Yesterday was day one of our SmartStart Foundations Workshop, the focus of which is on a dual integration linking Eloqua to two instances of Salesforce.com. It was an interesting day of conversation and let’s just say that our parking lot could rival the one at Disney World! Thank you to Sid Batra, Ravi Shrestha and Nghi Luu for their eternal patience and guidance!
I tend to be an analytical person who likes to understand all of the potential outcomes before making a decision. Since our time together this week is limited to three days I recognize I need to put that aside and make sure we come out of this week with some actionable steps that can keep this project moving forward.
Step 1: Identify what is truly important and become comfortable with leaving the other stuff off the table
For our business, there are four “non-negotiable” outcomes required of this integration and two items that would be nice to have but not necessary for me to consider the dual integration a success.
Non-negotiable Objectives:
- Be able to write activity information onto lead and contact records in Salesforce.com
- Be able to create a lead in Salesforce.com that can be routed using existing workflow rules
- Be able to track campaign involvement and tie this information back to the campaigns object in Salesforce.com
- Keep the contact table in Eloqua as clean and simple as possible while still accomplishing business objectives
Nice to have but not required:
- Be able to pull segmented lists exclusively out of Eloqua
- Closed loop reporting out of Eloqua to the opportunity level
Step 2: KISS It!
Keep it simple. I have found from past experience that you can get so caught up in everything Eloqua can you that you can over-complicate a project.
While it is important to think about the future, that is what the parking lot is for.
From a technical standpoint, our biggest challenge with setting up the database is not using all of the available fields on the contact record to accomplish advanced segmentation. This would require having “SFDC A” and “SFDC B” specific segmentation fields. This is not exactly keeping it simple and also violates my #4 requirement.
Today, a lot of our segmentation is accomplished by our internal team using their judgment and logic to place new leads into “buckets” based on their company, title and self-reported primary interest – part art part science.
I explored the use of custom data objects (CDOs) as an alternative to contact record fields but have found that they only offer a one-way communication with Salesforce.com pushing information to the CDO but the CDO not being able to send anything back. I struggle whether or not the functionality of a CDO is what we need because if we capture form submission data for any of the segmentation fields in a CDO, it is essentially stuck in Eloqua and cannot make its way back to Salesforce.com (at least in an easy way that does not involve more customization, middleware and flat file transfers.) With Eloqua, we could let people self-segment on a form versus our current manual process but then we need a way to get this information back over to Salesforce.com. So that leaves CDOs in the parking lot.
So its decision time: set up a bunch of contact record fields for future segmentation purposes OR pull marketing lists out of Salesforce.com and not rely on segments in Eloqua and waste time setting up CDOs.
Decision: Pull marketing lists out of Salesforce.com for now. Only create a custom contact record field if the information is required for a lead to be routed correctly once it is created in Salesforce.com. Keep it simple and get the basic integration between all of these systems functioning rather than spending too much time trying to fit an elephant into a cat carrier.
Step 3: Enter day two with a commitment to honoring the first two steps!
Sometimes letting go is easier said than done. With that in mind, I am going to put the key points from this post up on the wall today to remind myself and my team that we must move forward. After all, integrations require constant monitoring and almost always have changes and enhancements along the way!
I will post an update tomorrow about what we were able to accomplish today. I know dual CRM integrations with Eloqua is a topic a lot of people are curious about so hopefully these posts will help somebody.
Also, if you have been down this road before and have any advice, please leave it as a comment in this thread!t