Weird bug with "Score" field type?

[Anonymous]

Hi Marketo Community,

Has anyone run across any weirdness on any of their lead scoring fields whether Marketo's Lead Score field or a SFDC Custom "Score" type field not updating and showing the correct sum of the "Behavior Score" and "Demographic/Firmographic" Scores?

I ask because we are currently experiencing this issue. Note***: Since we re-did our lead scoring model last year, our scoring fields are SFDC Custom Fields in Marketo and are "Score" type fields.

Assuming, Lead Score = Behavior Score + Demographic Score:

1 - When a lead is created, it gets scored based on firmographic data and behavior activity in Marketo right away. When the initial SFDC Actvity Sync: Insert occurs, the Demo and Behavior Score pushes into SFDC.

2 - In SFDC, we have a workflow field update (not a formula field) for our Lead Score field. This workflow field update sums the Behavior and Demographic Score and populates the total of B+D in the SFDC Lead Score field.

3 - When it was working, Marketo would recognize the new change in the Lead Score field in SFDC and update the field in Marketo rather quickly.

Our inbound lead assignment smart campaigns rely on this Lead Score field to automatically assign a lead to Sales when they reach a certain scoring threshold, but leads aren't being assigned out because the Lead Score field is not pulling the summed value from SFDC. It keeps trying to write the original Lead Score field from the initial sync that happened upon lead creation. It won't update after the first SFDC Sync.

Note: This is only happening to our SFDC Custom Lead Score field. All other fields are syncing correctly between Marketo and SFDC.

I am currently working with Marketo Support, but no answer yet to why this is happening.

I have had our partner Marketo agency's Developer look into it and he has never seen anything like this either and believes it is a bug.

I'm sure that other Marketo users have a similar lead scoring implementation/model as us so I wanted to see if anyone has noticed any issues recently.

[Mike_Reynolds2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Shirleen Solares​ Shirleen Solares​​, Grégoire Michel​

Here’s the information I got from our engineering team.

The ability to have SFDC score changes update values back inside of Marketo was a bug and that bug got fixed when a patch rolled out to correct something else related to the changes to the Marketo Salesforce sync.

Here's what was going on:

All score fields, even custom ones, are set by design to be “Marketo-win” fields so the values on the Marketo side will always push back up to SFDC and overwrite the value on that side. That’s the expected behavior, but there was a way that behavior could be accidentally overridden. That ability to override expected behavior is the bug that was fixed.

Here’s how it worked.

There are two settings at play, the “Marketo always-win” setting and the SFDC Read-Only setting on the field itself. Score fields are set to Marketo always-win by default. If you set the field as Read-only from the SFDC side, it’s supposed to block updates from Marketo coming up to SFDC, essentially in effect creating an SFDC always-win situation. This conflict is what the bug took advantage of to force the score change from SFDC down to Marketo, despite the expected behavior. The other piece to the puzzle is that it only happens when the two field settings are set in that way to create that conflict, which is why some people experience it and others didn’t, (like we found out here and here).

What's been done:

The bug got fixed, so custom score fields will always win on the Marketo side. However, that doesn’t have to stay that way.

Changes you can make to the behavior:

If you’d like to change that setting, we can enable it to allow score changes from SFDC to come down to Marketo by putting in a service request with Engineering to switch off the Marketo always-win setting. That will make it a true bi-directional sync where changes on either side will be allowed to sync over to the other side and stick so they aren’t overwritten.

Disclaimers about changing the behavior:

• First, it’s all or nothing – it will make that change across the board for all custom score fields and can’t be targeted to specific fields.
• Second, the change can’t be applied to the standard Marketo Lead score that comes stock with the instance.
• Lastly, if you’d like to make those changes, you’ll need to Contact Marketo Support to have individual Support cases opened up for each instance needing the change

What to do next:

Test this behavior out before submitting the case to Support to have it changed. Engineering has released patches to correct the behavior and you should re-test your fields to be 100% sure of what they are doing currently as of today before submitting a case asking for that behavior to be changed.

If there are any other questions at all, you can post them here, but you can also Contact Marketo Support to get answers specific to your particular use case.

Thanks!

-Mike

[Anonymous]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I read the other use cases you linked to, and our instance was one where the score fields were NOT Read-Only and the bi-directional sync was happening with no issues. In fact, that bi-directional sync was functioning for us since we've had Marketo the past 6 years. So it's very interesting and sucks to find out that feature was actually a bug. It would have been nice to leave as is or make that an actual feature.

We will not be changing the Marketo always-win setting as you mentioned above. We don't want this to affect our other score fields if we decide to update our lead scoring model in the future.

We will have to keep using an integer type field for "Lead Score" we created as a work-around in Marketo to allow for that bi-directional sync.

Thanks,

Shirleen

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Shirleen Solares​ Grégoire Michel​

I've been doing some more research with the Engineering team and we may have a work around, but it would require some testing to confirm it would work as expected. Definitely would need a support case for it. Here's the details:

If you make the change and remove the Marketo Always Win setting for all custom score fields, you could then change settings on individual fields to block updates one by one.

For example, if the Always Win setting is turned off, it goes to being a true bi-directional sync (again, only on the custom score fields, not on the standard Lead Score field). But, you could take one specific field and make it Read-Only on the SFDC side. That would make the SFDC field the winner and Marketo would take that value coming down from SFDC.

