Ideas on how to not update all fields from Marketo to SF

[Jaime_Servaes]

So I have an issue.  Our clients and prospect base own/work for multiple dealerships. So in SF they might be associated to dealership 1 but they complete a form or we upload a list and that says they are with dealership 2.  So right now Marketo updates with the new dealership data which in-return updates SF.  But that can actually cause alot of confusion in the company if a salesperson is already working with this contact and now their dealership name has changed.

I actually just had this happen when I imported a list, it updated the person's name (First and Last) to a more generic name (John Doe to Financial House) which caused a lot of confusion with a division who had John Doe coming to a class but John Doe no longer existed.

So I'm trying to come up with ideas on how we can still capture more updated information from form submissions, but if it's a list import not update the data into SF, or maybe even not update the data in Marketo.  Any ideas on the best solutions for something like this?

My SF admin wants me to load all list imports into SF first as leads, and then pull those contacts into my Marketo list. But I don't see how that will work either, b/c if the person already exists in SF and Marketo, once they are entered as another lead in SF they will still be matched in Marketo by email address, correct?  If so, then won't Marketo update that information?

I'm open to suggestions or idea if anyone else had ran into this, how you fixed it.

[Grégoire_Miche2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Jaime,

A few comments/ideas:

• You can block updates on fields in the admin -> field management, then choose the field and in the field menu, select "block field update". There you can block certains sources, such as form fillouts or imports. Block updates will prevent an existing value to be overridden but will not prevent an empty field to be filled out
• Importing contacts as leads in SFDC if the contact already exists is a bad idea: it will create duplicates that you will have to cleanse, lest lots of issues araise in your Marketo instance. And my experience is that these duplicates are never merged and cleansed

-Greg

[Jaime_Servaes]

Greg,

I believe the answer is your option one. I didn't know I could block updates by certain sources, so I think that should resolve my issue.  Thank you so much. As I was very against loading these people as leads into SF knowing they were probably going to be duplicates. And yes, we never seem to get that data cleaned and merged.