Changes to Marketo Salesforce Sync – Questions and Discussion

[Anonymous]

I created the new fields on Nov 1 and the majority (about 15k of our 20k leads ) have been backfilled, but I still haven't seen a "process complete" notification in our notification center. After the first day about 10k had been filled, and on the second day another 5k came through, but the remaining 5k seem stuck: there were no newly-modified by Marketo lead records (except for the ones that were created) today, for example.

Any idea what's going on or how I should proceed?

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Hi Jake Harris​

Could be a combination of things, so the short version would be to Contact Marketo Support so we can look at it directly and be 100% sure everything looks good on the back end.

We've heard some scattered reports here and there that even after the backfill has gone through, the instance notifications haven't come up. Still trying to sort out what's causing that but they're a not overly common. Could be that it completed and just didn't send the notification.

Not sure what you mean by them being "stuck", which is why it'd be good to Contact Marketo Support so we can check it out directly. There are a few possibilities, but none that would explain it with 100% certainty without looking directly at it.

-Mike

[Anonymous]

Hi Mike,

Just wanted to share my experience thus far on trying to get this resolved through Marketo Support. I opened my case 6 days ago, and I'm not any closer to getting it resolved. The tech support rep has been unable to communicate anything clearly in writing, so I asked for a meeting. The rep told me they were completely unavailable all of monday and tuesday (which was very frustrating, and frankly hard to believe) and offered to meet at 3:30pm yesterday. They failed to show up to this meeting (I updated the case at 3:35pm to remind me of the meeting, too), so another day has passed without any resolution. I clicked the Escalate Case button, and somebody in Australia replied to say "sorry" and that they were assigned the case back to the same tech that isn't responding to my case. I still haven't heard from the tech assigned to my ticket since Friday.

I have over 5k leads that have not been backfilled, and I created this case 6 days ago. I'm really disappointed in this customer service experience, and in the backfill process in general.

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Hi Jake Harris​

I'm sorry that you're having problems here. I've reached out to our Support Management team to get this worked out right away. Again, I'm sorry you've had a bad experience, but we'll get it resolved.

[Anonymous]

Still no progress whatsoever. Still waiting for help. More frustrated than ever.

[Mike_Reynolds2]

If anyone is interested, Jenn DiMaria over at  RevEngine will be holding a webinar on these configuration changes on Thursday, November 17th, from 1 - 1:45pm Eastern time. I'll be there along with a couple other key contributors to this project from Marketo to answer as many questions as we can. If you'd like to join in, please check out their webinar registration page right here.

Cheers!

Mike

[Anonymous]

Just a quick update that hopefully helps anyone else that ran into my same question. If you're trying to run comparisons between the old mkto2__ fields and the new mkto71_ fields on the Lead object, make sure that you exclude IsConverted leads in your comparison - the converted leads will not get backfilled by the Marketo backfill process. Also, I never got an alert that my backfill completed, so you may not either. And don't wait if you run into issues, the Marketo tech support assistance is extremely slow, so if you're having problems, don't delay in getting a ticket started. They took 11 days to resolve my question, and insisted that they were "within their SLAs."

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Jake,​

As long as the new fields exist on both the Lead and Contact objects, the data will backfill into the newly recreated fields. So the field values are there, even on leads that have been converted. There isn't anything that would prevent the records that had previously been leads and were then converted to contacts from getting the values backfilled as part of this configuration change.

That said, there are external factors to consider. If you have visibility rules set up in such a way that the Marketo sync user can't access your Contacts, or if there are any kind of field settings or workflow rules for example that apply to the Contacts after they've been converted, that could affect this. Those would be customized variations in your SFDC setup that you'd need to check into, but we've got documentation that covers this right here: Changes to Marketo Salesforce Sync – Preventative Troubleshooting​. I can see that on the case you had escalated that there was something different going on with these leads that stopped them from syncing entirely between Marketo and Salesforce for all sync, but I wasn't on the call you had with your Support Engineer, so I don't know what specifically that was. Once that block was removed, it seems the leads all got resynced, which brought the backfilled values into the new fields.

Hope that helps!

Thanks,

Mike

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Jake,​

I've had a chance to follow up with the Support Engineer that worked with you on your case and he clarified what was happening. It's a great point that I'd like to clarify for anyone else who has a similar question.

In SFDC, a Lead record can be converted to a Contact record. If the Lead was synced to Marketo, it will still be synced to Marketo after it has been converted to a Contact record. But, the Marketo record will only ever reference one record in SFDC. Salesforce has Leads and Contacts, but in Marketo they're all just Leads. The Marketo Leads can sync with either the SFDC Lead record or the SFDC Contact record, but not both. So, once the SFDC Lead converts to a Contact, from Marketo's perspective, the previous SFDC Lead record may as well not exist because it's now synced to the SFDC Contact record (which has a different unique SFDC ID).

When the backfill process is done, it will be backfilling data to the one SFDC record it is currently synced with. Whether it's an SFDC Lead record or an SFDC Contact record doesn't make a lot of difference because it's only possible to push/sync data to the one single record that has the active sync back to the Marketo record. If you've got a list of SFDC Leads you're checking, but all of those SFDC Leads have been converted to SFDC Contacts, the data backfilled from Marketo will only be synced with the SFDC Contact record because that's the only record that the Marketo Lead record knows exists at that point. No data will sync to that previous SFDC Lead record after it's converted to a Contact, not lead score, not any field value, because that SFDC Lead record has been orphaned by the conversion to the SFDC Contact record.

This actually follows with the standard process of syncing data from Marketo to SFDC. Let's say you have a Marketo Lead synced to an SFDC Lead record and it has a score of 5. That SFDC Lead record then gets converted to an SFDC Contact. It carries over that lead score of 5 into the Contact record, but let's say it gets another score change of 5, for a total lead score of 10. The Marketo record will only be able to sync to the SFDC Contact record because it was converted and Marketo can't see that previous SFDC Lead record. So the result would be that the SFDC Contact record would show the lead score of 10, while the SFDC Lead record (orphaned after the conversion) would still show the previous score of 5.

Let me know if that helps clarify things for you.

Thanks,

Mike

[Event_User]

I want to make sure I understand the suggestion to deal with the field mapping issue where we don't know which contact field to map the lead field to because the labels are exactly the same.  Shown by this image posted earlier

The suggestion seemed to be like this:

1. Create all the new Lead fields you want to sync over with slightly different labels than the past fields.  Example "Acquisition Program" is "Acquisition-Program"

2. Create all the new Contact fields you want to sync over with slightly different labels than the past fields

3. Map them.

4. If you want the labels to match the original labels, then rename all the Lead and Contact field names you just made.

5. Delete MLM inside SFDC to remove the old fields

Is this the suggestion?  If so, what will be the label in Marketo when all finished?  As an alternative to renaming everything, can you delete MLM from SFDC after step 2 above and therefore not have the confusion about which field to map to?

Thanks,

Mike