Synch All Activities to Salesforce No Daily Limit!

[Anonymous]

So I just learned today that Marketo only synchs one activity of each type per day to Salesforce. (E.g., if one of your leads receives two emails in one day, only one of them will end up in a Salesforce activity). 

This creates a massive hole in terms of reporting and sales visibility. 

The whole idea behind CRM is to have all your interactions with a customer in one place. If only one activity per type is synched per day, then any subsequent activities will be "lost". 

Sure they are still in Marketo but Sales people will not have that visibility, which in our org they rely upon. 

Furthermore, we use Salesforce activities as the basis for some of our reports on emails (this is how we've structured our data warehouse) so this means that some of that data is unreliable. (Gulp!)

Anyhow, I feel like this is a critical gap and would love to see the option to synch all activities to Salesforce, regardless of whether it's the first email or the 10th email of the day. Whatever happens is what we should see in Salesforce. Personally, I don't see the logic of doing it any other way (why capture only some of your data?) 

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Was this confirmed by Marketo? It seems very bizarre... and I'm going to have to do some testing/reviewing on my own now. 

[Anonymous]

Here is the message I got from Marketo support: 

There is not a way to change this behavior at this time. Enabled activities will only create an activity once per type per day, we can't change that. I do think that the ability to change a setting on enabled activities to allow an activity for every activity of that type to be created in Salesforce would be a great addition to Marketo. I recommend making a post about this in the Ideas portion of the Community. This is closely monitored by our product managers for improvements and features to add to future releases. 
 

I was really shocked to hear this too -- it seems so counter-intuitive to only synch some of your activities based on such an arbitrary criteria as a daily limit. 

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hmmm. Definitely not ideal. Most of what we do isn't based in activities, but I can see how this would be problematic for reporting. I've liked it, in hopes that Marketo is able to update things!

[Anonymous]

I've been conveniently ignoring this for awhile, but yes, definitely makes sense to at least have the option to sync anything and everything.

[Luis_Paez3]

Two years ago we also tried syncing specific emails to activities within SFDC, however it ended up creating alot of noise within the activity stream for Sales reps.  Today we've transitioned to disabling the global activity sync option within the SFDC sync section - meaning that we use SFDC Activities only for sales reps' manually created activities and for extremely high value activities from Marketo (think Interesting moments).  We create these within an operational smartcampaign (think MQL type functionality).  This means that on a typical contact in a span of several months there are only a handful of activities (~5).  Sales still should have the abiliity to glance at what emails that a contact may have received from Marketo - so we use the Marketo Sales Insight component within a SFDC Page Layout.  Reps then can just click on the Email tab within that to see specific emails that were sent - and this DOES show mutliple emails per contact per day.

I do get your frustration if you're using a Data warehouse to track what was sent to a given contact throughout time.  Voting this idea up!   (BTW maybe contacting marketo consulting would be one way to construct a custom DW approach).

[Anonymous]

Luis, good point that all emails are visible in MSI. That does help with Sales visibility although we do like being able to look at the activity history and seeing everything (calls/emails) at a glance. And of course it doesn't help on the reporting side as you mention. 

Interesting you mention the custom DW approach, since one of our current projects is to warehouse everything in Marketo (the entire activity log) for every lead. Then we'd have the pure raw data and could run analysis directly. 

[Luis_Paez3]

So we just completed a reverse-DW approach with marketo consulting - in other words we are sending some legacy data points of our contacts into Marketo (by passing Salesforce).  Are you currently pulling data out of Marketo via the API? 

[Anonymous]

@Luis, that's really neat. What do you do with the data once it's there? 

We pull limited data right now out of Marketo using the API (mainly we store the Marketo ID in our software app so we can use it for routing leads based on the actions they complete in our app) but the idea is to get a lot more using an ETL tool into the data warehouse. 

Challenge before that is to figure out a sane data structure that will make sense and allow us to mash it up with all our other data. 

[Luis_Paez3]

We use the data that we push into custom marketo fields for segmentation.  Send me an email at luis.paez at blackbaud dot com and we can arrange a phone call if it's of interest. 

[Anonymous]

does anyone know if this is something Marketo plans on changing in the future?  Its really a bummer for reporting purposes.  Thanks.