01The Lead Arrives, the Rep Never Sees It
The inquiry arrives and the rep never sees it
The Short Version
Two products from the same vendor, two separate databases. The contact lives in the marketing side; the rep works in the sales side; nobody ever decided when a record should cross from one to the other.
The scene repeats in every manufacturer that bought both: marketing opens a report showing 180 inquiries in the quarter, the sales manager opens his screen and counts 34 opportunities. Nobody is lying. The 146 difference is contacts that were never promoted, because the promotion depends on somebody clicking, on a scoring rule nobody maintains, or on an integration that was switched on and never mapped. The report gap is the first symptom; the second is a buyer who calls two weeks later asking why nobody answered.
There is a variant that is worse because it looks healthy: everything crosses, but arrives stripped. The opportunity lands in the CRM with a name, an email and nothing else — no application, no estimated volume, no deadline, no origin. The rep opens the card, sees a blank record, and calls with the same script he uses for a cold list. The buyer who wrote three lines describing a failure in a press line gets asked "so, what does your company do?". That is a field-mapping problem, and it costs more than the leads that never crossed.
An integration that carries the contact but not the context has not connected two systems. It has moved a name from one screen to another and thrown the reason for the call in the bin.
02What the Integration Does and Does Not Do
What the native connection does — and what it leaves to you
Because both products come from the same vendor, the connection itself is a switch, not a project. What the switch does not do is every decision that makes the data useful on the other side:
Switch vs. Decision
The Switch Handles
Authentication between the two accounts, the contact record crossing over, and the email and page history being visible on the opportunity timeline. This part works on the first try and is not where accounts fail.
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You Decide the Moment
Which event promotes a contact to an opportunity: a quote-form submission, a score threshold, or a human marking it. Pick one and write it down. Manufacturers that leave two rules active end up with the same buyer as two cards and two reps calling him in the same week.
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You Decide the Ownership
Which rep receives the card, by which criterion — region, segment, product line or round robin. A card that arrives without an owner sits in a general queue, and a general queue in an industrial sales team is where inquiries go to expire.
And you decide what happens on the way back:
When the rep closes or loses the deal, that outcome has to return to the marketing side with a written reason. Without the return trip you can measure how many inquiries you generated but never which campaigns generated orders — and the argument about lead quality restarts every quarter with no data.
The infrastructure side of this — connectors, webhooks, what to do when the CRM is not from the same vendor, and how to handle a legacy ERP that owns the customer record — is not repeated here. It is covered in industrial CRM integration. This page stays on the two products from the same vendor and the decisions between them.
03Field Map and Send Trigger
The field map and the deduplication key
Map 01
The Seven Fields That Must Cross
Company, application, estimated volume, deadline, origin, segment and owner. Application is the one people forget and the one that changes the first call — a rep who reads "cracking in the weld of a 6mm carbon steel part" opens differently from one who reads nothing. Create the destination field in the CRM before mapping; a mapping to a field that does not exist fails silently.
Mandatory
Map 02
Deduplicate by Email and Tax ID
In B2B the same company shows up as three people over 18 months — the maintenance technician, the buyer, the engineer. Deduplicate contacts by corporate email and group them under the company by tax ID. Deduplicating by person name merges two different buyers named Silva and splits the same buyer who wrote his name in two ways.
B2B Specific
Map 03
Free-Text Fields Cross as Text
Do not map a free-text answer into a dropdown on the other side — the value silently drops when it does not match an option. Send free text into a text field and let the rep normalize it during the first call. Roughly one in three integration losses in manufacturers we audit is exactly this mismatch.
Silent Failure
One rule about the send trigger that saves a quarter of rework: promote on the quote form, not on the score. Scoring is useful for prioritizing what already crossed, not for deciding what crosses. A manufacturer with 40 inquiries a month does not have the volume for a score to be statistically meaningful, and a threshold that nobody recalibrates ends up holding back exactly the buyer who came straight to the point instead of reading five blog posts first.
