Connecting Lead data to Account data with an existing lookup from Lead to Account

[Delwin_Ng]

Hi folks,

Our Salesforce team has built something really cool that connects Lead records to Account records. That way we can do things like figure out if a Lead is from a Customer account or a Target account. I can't seem to get Marketo to see that same data though. Let me explain what they've built.

On Leads there is a lookup to an Account. This is automatically populated by looking at the domain name of the email address and seeing if there is an account with contacts that have email addresses with the same domain name. If there are no matching accounts it just stays empty. So on the Salesforce side they can already see that this lead is probably a part of this existing account and convert it or do whatever they want on the sales side. On the marketing side though I want to make sure that the lead is put into the right kind of marketing (prospect vs. customer) but I don't have access to the data on the account, even if the lookup is populated. I know that if the lookup were to a custom salesforce object I'd be able to pull it in but because it is an Account I can't see a way of doing that. Any thoughts out there?

[Josh_Hill13]

Formulas and lookups don't auto populate in Marketo until you force a sync. There's no sysmodtimestamp on them.

[Delwin_Ng]

I'm not sure I understand your reply Josh. Data from accounts sync in Marketo. Data from leads sync in Marketo. It just happens that this field on the leads is a lookup to an account. I just can't figure out a way to access this data from a Salesforce Objects Sync point of view.

[Amy_Goldfine]

I have had this same problem with lookup fields. It's very frustrating. It has less to do with your Leads doing a lookup to Accounts and more with the fact that they're a Lookup field.

When a regular field is populated or updated in SFDC, it updates a field called sysmodtimestamp. The change in sysmodtimestamp is what tells SFDC to sync to Marketo. The initial population of Lookup and Formula fields does not update sysmodtimestamp so it won't sync this down to Marketo. You need to have your SFDC Admin force a sync between these fields and Marketo. I believe that after this, value changes in those fields will change in Marketo.

[Delwin_Ng]

Thanks Amy for the sysmodtimestamp explanation. I understand the frustration of populating this data and keeping it up up to date in the first place, but I can't even get this to sync at all. I can't run a list of leads connected to an account through my custom lookup field and see if the Status on the Account = Customer.

[Amit_Jain]

If I understand it correctly, you are trying to create a smart list in marketo with Company filters and in the samrt list result, you want to see SFDC contact as well as SFDC leads associated with those accounts, right?

No, this is not going to work like this in Marketo. Marketo's Company object is only linked with SFDC contacts. If you wants to pull the list with the SFDC lead which belong to your customer accounts, you have to ask your SFDC admin to create another field formula type on the lead to populate the account type and sync that field with Marketo. Try this and let me know if this works.

Regards,
Amit

[Delwin_Ng]

Hi Amit. I know it won't work the standard way but because I've built a lookup from leads to accounts I thought there may be a way to set it up so that I could have a "Has Account" filter on it just like you can create an "Has Custom Object A" filter when you create a lookup from leads to a custom object. I understand the solution that you are proposing but there are a lot of values and so I don't know if the team that manages Salesforce will go for it if I ask for that path.