How did renaming a picklist in SFDC trigger Marketo Smart Campaign?

[Conor_McCormick]

Hello All,

Today our org updated a few picklist values in SFDC - the values were simply renamed for clarity- not removed, and the API Name was unchanged. Somehow this seems to have triggered one of our Marketo Email campaigns that activates when a new person from a particular lead source is created, and sent emails to the leads that were affected by the renaming - some going back three years. Looking at the Marketo records, the platform saw them as "New Leads", and tagged their created date as today in Marketo, despite the SFDC Create Date in Marketo holding it's original value.

I've examined all the other active triggers, segments, and batch programs in Marketo - none of them have a flow step to reset or resync leads to SFDC, nor do they have steps/triggers/filters that rely on the changed value names. Because almost 95% of the leads in question were affected by the picklist value being renamed, I'm assuming it is due to that, though there are outliers that do not fit. If it is due to the value being renamed, why would Marketo consider that a new lead? Was it not properly synced in the first place?

Thoughts on what could have happened?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Conor,

When you rename picklist values in SFDC, it does change the stored values of the fields, which in turn updates all the records that use the updated values.

I would bet that your smart campaign has a "data value changes" filter that fired on these changes.

Can you provide some screenshots of some of the activity log of 1 or 2 impacted leads, as well as the incriminated smart campaign smart list ?

-Greg

[Josh_Hill13]

I agree a bit more detail is needed. I wonder if some of the records were previously deleted and synced back due to the sudden change in DVC.

Most likely a Lead is Created in SFDC or a DVC trigger.