Company Name Keeps Changing

[Venus_Wills]

We’ve continuously had this issue where Marketo keeps changing the company name field in our database. For example, say a lead is from Accenture. The correct account name in SFDC is "Accenture Plc." That field is almost never correct in Marketo. It rotates through all the different versions of the name that has been entered into our system through forms, list uploads, etc. Sometimes it reads “Accenture” and sometimes “accenture.” In the activity log, it shows that whenever Marketo is synced with SFDC, it keeps trying to change it back to "Accenture Plc." See image below.
 
We’ve contacted customer support but was told that SFDC is source of the change. If you look at the image, it never logs when "Accenture Plc" is changed to "Accenture" but only the other way around. If SFDC and Marketo are syncing correctly, the company name should always be "Accenture Plc."



Any insight is greatly appreciated!

[Dan_Stevens_]

I realize this is an older thread, but here’s a great explanation from Paul Wilson​ on why this is happening (at least on the MS Dynamics side - and suspect it’s the same for SFDC).

[Accounts Tip] Company Name Mismatch

[Mike_Reynolds2 · Accepted solution]

When a field value on the Company/Account object is changed, all lead records associated to the same Company/Account inside of Marketo will have that change made to them as well. The problem we find is that the Change Data Value activity is only logged on the individual lead record where the change was actually made. All other leads associated to the same Company/Account that got the change due to that association will not show the Data Value Change activity at all.

Since SFDC is the owner of the Account object, the next time it syncs, the value from the SFDC side will overwrite the other value. That's why you don't see the value change to the wrong value but do see the correct value coming down from SFDC.

[Anonymous]

How can we prevent this Mike Reynolds​? I understand what is happening but I want to prevent it FROM happening.  Would blocking all Account info from any sort of Non-SFDC Updates solve the issue?

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Dan Donin​ Blocking field updates would stop existing field values from being changed. Check this doc for how: Block Updates to a Field - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

Thing to remember though is that this will stop updates to fields only. Brand new values being put in will not be blocked because they're an insert of a new value, not an update to an existing value. So if a new lead comes in with the same company info but has a different value for a field on the Company/Account object, if it's the first new insert of the value into the field, it could still have the same effect.

I'd personally love to see that behavior changed. Best recommendation I can make to that point would be to submit it as an idea in the Ideas section of the Community here.

[Yun_Bai1]

Hi Mike,

Can I ask you a Marketo SFDC sync related question, but not same as this thread question?

Let's say, there is an existing lead with No. of employees >500 already  in both Marketo and SFDC. We have SFDC workflow rule set up for lead update with: if No. of employees >500 , will send SFDC email alert to sales. The lead filled out a form, has a new interesting moment, and got "sync lead updates to SFDC". I believe lead record in SFDC will maintain the same, only the last interesting moment and date will get update. In this case, will update lead information (interesting moment) in SFDC trigger the SFDC email alert? I assume not, but would like to have a confirmation.

Thanks,

Becky

[Anonymous]

We had a call with Marketo support yesterday and this one was of the items raised. It has been escalated, so if we get an answer for a fix, I will post it on here!

[Liliana_Cheng1]

Hey Alice, was this ever resolved? We see this a lot too, mostly with contacts that are associated to custom objects in our SFDC instance.

[Venus_Wills]

Hi Alice, 

I have not yet, but I believe it has something to do with how SFDC and Marketo treat accounts vs. company names. We keep a very strict naming convention regarding naming convention in SFDC, e.g., Accenture has to be called Accenture Plc. We also have an account in SFDC where we lump in all un-named accounts, i.e., those who are not our target audience. The issues is that we have different companies under the same account in SFDC, but Marketo is unable to distinguish that. Therefore, every time Marketo syncs with Marketo, it picks a random "account" to use as the company name.

I haven't had a chance to investigate the block field update route. I'm afraid it'll leave our Marketo database with a bunch of random company names, e.g., Accenture, Accenture Plc.

I'm sorry this is probably not very helpful. I'll update this thread if I find a solution to this issue.

[Anonymous]

Hi there, did you get this rectifed? I am having a similar problem with Dynamics & Marketo.

[Venus_Wills]

Do you think if I block field updates to Company Name in Marketo, that would help with this issue?

[Anonymous]

I see something like this in my instance too. It seems to be related to the Company object in Marketo. What I've figured out is that if any of the Contacts in a particular account, in your case the Accenture Plc account in Salesforce, does something to change their Company Name (form fillout, list upload, etc.) it will change the Company Name on the Marketo Company object. The result is that all Contacts in the Accenture Plc account will now have the updated Company Name. In my testing the updated name only remained for one sync cycle until Salesforce wrote back the proper Account name.

I have also seen that these kind of bogus names do persist for longer than a sync cycle, sometimes for a couple of weeks, so I'm not sure why that happens.

[Anonymous]

So we know that Salesforce is changing it to "Accenture Plc" but we don't know what is changing the values in Marketo - is it a campaign, list upload, API, or manual change?

Maybe you could run a report of all leads with Company Name changed from "Accenture Plc" to "Accenture", go into the logs, and try to determine what's changing the official SFDC name to the one that shows up in Marketo.

[Venus_Wills]

Thanks for your replies! 

This lead is a Contact. Our SFDC database has a very strict account naming convention, so any time a lead in Marketo syncs with SFDC, it is attempting to update that lead's company name with the official account name in SFDC. There is no campaign in Marketo that is trying to change the data value. Jeff assumed correctly that the campaign field is empty.

Here's a screenshot of the activity detail showing the sync from SFDC:


Even though it said new value "Accenture Plc," it still says just "Accenture" in Marketo.

Could it be how we mapped the fields?

[Josh_Hill13]

Venus,

Do you have a Marketo flow that is attempting to Change Data Value? That's what it looks like there. There's a column to your right that will tell you if a Campaign is doing this or an SFDC action. In fact, if it is an SFDC change, it usually says Activity Type = Sync from SFDC (or something like that).

You need to go to that record in SFDC and check it's change history if you can. You should also ask your SFDC Admin about this as some systems may have data clean up routines that attempt to force the name to conform to a pre-set list of Account names.

[Anonymous]

Agree with everything Jeff said.

Do you have any smart campaigns changing Company names, Venus?

[Anonymous]

That is a weird on. Is this record a Contact? If so, then the Company name would be controlled by the Account and not at the Contact level. So when you try to change the Company Name in Marketo, it will not take in SFDC and these activities are SFDC changing the name back.

I'm assuiming the Campaign Name is blank for all of these?