Marketo and Pardot Implementation, Governed From the CRM

A Marketo or Account Engagement build that still works in year two takes 10 to 14 weeks, and the first three produce no campaign at all. They produce a field contract: every field the platform will read or write, which system owns it, which direction it travels, and what happens when both systems change it inside the same sync window. Teams that skip this spend year two arguing about why the CRM and the automation platform disagree on who is a customer, and no amount of campaign work repairs it afterwards. Where I start: With your Salesforce or Dynamics instance open, not the automation platform. Ownership rules, record types, the lead-to-contact conversion path, duplicate rules, and which picklists are already load-bearing in reporting. In Account Engagement I write the connector behaviour down field by field, because a field set to Salesforce-wins and a field set to most-recently-updated fail in completely different ways, and the failure stays invisible until a rep overwrites something at quarter end. In Marketo the equivalent work is deciding sync-triggered fields, partitions and workspaces before a single record loads, since none of those three are cheap to change later. Then the taxonomy. Programs, channels, tags and naming go in before the first asset, with success statuses that map to the stages your funnel report already uses. Operational programs come next: data management flows, routing, suppression, the subscription centre. Campaign work is last and it is the least interesting part of the engagement. Regulated and Indian market work: For banking and insurance clients I build the consent record as a first-class object with purpose, timestamp, channel and source artefact, because the DPDP Act treats consent as something you must be able to produce, not something you assert. SMS goes out through a DLT-registered header and pre-approved template IDs, with template variables mapped in the platform rather than pasted in by a campaign manager. WhatsApp runs through the Business API with the 24-hour session rule enforced in the flow instead of in someone's memory. What you receive: A written field contract and sync direction table. The taxonomy document. Operational programs configured with their own alerting. A test plan I run in front of you, including the sync-conflict cases that are otherwise discovered by accident. A recorded handover for whoever owns this after me, and the list of things I deliberately kept simple. Not included: Email and landing page copy, and design beyond templating what your team supplies. Salesforce administration outside the fields in scope: I will tell your admin exactly what I need and why, but I do not rewrite your validation rules or your assignment logic. Cleanup of a decade-old database, which is separate work with its own decisions. Migration from Eloqua or HubSpot is quoted apart, because the hard part is historical activity rather than the platform. Who should not hire me for this: Anyone who needs campaigns sending inside a month. Anyone whose sales leadership has not agreed what a qualified lead is; I will ask for that agreement in week one and I will not invent it on their behalf. Anyone who wants the automation platform to be the system of record. If that is the plan we disagree at the level of architecture and you should hire someone who believes in it. Working style: I do not subcontract. You get me on the calls, in the instance and at the handover. Sessions run in English or Hindi.