Advisory - Healthcare Research and Consulting
Client Overview
The Advisory Board, part of Optum, is a healthcare research and consulting organization that supports hospitals and health systems with insights, data, and best-practice guidance. Its mission is to help healthcare leaders make better strategic and operational decisions.
Marketing at Advisory is primarily focused on sharing research, engaging members, and amplifying thought leadership, rather than running high-volume lead generation campaigns. Even so, the team depends heavily on accurate, well-governed data to target the right stakeholders and measure engagement across accounts.
Complex Marketing Operations: Advisory runs marketing and sales across multiple Salesforce instances—one environment optimized for lead generation and another centered on contact and account management. A single Marketo instance serves as the central marketing automation hub, orchestrating communication and capturing engagement across both Salesforce orgs.
Challenge
Despite having mature systems, Advisory's marketing operations were held back by fragmented integrations and manual work. Marketo's native Salesforce connector supports only one Salesforce instance. Advisory, however, needed a way to keep multiple Salesforce orgs and Marketo in sync at the same time—without brittle workarounds or constant admin intervention.
Key pain points included:
- The need to support both one-way and conditional two-way data flows between Salesforce and Marketo
- No built-in mechanism in Marketo to send and receive data from AWS S3 for large-scale inbound and outbound data operations
- Manual, error-prone data cleanup and transformation inside Marketo, especially for legacy records
- Lead creation inconsistencies, including duplicates and missed leads, driven by limitations in the existing process
- A requirement to sync thousands of Marketo programs to Salesforce campaigns reliably, which was slow and difficult to manage by hand
These gaps reduced marketing agility, slowed campaign execution, and introduced data quality and reporting risk at a time when Advisory needed more confidence in its marketing data, not less.
Solution
Portqii's EDI Platform: To solve these integration and data quality challenges, Advisory implemented Portqii's EDI platform, using a combination of Syncs, Actions, Decisions, and Connect (AWS S3) capabilities to orchestrate data movement and enforce business logic across all systems.
With Portqii in place, Advisory was able to build a single, configurable integration layer connecting Salesforce, Marketo, and AWS S3—removing fragmentation and putting marketing operations back in control.
How Portqii Helped (Feature-by-Feature Impact)
Detailed Implementation
Multi-Salesforce Integration and Conditional Syncs: Using EDI Syncs and Actions, Advisory connected both Salesforce instances—one focused on lead generation and the other on contact and account management—to the same Marketo environment. With this setup, the team could define one-way syncs where data should only move from a system of record to a downstream system, configure conditional two-way flows where updates were allowed to travel in both directions but only under specific rules, and control which Salesforce org was responsible for which data elements, keeping ownership clear and avoiding conflicts. Result: A governed, flexible integration between multiple Salesforce instances and Marketo, with transparent control over direction, frequency, and scope of data syncs.
AWS S3 Data Exchange with Audienz Connect: On its own, Marketo did not provide a robust way to read from and write to AWS S3. This limited Advisory's ability to work with large data files, external enrichment data, or archived engagement information. With Audienz Connect and Actions, Advisory was able to pull qualified records from S3 files into Marketo leads and Custom Data Objects based on pre-defined matching and filtering logic, schedule S3 imports to run automatically ensuring only eligible records were brought into Marketo, and push interaction and engagement history from Marketo back into S3 on demand, avoiding the need to keep all of that detail inside Marketo long-term. Result: A reliable, automated data pipeline between Marketo and AWS S3, with fine-grained control over scheduling, filters, and record eligibility.
Automated Data Transformation and Cleanup: Historically, Advisory's marketing operations team had to execute one-off, manual data cleanup projects inside Marketo—correcting formats, fixing historic errors, and normalizing values across fields. With EDI Actions, Advisory was able to define transformation rules and apply them to targeted segments of records, run batch cleanup jobs to fix historical issues using one-time Syncs rather than repeated manual exports and imports, and keep data up to date by scheduling recurring clean-up activities where necessary. Result: Consistent, trustworthy data in Marketo with minimal manual intervention, improving both segmentation quality and reporting accuracy.
Intelligent Lead Creation with Decisions and Actions: The prior lead creation process left Advisory exposed to duplicates and missing leads, especially when records flowed in from multiple entry points. By combining Decisions and Actions, Advisory introduced a validation and control layer that evaluated whether an incoming record met the business criteria to be created as a lead in Salesforce, checked for existing records to prevent duplicate lead creation across Salesforce instances, and captured leads that had been missed by legacy processes, ensuring a more complete picture of engagement. Result: A more reliable, duplicate-aware lead creation process, with better coverage of all qualified leads and clear rules on when and where leads are created.
Program-to-Campaign Sync with Portqii Syncs and ANA: Managing the relationship between Marketo programs and Salesforce campaigns had become a major operational burden. Thousands of programs needed to be aligned with the correct campaigns, and doing this by hand was slow and error-prone. With Portqii Syncs and the ANA application, Advisory defined and stored standardized sync configurations specifying how Marketo programs should map to Salesforce campaigns, used ANA to trigger those syncs on demand allowing the marketing team to decide when updates should run, and ensured that mappings and rules were centralized and reusable instead of being recreated each time. Result: A substantial reduction in manual effort, more accurate program-to-campaign mapping, and tighter alignment between marketing activity and sales reporting.
Results
By deploying Portqii's EDI platform as the integration and automation layer between Salesforce, Marketo, and AWS S3, Advisory achieved:
- Complete integration across multiple Salesforce instances feeding a single Marketo hub
- Automated, governed data flows to and from AWS S3 for both inbound and outbound operations
- Streamlined data transformation and cleanup, removing large amounts of manual work from the marketing operations team
- Reliable, rules-based lead creation with fewer duplicates and more complete lead capture
- Smoother program-to-campaign synchronization, improving the consistency of reporting between marketing and sales
Future Outlook
Advisory plans to continue expanding its use of Portqii's EDI platform—connecting additional systems, evolving its data models, and automating more of the work that previously depended on manual intervention.
By treating Portqii as the central orchestration layer for marketing and sales data, Advisory is building a foundation for scalable, insight-driven campaigns that better support healthcare leaders around the world.