Also, you could instead block field updates from Admin > Field Management to stop field value changes coming down from SFDC. That should retain the Marketo value and push it back up to SFDC (similar to the Marketo Always Win setting would).

This could be a work around that gets around the all-or-nothing aspect of removing the Marketo Always Win setting.

The catch here, the part that will require testing to confirm, is with blocking field updates from Admin > Field Management to stop the values from coming down from SFDC. While that would stop the Marketo value from being overwritten, we may not ALWAYS push it back up to SFDC since it’s a little different than the Always Win setting.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Mike,

The read-only technique will only work if the field in SFDC is a formula field, as it does not request the "field update" mechanism from the Marketo user. But if the total score field is computed with a workflow, I am 100% sure it will not work, as the workflow trigger in SFDC means the field IS updated by the Marketo user, together with the behavior and the demographic scores, in the same SFDC transaction.

And we do need the total score field to be overwritten, since the whole purpose is to compute the total score, which Marketo cannot do. So this excludes the "block update" technique.

The 2 workarounds we have found so far work well, BTW:

• for small volume instances: Create a formula field in SFDC that computes the total score. Let it sync as an Integer field in Marketo, then have a "data value changes" trigger campaign in Marketo that just copies the formula field in the total score field.
• For high volume instances: munctions to do the sum in Marketo.

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Shirleen,

One of the issue you will face is, once a field is set as a score in Marketo, you cannot revert it to an Integer

We had to create new fields in SFDC and let them as Integers in Marketo.

YOu may want to vote here:

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Greg,

Yes, we only created a new field in SFDC to replace our Lead Score field which was the field that stopped syncing bi-directionally for us when the "bug" was fixed. When the new field synced to Marketo is created an integer type field in Marketo for Lead Score. We're okay with not being able to revert the Lead Score field back to score-type since we don't use any Score-type triggers or batch filters for the Lead Score. We are able to still use smart list trigger and batch filters by using the Data Value Changes/ed filters if needed. Hope that makes sense.

-Shirleen

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Greg, Shirleen Solares​

I'm working with our Engineering team on this. Need to confirm a couple of points and this is what they're asking for:

1. Are these fields read-only in sfdc to the marketo synch user? (Believe so from the database)

2. If these fields are read-only, are they expecting that the value synch should be one way from sfdc to mkto? Meaning that only sfdc value can be synched to mkto and mkto value won't be able to synch to sfdc.

My understanding is that the behavior we're looking for is a true bi-directional sync where values changed on either side, in SFDC or in Marketo would then be updated on the opposite side. In that case the the field permission should not be read-only, and should allow the sync user write permission access. Could you confirm on those details?

Re-posted same question already in All score fields have stopped to sync from SFDC to Marketo

Thanks,

Mike

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Mike,

No the fields are read-write in SFDC for the Marketo user.

In the 2 instances I have been running the tests, the Marketo user is system admin. This means the user as the "modify all data" SFDC permission. In other words, all fields are read-write, except for formula fields, which the score fields are not.

-Greg

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Greg,

I just opened up a case for you on this profile you're using here. I need to get some detailed info that's better not to post, plus the case helps us maintain tracking and accountability when working with Engineering. Could you take a look for it please?

Thanks,

Mike

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Mike,

Answered to you through the case. I also created 2 additional cases on 2 other customer instances and sent you the case numbers by DM.

-Greg

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Thanks Greg! Just replied through the cases, so let's keep working in there.

-Mike

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Just so you know, I'm still looking into what the expected behavior is with those custom score fields. Like I mentioned in the other post, this is a strangely complicated one. More info to come.

Thanks,

Mike

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Shirleen,

I am observing the exact same behavior on another instance. In fact all score fields have stopped to sync from SFDC to Marketo.

Mike Reynolds​,

This is following some questions I was asking there: Changes to Marketo Salesforce Sync – Questions and Discussion

In fact, I feel (from your comment in here https://nation.marketo.com/message/108801#comment-108801 , Mike ) that the changes you have made to the sync recently have stopped an unoffical behavior: the lead score used to sync BOTH ways, and many companies have used that to overcome the inability for Marketo to sum up 2 fields...

-Greg

[Mike_Reynolds2]

I'm checking with our Product team on this directly. This same question seems to have been going around a few times in the past and I keep getting different answers on what is expected behavior. Once I have more conclusive info, I'll let you know.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Mike, What's really weird is that it used to work well until recently.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Gregoire,

You are correct. The "score" type field was working perfectly fine before.

In the meantime this issue gets sorted out, I created a new field for Lead Score in SFDC as "number" type. It synced over to Marketo as "integer" type field, and the "integer" field type is working correctly. My new Marketo Lead Score field is updating the correct value from SFDC every time there is a score change.

Luckily, we do not have any smart campaigns that change the score for Lead Score specifically so it was easy for us to replace the non-working lead score field with the new lead score field I created in all of the smart campaigns. Our lead scoring campaigns in Marketo only change the score for our Behavior and Demographic score fields.

This wasn't an ideal solution, but we had to do it in order to re-trigger our automatic lead-routing/assignment campaigns based on score.

Best,

Shirleen

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Shirleen,

Yes, this is the workaround.  You can even make your number field a formula in SFDC, to make it simpler, as described here:

All score fields have stopped to sync from SFDC to Marketo

-Greg