04How to Test and Monitor
How to test it end to end and catch it when it breaks
An integration is not validated by the green check on the settings screen. It is validated by a real submission that you follow with your own eyes to the rep's card. Do this test the day you turn it on, and again on the first business day of every month — connectors break silently after form edits, field renames and plan changes.
The End-to-End Test, in Four Steps
Step 1: Submit for Real
Fill out the quote form from a phone, off the company network, using a corporate-looking email you control and a real application description. Test submissions from inside the office network are often excluded by tracking filters and prove nothing.
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Step 2: Check the Card, Not the Log
Open the opportunity in the CRM as the rep sees it and read the seven fields. If application or volume is blank, the mapping is wrong even though the integration log says success. The log reports transport, not content.
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Step 3: Confirm the Owner
The card must already carry the name of the rep who owns that region or segment, and that rep must have received the alert. Ask him — do not check the notification screen, ask the person whether the message arrived and where.
Step 4: The monthly number:
Compare inquiries received on the marketing side with opportunities created on the sales side for the same month. A gap under 10% is normal — spam, duplicates, contacts outside your filter. A gap above 30% means the trigger or the mapping broke, and the sooner you look the fewer weeks of inquiries you lose.
If the integration is proven correct and the rep still does not touch the card, the problem moved: the data arrives and the behaviour does not change. That is a different diagnosis, covered in why the sales team does not use the CRM. And if the account itself was never organized in the first place, start at organizing RD Station from scratch before wiring anything together.
05FAQ
FAQ
How do I integrate RD Marketing with RD CRM? +
Turn on the native connection between the two accounts, then make three decisions the screen does not ask about: which single event promotes a contact to an opportunity, which seven fields cross, and which rep owns the card. Deduplicate by corporate email and company tax ID. Configuration takes about four hours once those decisions are written down.
Why do leads not appear in RD CRM? +
Almost always because no event was configured to promote the contact, or because the promotion depends on a score threshold nobody recalibrated. Compare inquiries on the marketing side with opportunities created on the sales side for the same month: a gap above 30% points at the trigger, not at the connection.
Which fields should cross from marketing into the CRM? +
Seven: company, application, estimated volume, deadline, origin, segment and owner. Application is the one most often left out and the one that changes how the first call goes. Create each destination field in the CRM before mapping, because a mapping pointed at a field that does not exist fails without any error message.
When should a contact become an opportunity? +
On the quote-request form submission, for most manufacturers. That is an explicit buying signal and it needs no maintenance. Promoting on a score threshold only makes sense above roughly 200 inquiries a month, where the numbers mean something — below that a threshold mostly delays the buyer who came straight to the point.
How do I avoid duplicate records between the two products? +
Deduplicate contacts by corporate email and group them under the company by tax ID. Never deduplicate by person name — in B2B the same company sends three different people over 18 months and the same person writes their name two different ways. Also keep only one promotion rule active; two rules create two cards for the same buyer.
Does the sale result go back from the CRM to marketing? +
Only if you configure the return trip, and most accounts never do. Without won and lost outcomes flowing back with a written reason, you can report how many inquiries you generated but never which campaigns produced orders. That missing return is why the argument about lead quality restarts every quarter with no evidence on either side.
How do I know the integration broke? +
Run one real submission from a phone off the company network on the first business day of every month and follow it to the rep's card. Connectors break silently after form edits, field renames and plan changes, and the settings screen keeps showing a green check. The log reports transport, not whether the fields arrived filled.
Do I need RD CRM, or can I use another CRM with RD Marketing? +
Another CRM works — the decisions in this page are the same, only the plumbing changes from a native switch to a connector or a webhook. Choose the same-vendor CRM when nobody in-house maintains integrations; choose another when the sales team already lives in one and the switching cost would fall on the people who have to use it daily.
Not sure how many inquiries never reach your reps?
We compare both sides for the last 90 days, find where records stop crossing or arrive stripped of context, and hand back the field map and the trigger rule already agreed with your sales manager.
