo’s lead lifecycle program as well and ensures that all relevant parties are informed.
Another example of how the solution streamlines the sales and marketing process is how the system integration can keep sales continuously updated. This challenge was tackled by leveraging marketing tokens to build a Marketo program that automatically updates the sales team with the most recent online activity on Infront’s leads and contacts.
For example, when someone fills out a contact us form on the website or signs up for a webinar, the Marketo program creates a short information snippet, such as “Filled out Swedish contact form on 2023-02-15” or “Signed up for Finance Webinar on 2023-03-15.”
This information is then posted directly in the notes section in the lead or contact record in Freshsales. By leveraging the Marketo program to set this up, in combination with the integration, it is fully customisable and only what is relevant for sales is posted to lead or contact record notes. With this solution, the sales team stays informed about the lead or contact’s history and relevant marketing and sales interactions. They can see the most recent activities in the individual’s record, which helps them tailor their outreach and follow-up efforts.
The integration is fully bi-directional (where required) and it manages Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Deals, lead routing, notes, and specified activities between systems.
This solution has streamlined the lead management process and enabled marketing and sales to align ways of working in all three systems in order to:
- Improve marketing programs - with automated emails and lead scoring, Infront can ensure that leads are engaged and informed at the right time.
- Scale marketing and sales efforts.
- Create a streamlined process for managing leads from qualification to handover processes and lead routing.
- Increase visibility into the end-to-end customer journey.
