Enable to swap and/or merge Marketo only fields with CRM (SFDC / MSD) fields

Enable to swap and/or merge Marketo only fields with CRM (SFDC / MSD) fields

This issue mostly happens to companies that decide to connect Marketo to their CRM (SFDC or MSD) fields long after having started to use Marketo.

When you connect the Marke with the solution, the whole CRM data schema will be created (either fully automatically with SFDC or after the mapping process if using MSD). But if you have been using Marketo for quite a while, it may very well happen that you will already have these fields in your instance (created from the admin -> field management) that this field are used in many (sometimes hundreds) places (forms, smart lists, flow steps or in assets as tokens) and contain plenty of values.

You are at this point in a bad situation as in the same time you get a whole set of new fields that are sync'ed with the CRM.

For the moment, even support cannot really help you cleansing your schema and if you want to get rid of your legacy fields, you have first to remove all usage to them, then hide them and finally ask support to deep hide them so that no one (event admins) can see them. This is a very long and time consuming process that can take weeks for a few persons (plus the task is just awful to execute).

Note: keeping the data is somewhat easier as you can create smart campaign that conditionally copy the value of the legacy fields into the CRM Sync'ed ones, based on field value or even on lead history.

To make things even worth, when you get to admin -> field management and you select a field and look at the "used by", you discover that it's ot possible to open the asset in a separate tab, which drives you to cycle through the whole GUI for each usage of each field.

So for the removal of the legacy fields, we really need a better process for this such as:

  • The capability to swap one field for another everywhere this field is used, including tokens
  • the possibility to merge a Marketo only field with a CRM mapped one, always keeping the CRM mapped one.

Of course, one will have to make sure that the right data is in the CRM mapped field prior to swapping and or merging the fields.

-Greg

1 Comment
kh-lschutte
Community Manager
Status changed to: Open Ideas