Hi everyone. Excited to join the community. I'm coming from a marketing automation background and have spent the last few years deep in the weeds of lead scoring and ABM, but I've always worked with a CRM that was already chosen and implemented. Now I'm at a new role where we're evaluating from scratch, and I have to admit, the blank slate is a bit daunting.
We're a mid-sized B2B SaaS company. I'm looking to avoid the classic trap of just picking the biggest name and hoping it integrates later. For me, the evaluation has to start with our existing martech stack and data flow. I'm thinking through questions like:
* How will our marketing automation platform (we use Marketo) sync bi-directionally?
* Where does the lead scoring logic actually live—in the MAP or the CRM?
* How cleanly can we pipe product usage data from our platform into a contact record?
I'm hoping to find (and eventually contribute) posts that get into the real-world, nitty-gritty of integration. Less about feature checklists and more about "here's how we connected this CDP to Salesforce for a unified view," or "this is the workflow that broke when we tried to sync custom objects." Looking forward to the discussions.
— benk
automate everything
Great starting point focusing on data flow first, not feature lists. That's the only way to avoid a mess.
The Marketo sync question is key. I've seen teams get stuck on "where does the lead scoring logic live?" because it creates sync lag and constant finger-pointing. You usually have to pick a system of record for that logic and accept some duplication.
My advice? Start a trial and immediately try to break the integration. Pipe a weird custom field from your product, see how it maps, watch the sync logs. That's where the real evaluation happens.
Demo or it didn't happen
Oh, I love this approach. Starting with the data flow is absolutely the right move, and focusing on those real-world integration pain points is how you avoid huge headaches later.
> How cleanly can we pipe product usage data from our platform into a contact record?
This question, for me, became the most important one in my last evaluation. The canned sync between the big CRM and MAP is usually okay, but bringing in custom event data is where it gets messy. We built a ton of Zapier/Make workflows (basically a poor man's iPaaS) to pipe usage events from our app into HubSpot as custom timeline events, and it was clunky. The real test was the API - how fast can you write custom data, and does the CRM have a clean "activity" or "event" object for it, or are you stuffing it into a custom field note?
I'd suggest building a tiny script to push a test product event via each candidate's API during your trial. You'll learn more from that in an hour than from a week of sales demos.
null
You're already ahead of the curve by asking where the logic lives, but that's a cost question too. Every sync is a transaction, and every logic execution has a compute price tag. Who's paying for it - your MAP's plan or your CRM's API cost?
The real nitty-gritty is watching those logs like user1466 said, and then checking the bill to see what that constant syncing costs. I've seen "free" integrations that triple the number of API calls.
And for product usage data, ask for the rate limits on that custom event object. Pushing data every time a user logs in? That adds up fast. You need to model the data volume against their pricing tiers.
Show me the bill
Totally feel you on the blank slate being daunting. Your point about starting with the martech stack is so important, I almost missed it myself.
You asked where the lead scoring logic should live. I'm currently trying to figure that out too, and I'm wondering about the operational cost. Like, if the logic sits in Marketo, does that mean your sales team has to switch contexts to see the score, or can they trust the field sync? And if it's in the CRM, who maintains the model when marketing wants to tweak it? Feels like a process question as much as a technical one.
Also, on the product usage data, do you have any early thoughts on what object you'd pipe that into? I've seen some teams use a custom activity/event, and others just jam it into a field on the contact. The rate limits on activities can be a hidden cost, from what I'm reading.