Case Study · CENTRL · Financial Technology
CENTRL's marketing and sales ops ran on manual glue. Now Salesforce and Marketo run as one engine.
A financial-technology company's revenue ops lived in the gaps between systems: aging Process Builders in Salesforce, webinars hand-assembled every month, UTM attribution that evaporated between pages, and ARR double-counted across channels. As CENTRL's ongoing Salesforce and Marketo team since May 2025, we closed those gaps one workstream at a time - nine of them so far.
Industry
Financial technology (diligence & risk platforms)
Platform
Salesforce Sales Cloud + Marketo
Timeline
Ongoing since May 2025
Outcome
Two platforms running as one revenue engine
The challenge
CENTRL: a fintech whose revenue ops lived between two platforms
CENTRL provides diligence, risk, and compliance platforms to financial institutions. Salesforce held the pipeline and Marketo ran marketing, but the work connecting them was manual: hand-built webinar campaigns every month, attribution that depended on UTM parameters surviving page transitions, aging Process Builder automation, and revenue reports that counted the same lead twice when it arrived through two channels.
Automation on retired rails
Core Salesforce automation lived in Process Builders - a tool Salesforce has retired for new builds - plus a backlog of undeployed Apex and a misbehaving Outreach plugin.
Webinars built by hand, monthly
Every brown-bag webinar meant manually creating the Zoom event, registration links, email templates, recipient lists, and follow-ups - days of work, repeated each month.
Attribution that evaporated
UTM parameters were lost between pages, GA4 and Marketo did not speak, and nobody could trace a closed deal back to the campaign that started it.
ARR counted twice
When one lead arrived through two channels - a demo sign-up and a website form - both sources claimed the revenue, inflating ARR reporting.
Dirty send lists
Recipient data arrived in spreadsheets with duplicates and null emails - every send risked bounces and double-delivery without a cleaning pass.
Reporting hitting platform walls
Salesforce's three-field grouping limit and cross-object quirks made the reports leadership wanted genuinely hard to build.
The architecture
Own the connective tissue between Salesforce and Marketo
Neither platform was replaced - the engagement wires them together: modern Flows on the Salesforce side, a templated campaign engine on the Marketo side, and attribution flowing both directions through GA4.
Sources
Wired by Cloudsheer
Outcomes
What we built
Process Builder to Flow migration
All six legacy Process Builders rebuilt as modern Flows, tested against live records before cutover - Salesforce automation moved off retired rails onto the supported platform.
The monthly webinar engine
A templated pipeline for the brown-bag series: Zoom events with source-tracked links (LinkedIn, website, email, app, social), three-touch Marketo invite cadences, deduped and null-checked lists, smart campaigns, and attended / did-not-attend follow-ups with reports.
GA4-to-Marketo attribution
End-to-end design: UTMs captured at first touch and persisted, GTM and Munchkin aligned, GA4 events into Marketo for scoring, Marketo activity back into GA4 - with idempotency so nothing double-fires.
ARR attribution dedup logic
Prioritization rules on the Salesforce side: when one lead arrives through multiple channels, the highest-value source (a demo sign-up over a website form) claims the revenue - once - segmentable by product and year.
Org hygiene and deployments
Einstein Activity Capture configured with clean lead field mapping, the Apex and Visualforce deployment backlog shipped, the Outreach plugin debugged, and field limits raised where real usage demanded it.
Campaign data and reporting
Lead and campaign-member records reconciled against client spreadsheets, campaign reports built per program, and workarounds engineered for Salesforce's reporting limits leadership kept hitting.
How we did it
Two platforms, one revenue engine, eleven months and counting
CENTRL builds diligence and risk-management software for financial institutions, and its go-to-market runs on two platforms that were never quite wired together: Salesforce for the pipeline, Marketo for the marketing engine. Neither was broken - but the connective tissue was manual. Monthly webinars were assembled by hand. Lead attribution lived in UTM parameters that vanished between page loads. Salesforce automation sat in Process Builders that Salesforce itself was retiring. Our engagement, ongoing since May 2025, is the team that owns that connective tissue.
The Salesforce side came first: we migrated the org's six Process Builders to modern Flows - testing each against live records before cutover - set up Einstein Activity Capture with clean lead field mapping, deployed the backlog of Apex classes, triggers, and Visualforce pages that had been waiting on a release process, and debugged the Outreach plugin the sales team depended on. Unglamorous work with a compounding payoff: automation on a supported foundation instead of a retired one.
Then the webinar engine. CENTRL runs a monthly "brown bag" webinar program, and each one used to be built from scratch. We templated the whole pipeline: Zoom webinar with source-tracked registration links for LinkedIn, website, email, the CENTRL app, and social - so registrations carry their origin - plus Marketo email templates on a three-touch cadence, recipient lists deduped and null-checked before every send, smart campaigns scheduling the sequence, and attended versus did-not-attend follow-up campaigns with their own templates and reports. What took days each month became a repeatable checklist.
The deepest workstream is attribution. We designed and built the end-to-end path between Google Analytics 4 and Marketo: UTM parameters captured on first touch and persisted across pages, Munchkin tracking aligned with GTM events, GA4 events flowing into Marketo for scoring, and Marketo activity visible back in GA4 - with idempotency checks so no event double-fires. And where duplicate attribution was inflating revenue reporting, we built prioritization logic on the Salesforce side: when one lead arrives through multiple channels, the highest-value source wins, so ARR is counted once, segmentable by product and by year. Finance-grade attribution for a company that sells to finance.
How we delivered
Ongoing since May 2025, start to finish
Foundation
May 2025: first webinar campaigns shipped, email templates built, campaign data reconciled - learning the org by working it.
Modernize the automation
June 2025: six Process Builders migrated to Flows, EAC configured, the Apex deployment backlog cleared.
Industrialize the webinars
July to September 2025: the monthly engine templated - source-tracked links, cadences, dedupe passes, follow-up programs.
Build the attribution pipe
October to November 2025: the GA4-Marketo integration designed end to end, and ARR dedup logic prioritized by source value.
Run and refine
December 2025 onward: the ongoing cadence - campaigns, reports, and the next workstream in the queue.
The results
What changed for the business
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Salesforce automation | Six aging Process Builders | Six modern Flows, tested and live |
| Monthly webinars | Hand-assembled each time | Templated engine with source-tracked links |
| Attribution | UTMs lost between pages | First and last touch persisted into Marketo |
| ARR reporting | Double-counted across channels | Deduped, prioritized, segmentable by product and year |
| Send lists | Spreadsheets with duplicates | Deduped and null-checked before every send |
| Engagement model | Ad-hoc requests | An ongoing team, nine workstreams and counting |
Running Salesforce and Marketo as two separate worlds?
Book a free 30-minute scoping call. We will look at where your attribution breaks, what your campaign ops cost in manual hours, and hand you a plan to wire the two platforms into one engine - at no cost.
Client identifying details have been anonymized at the client's request. Metrics reflect the outcomes of a real engagement.