02 / Technology
Marketing technology, CRM and the joins between them
The architecture underneath the marketing: CRM, automation, ecommerce, analytics, and the joins between them. The work is almost never the systems. It is the joins, and it usually arrives as a request to fix a report that two systems disagree about.
Systems we work in
- CRM
- Marketing automation
- Ecommerce platforms
- Analytics and tag management
- Data warehouse and reporting
- The integrations between them
Five systems, six joins, one of them broken. In our experience the broken join is what the business is actually feeling, and it is rarely the thing anyone has been asked to fix.
What goes wrong
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A build that stalled at seventy per cent
The implementation partner left, the internal champion moved on, and what remains works well enough that nobody can justify finishing it. It quietly costs more every month it stays that way.
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Two systems that disagree about the same customer
The CRM and the ecommerce platform each hold a version of the truth, neither is wrong exactly, and every report built on top of them inherits the disagreement.
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A platform chosen for the wrong reason
Selected on a feature matrix, a demo or an existing relationship, rather than on what it has to do on a Tuesday afternoon in your business.
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Automation nobody owns
Workflows built by people who have left, still running, still sending. Nobody is confident enough about what they do to switch them off.
What we do
We are not a reseller, so telling you to keep what you have costs us nothing.
Every one of these ends in something you keep: a written specification, a working integration, a documented container, a decision record naming what was rejected and why. Not a slide deck describing what somebody else should build.
- Selection
- Requirements written from how the business actually runs, then a shortlist and a recommendation. We resell nothing and take no vendor commission, so the answer is sometimes to keep what you have.
- Integration
- The joins between systems, built so that one record means one thing everywhere and a change in one place does not silently break a report somewhere else.
- Recovery
- Picking up a stalled implementation, working out what was actually built against what was specified, and finishing it or replacing it.
- Automation
- The processes around sales and marketing, documented and automated. Admin time is the cost nobody budgets for and everybody pays.
- Handover
- Written documentation of what was built and why, so the next person does not inherit a system whose only record is a departed contractor.
The stack has to report into something, and that something is measurement and tracking. Where the systems work is being done to lift a funnel, it runs alongside conversion rate optimisation.
Tell us which report you cannot trust
One email starts it. No form, no queue, no account to create, and no discovery call before anyone has told you anything useful.
That opens a message to info@mktg-consulting.com with the four things we need already listed. Answer what you can and we will ask for the rest.
What to include
- Which of the four areas you are asking about, or that you are not sure
- What is already in place, and roughly how long it has been there
- What is driving the timing, because that usually decides the shape of the work
We reply to every enquiry within one working day, including the ones we are not right for. If it is not work we should be doing we will say so and, where we can, say who should. A site promising a reply and never saying when is a promise nobody can hold us to.