Best Practices Salesforce / Marketo Sync

[LucasDF]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to hear about your best practices concerning contact database Sync between Marketo and Salesforce,

I already know how to send Marketo contact to Salesforce, when I edit them with one of the two platforms it modifies it on the other platform, every is well synced... BUT

I've given the sales team access to Salesforce so they can start working with it and there is a little problem :

When you transfer contacts from MKT to SF, it will make them appear as "Leads" in SF

But my Sales are registering new people as "Contact" in SF

I understood that when one of my sales told me "Why can't you see the contact I added on SF with Marketo ?"

In my opinion, they should register their new contact as "Lead" but I'm not really sure,

What's your idea about that? Have you ever been confronted with that kind of methodological problem?

If you have any other comment related to the subject I'd be glad to hear them,

Lucas

[Brooke_Bartos1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Lucas,

You'll want to work with your Salesforce Admin to make sure that the Marketo Sync User has Read/Write access to both Leads and Contacts in Salesforce. If the permissions are there, and there are no custom rules in place around syncing from SFDC to Marketo, then you should be able to see, access, and modify those contacts in Marketo the same as you do your leads. 

Brooke

[LucasDF]

Hi Brooke,

I'm my own Salesforce admin so I'll check about that, but I think its already set as Read/Write : when I modify a "Leads" in Salesforce it also modifies it in Marketo, but If they are register as contact they are not created in Marketo. So my question was about how should we treat these persons on Salesforce ? Is it a good a Idea to let the team create them as "Contact" or should I tell them to create them as "Leads"?

[Michael_Florin]

Are you saying a new contact is not created in Marketo at all?

That would puzzle me. I can't speak about _every_ Salesforce installation, but at least for us new contacts are certainly being created in Marketo. And they would be created as "Persons" with SFDC Type = Contact, as Marketo does not know the concept of Leads vs. Contacts as Salesforce does. 

And if the new Salesforce Contact were created through Lead->Contact conversion, Marketo would receive this as a "new person created" activity on the known record and change the SFDC Type from Lead to Contact.

And no: I don't think you should advise your sales guys not to create contacts anymore. Contacts are members of Accounts and they inherit specific feature from the account, which makes the Contact/Account relationship a special one in the Salesforce architecture. Some companies are even embracing a contact-only model in Salesforce and give up on the lead type completely.

[LucasDF]

Mmm that's very interesting, I think I'll let them create them as "contact" then, the only problem is : If they register someone we already have in database it won't tell them that its a duplicate contact as one will be a "contact" and the one we already have is currently a "lead".

Concerning you first question, I was thinking about the other way : Created in marketo and doesn't appear in Salesforce, but If created an automatic flow and it seems to work well !

[Amy_Goldfine]

The contacts that are not syncing to Marketo, are they being created as attached to an account or orphaned? Contacts are meant to be attached to an account, but there are edge cases where they can be created orphaned, in which case they will not sync to Marketo.