Sync To CRM Time - Does This Cause Issues For Anyone Else?

Question

I have been a long-time Eloqua user. Primarily, the companies that I have worked are B-to-B and serve small businesses.  In the small business lead generation world, when you wait to respond to leads - you lose. The first one in usually gets the deal.  We have all of our lead generation activities running through Eloqua, including our PPL campaigns where multiple competitors are also responding to RFQ's and also our inbound sales call center uses it (via form) to submit leads in order to take advantage of the de-duplication and validation power in Eloqua.  The latter causes my sales team to wait 15 minutes while they are they are waiting for the lead to get created and transferred to them in CRM. 
Here is my issue.  At best, it takes Eloqua 15 minutes to sync the leads to SFDC.  These programs are "straight to queue" integrations too.  I am running integration events straight from the form processing steps, so there are no program builder delays here.  The guys in Support have been really great, and have been working with me to see what can be done to decrease the lag time, but 15 minutes seems to be the acceptable rate. So, I am starting to think of ways to take them directly to SFDC and just live with the issues of duplicates and no validation.
I can't be the only one that this causes issues for.  Does anyone else have this issue?

Answer 1

Hi John,
I too have had these issues.  The main problem is not program builder.  The integration queue/engine is prone to backlogs.  Rumor has it that the integration engine is shared by the campaign engine and a bunch of other services in the platform.  Either way, the integration queue will always have a lag.
My solution was:
1.  Push data from ELQ form to a SFDC Web-toLead Form IF ELQ contact has blank LeadID and ContactID (does not exist in SFDC) -- this creates leads instantly in SFDC.
2.  Run an apex trigger from SFDC to do a blind form submit to Eloqua with the email address and SFDC Lead ID for the leads created from step1 -- this will ensure that creating duplicate leads in SFDC is minimized.
3.  Send notifications from ELQ form to Sales Reps if ELQ contact already exists in SFDC as Lead or Contact. -- even without the updates on the lead or contact records in sfdc, this gives the reps an immediate heads up. 
4.  Send the rest of the information that I couldn't fit into the post-data-to-server step for the new lead.
Of course I also baked into the form processing steps a bunch of conditions to mitigate spam.