Common failures
Common failures
Configuring features before configuring the data model. Teams dive into emails and landing pages while the contact properties and lifecycle stages are still undefined, then discover their segments are unreliable and their reporting is fiction. It happens because the data model is invisible and the features are shiny. Define properties, lifecycle stages, and source tracking first, then build features on top of them.
Free-text fields where dropdowns belong. A single open text field for something like industry or lead source fractures into a dozen spellings within weeks, and every segment built on it is broken. The cause is choosing the path of least resistance at setup. Constrain any field you intend to segment or report on to defined values from the start.
Skipping email authentication. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC feel like IT trivia, so they get postponed, and then a nurture sequence quietly lands in spam while the dashboard reports it as delivered. Authenticate the sending domain before the first real send, and verify it, because the cost of skipping it is invisible until your whole programme underperforms for no apparent reason.
A lead-scoring model built without sales in the room. Marketing defines an MQL alone, sales does not trust the number, and qualified leads either get ignored or sales drowns in junk. The fix is to agree the qualification bar with sales before encoding it, and to feed sales' accept-or-reject decisions back into the model so it sharpens.
Giant, undocumented workflows nobody dares touch. One sprawling automation with no name, no description, and no clear exit criteria becomes a black box that breaks in ways no one can diagnose. Build small single-purpose workflows, name and document each one, and define explicit enrolment and exit conditions so the next person can read and safely change them.
Treating attribution as a report instead of a setup. Teams expect to ask "which channel drives revenue" whenever they like, then find the tracking was never configured to answer it. Source tracking, a UTM convention, original-source capture, and the link to CRM revenue have to be wired before campaigns run, because you cannot reconstruct clean attribution for traffic that already came and went.