API Name for SFDC ID?

[th_1]

Hello,

We're building integration between Marketo and our own product. The process is once the prospect fills out the marketo form, we'll use the webhook to call our product to set up access for the prospects. Now, we're looking for an unique identifier to push the data from our product back to Marketo to report on their progress of using our product. We're thinking about using SFDC ID as an unique identifier. My engineering team wants to know the API name for the SFDC ID. However, there's no API Name for the SFDC ID that I can find in Marketo.

Does anyone know how we can locate the API Name for the SFDC ID? Any other suggestions for an unique identifier? We're not considering email addresses as there might duplicates in the system.

Thank you!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

You can’t update people using a direct lookup on sfdcId (that’s the API name for the computed field we think of as “SFDC ID“).

If you know the person’s SFDC Type (easily derived from their ID, of course) you can update people using either sfdcLeadId or sfdcContactId. Only one of these lookup fields is supported per call to Sync Lead.

An alternate approach is to mirror the SFDC ID to a custom string field, then use that custom field as the lookup field. This would allow you to update Leads and Contacts in the same request, with the risk that the data is not up to date.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Also, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to look up using the SFDC ID if you can use the Marketo Person ID.

This ID is of course set from the very moment they call the webhook, no need to wait for a sync to SFDC.

Barring Marketo merges, what’s the reason to not use the original Marketo Person ID?

[th_1]

Thank you Sanford! We decided to use Marketo Person ID. We were hoping that we can use 1 identifier across Marketo and SFDC in case we need to switch the sync to SFDC directly. However, it doesn't seem that there's a straightforward way to use SFDC Lead/Contact ID in Marketo.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Right, although Marketo itself can combine Lead and Contact IDs (including tracking conversions and merges on the SFDC side) when using the API you'd have to use a separate request for each type. But still, you never have to worry about this with a single lead since you'll know its type in advance, and for a batch you'd have to split it into a maximum of 2 batches.