Why is Marketo updating salesforce accounts?

[Apurva_Patel]

Recently I discovered that my Marketo user in Salesforce is also updating accounts. The product docs for crm set up says that account syncs are always from SFDC -> Marketo. Then why is my org getting updated by Marketo?

[Grégoire_Miche2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Apurva,

2 possibilities here:

• Support has activated this possibility. This normally something that should be done under very specific circumstances
• Some triggers on contacts do propagate some info from the contacts to the accounts

-Greg

[Apurva_Patel]

Thanks Greg!

I do not believe that has been activated by the support. We never asked for it. Also, there are no custom triggers from our end to stimulate this update on account. I see that the updated timestamps on contact and account are precisely the same. So, something is triggering an update on the account, and we do not want this to happen. How do I stop this? I have also noticed that whenever an Interesting moment is captured on the contact, it updates the contact(which is fine), but that contact's Account is also getting updated somewhere. Hard to figure out what is getting updated here. Only the lastmodifiedby and data/time are helping me right now to figure out this. How do I stop this? Is this a standard Marketo behavior?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

I ran a test on our instance, and the account does not get updated, even when we add an interesting moment to a contact.

It has to be a mechanism that is internal to you SFDC. Could be a Process Builder as well.

-Greg

[Justin_Norris1]

Apurva Patel​

What fields on your accounts are being updated? Can you give an example of a scenario where it happens -- e.g., the trigger in Marketo, the flow steps, and then the result in SFDC?

The only other scenario I can think of where this would happen (aside from the additional workflows in SFDC, which I agree with Greg sounds like the most likely culprit) is if you are using Person Accounts in SFDC. These combine properties of contacts and accounts and are writable from Marketo. But it doesn't sound like you are.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

And also, you should not post questions in the champions group if you expect a quick answer. It is not it's purpose.

Read Getting the most of the community when you have a Marketo question

-Greg

[Apurva_Patel]

Got it. Thanks Greg. Will keep in mind. This was my first post.

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

As added protection in our instance, we prohibit (in Admin section & in SFDC) the Marketo user from modifying account level fields.

You may want to check this as well...

[Apurva_Patel]

Thanks Geoffrey Krajeski ! But by removing the edit perms for the marketo profile in salesforce, will also stop the sync between marketo account info and salesforce? I read it somewhere to give right permissions in marketo, we need those fields to be visible for the marketo profile.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Apurva,

You can remove write rights without preventing the user to see the fields. But I am quite sure that if you do so in your case, it will also block the contact sync, since SFDC is cascading some update to the account. If you block the right to update the account, the cascading will fail and the whole sync will fail.

-Greg