Support is working on this as well, but I thought I would throw this out to the community to see if anyone else experienced this, and what can be done. We are using the field "company" for form fill outs in Marketo. This maps to our CRM system to the lead & account object (our contact object has a customized field on it). When someone fills out a form, or if I do a data value change to that field, over 224,000 leads in our system has their value changed as well. I have investigated and it seems that it is only affecting contacts in our SFDC database that have the same Account name associated with it. We did not do a mass list import of these contacts into Marketo, outside of our initial sync with SFDC. Can anyone shed light on what is happening, and what we can do? My last resort would be to hide that field, and then to add in a Marketo only field to remedy. The downside is that field would not be available to us on the event check in app. Thanks!
I am assuming that 224k records do not match the same Company Name here?
This sounds like a weird mapping error or perhaps a hidden workflow in Marketo or SFDC.
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.
To add to Mike's comment, the reason this does not also make changes in SFDC is because Marketo is not able to edit Account fields.
You're correct about the association between leads that all have the same Account in SFDC being affected, but they only get changed in Marketo.
John