The Client
When was the last time you got a call from an unknown number? What’s the chance it was spam? Our client is in the business of pulling the mask off these spam callers so you can tell who is actually trying to get a hold of you. The name of the game is clarity. So, naturally, the frustration with their non-transparent internal systems was particularly grinding.
Internally, it seemed like the team’s dynamics were even hidden from itself. Sales was deeply embedded in Salesforce while the current marketing team was working with an inherited version of Marketo. The custom setup and lack of documentation left the marketing team not only scratching their heads, but losing opportunities to the data black hole.
This isn’t to say that they were completely without information sharing. The two platforms did indeed share information via a one-way sync from Marketo into Salesforce. However, anything that needed to move the other way had to be handled manually. Leads collected by the sales team at trade shows or passed along by partners went into Salesforce but often stayed there, never entering marketing’s campaigns. Portal signups, where customers could create accounts on their own, were pulled into lists and then manually uploaded into Marketo. Some made it through, but many did not.
The marketing director knew the gravity of the situation. He was technical, able to code, and worked closely with the Salesforce administrator to keep information moving. But despite his technical ability and drive, this project still couldn’t be handled internally.
The Problem
The issue was not that the tools did not work. They did, but they worked for a version of the company that had nothing to do with the one the team was living in. Especially in the case of Marketo, there was a highly customized setup that the team couldn’t try to reverse engineer while also needing to actually market their product. So they couldn’t market effectively because they couldn’t act efficiently as Marketo admins, but also couldn’t take the time to figure it out due to their other daily responsibilities. Naturally, the team couldn’t even dream of higher ambitions like good reporting.
Even beyond the lack of reporting, the reporting data that they could see was often misleading. Marketo forms were named according to the page they lived on and might appear on twenty different pages with twenty different names. Something as simple as counting total submissions for a “Contact Us” form became impossible. In Salesforce, attribution was built on a lead source field used in inconsistent ways, sometimes reflecting an event, sometimes a sales activity, and sometimes a vague label entered manually.
For marketing, these problems hit harder because of the stakes. The biggest risk? High-cost advertising campaigns without a reliable way to tie spend to revenue. If they were ever called into question, the team would not be able to reliably pull numbers to justify the ads. Even more dangerously, if the campaigns weren’t performing well, the team could not diagnose that effectively enough to steer and refine the campaigns. Getting outside help meant waiting for approvals from finance, security, and legal. That process took more than a year, while every month new contacts slipped through the cracks and reporting stayed incomplete. By the time ClearPivot came in, the symptoms were visible to the entire organization.
The Solution
The team started by mapping the entire lifecycle from first contact to closed deal. They defined exactly what qualified as an MQL, what point at which a record should move to sales, and what were the criteria for SQL status. These rules were built into the system so there was no guesswork. After that came the marketing tech. ClearPivot and the client decided to migrate the client's marketing system from Marketo to HubSpot.
ClearPivot set up a two-way HubSpot-Salesforce integration so both systems always had the same records. First problem solved. Now, leads entered by sales flowed into the marketing workflow, and marketing activity became visible to sales without anyone needing to run an import.
Next, they rebuilt the two most important lists for the marketing team: the marketing contacts list and exclusion list. ClearPivot redesigned them with automation to catch invalid or irrelevant records before they entered campaigns. Filters blocked records with missing or role-based emails, removed traffic from regions the company did not serve, and excluded addresses that had bounced. And, the marketing lead added a custom email validation script at form submission to further reduce spam entries.
The Results
The constant lag from manual imports disappeared. Leads were campaign-ready as soon as they were entered into Salesforce, so sales could see complete engagement histories. Lists stayed clean thanks to the filters and didn’t need weekly cleanup sessions. Spam, bounced emails, and irrelevant records were blocked before they could take up space or budget. The client’s marketing contact counts stayed within limits without sacrificing quality.
The reports the team had once only dreamed of were now available in real time. The marketing team could now show exactly how ads performed against spend. Now, they can see and invest in campaigns that bring in the most valuable leads. And once the team had these records, they could see info in a CRM that wasn’t flooded with custom properties that had been created but not used.
Don’t forget: this company’s mission, internally and externally, is bringing clarity so you can make a choice. You can choose to pick up the call. Now, this company and their marketing can choose with clarity themselves how to move forward with real, actionable data.
