We have some exciting news to share with you as we’ve just released our most important (and most complex) feature to date but before we go into details we need to talk about the best practices for managing customer data.
For sales and marketing teams to work together they need to work off the same data.
A contact can’t be a potential lead in one database and a paying customer in another. If they were, they’d receive irrelevant information or sales might miss signals that the contact is ready to buy.
But this you know already. Everyone knows this. 47% of sales and marketing leaders think that their sales and marketing tools would be more useful if they were easier to integrate.
“Single source of truth” is the right approach – but not in every situation
I’ve worked with many sales teams and I’ve even worked at a CRM company for 7 years so I’m a big fan of the “single source of truth”. It’s a straightforward concept that advises to centralize data in one place in cases where various stakeholders use the data in various ways.
In the microcosm of sales and marketing tools, the best practice is to treat your CRM as the single source of truth. And this single-source-of-truth-data can be copied and synced to other revenue tools. For example, marketing automation tools.
When an opportunity is marked won in the CRM the relevant contacts can automatically be removed from the leads list in the marketing tool, and an onboarding sequence can be started.
Makes sense, no? CRMs and marketing automation tools offer native integrations for simple connections and you can use specialist data integration tools like Outfunnel where native integrations are not available or setup is more complex.
Alas, the best practice is not always the best solution. For example, a company may operate with a large quantity of leads with only a small number of them converting into MQLs or SQLs. This large quantity of leads only interacts with emails and a website and has no touchpoints elsewhere in the organization. Do they need to be part of the single source of truth? Probably not.
Or, in the words of our users:
Ideally would like all leads with an ActiveCampaign lead score higher than X to be synced over to Copper along with engagements that are behind the score
How do I sync the Mailchimp tags with Pipedrive contacts?
The setup without a single source of truth for all contacts may look something like this:
In our six years of operations, we’ve come across many more setups that make sense without defining a single source of truth.
Long story short, it must be possible to sync data two ways (aka bi-directionally) to enable all the use cases that revenue teams need.
If you’ve read so far, you’ve already guessed that is exactly what we’re releasing here.
Outfunnel can now sync contact data 2-ways
With our new two-way contact sync, you can run your sales and marketing operations exactly as you like.
You can sync all your contacts across your tools, or only select specific segments. For example, only contacts with open deals or only contacts with a certain label or tag.
You can pick which of your tools is the source of truth in case of data conflicts.
You can sync all fields bi-directionally or specify certain fields to only sync one way.
You can initiate your desired workflow once the data has been synced. For example, when a new contact has been synced from your marketing automation tool to your CRM with a label “MQL” you can use the workflow automation feature of your CRM tool to schedule a follow-up activity for a colleague.
And of course, one key feature of the two-way data sync is that it’s always on, 24/7. No more manual copy-pasting or importing-exporting. Ever.
The main use cases for 2-way syncing of contact data
With our new bi-directional contact sync you can do things like:
- Keep a leads database in your marketing automation tool and a customer list in your CRM, and only sync leads that are qualified (match MQL criteria) to your CRM
- Keep CRM as your single source of truth and enrich this with useful information from your marketing automation tool. For example, sync over subscribe status or tags/labels from your marketing tool to your CRM
- Sync all new subscribers from your marketing automation tool to your CRM.
- Last but not least, keep your CRM and marketing automation tool contacts in sync so that when data is changed in one tool this gets reflected in the other.
Start syncing your contacts bi-directionally
The two-way contact syncing is available for Pipedrive-Mailchimp and Pipedrive-Klaviyo immediately, with our other connections following soon. Next up are:
- HubSpot – Mailchimp 2-way contact sync
- HubSpot – Klaviyo 2-way contact sync
- Salesforce – Mailchimp 2-way contact sync
- Salesforce – Klaviyo 2-way contact sync
Don’t see your preferred combination here? Fill out this form. We’re just planning our next integrations and we’d love help in deciding which integration corridors are most requested.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that, in a way, we’ve synced data bi-directionally between CRMs and marketing tools from day one. Namely, we’ve synced email engagement, such as openings and clicking back to the CRM. But now we offer a bi-directional contact sync as well, so you can pick and mix your revenue tools, and the data would be as easily connected as if you were using an (expensive) all-in-one product suite.
Happy marketing and selling!
