Two platforms with no way to share data, connected with a custom integration. What happens in one shows up in the other, so the people who need it can see it and act on it. An hourly check flags anything that has gone quiet.
Most companies have at least one system that was never designed to connect to the rest of the stack. It does its job well. It just does it in isolation, and everything that should follow from it has to be done by hand or not at all.
A SaaS company was onboarding WorkRamp as its learning platform, and there was no native Marketo integration. Nobody could see learning activity where the marketing decisions were being made. That meant no lifecycle email when someone finished a course, no way to score a lead on product education, and no list of the people who enrolled and then quietly stopped.
The information existed. It was just sitting behind a gate.
A layer sits between the two systems. When someone starts, finishes or abandons a course, that event is written to their record in the marketing platform and attached to the right person every time. Before anything is written, it checks whether that person should be emailed at all. Course recommendations come across in a form the email templates can use directly, so nobody is reformatting anything by hand. A second check runs every hour and flags the enrollments that have sat untouched for three days.
The two systems are matched on an ID that never changes. Contact ID, not email. The same person shows up under a work address in one system and a personal one in another, records get duplicated and merged, and a match that breaks quietly is worse than no match at all.
Eligibility is checked before the write, not after. Nothing lands in the marketing system that shouldn't be emailed in the first place.
Records append, they never overwrite. You keep the history of what someone did, not just the last thing they did.
Something watches for what did not happen. An hourly sweep flags enrollments that have gone quiet for three days. Many of the growth signals in this type of data are in the people who started and stopped.
Any two systems that should be sharing data and aren't. A scheduling tool that doesn't write back to the CRM. A billing system nobody in sales can see. A form that collects something useful and drops it in an inbox. If the answer to "why don't we just look it up" is "it's in the other system," that gap can be closed.