Integrate existing Marketo environment with new Salesforce

[Anonymous]

Hello Community,

I am having a situation where we need some input on best practices when integrating a Marketo environment that has been running for a few years, with a new Salesforce org. I am from the Salesforce side, with no experience of Marketo.

Existing data such as leads and contacts will be imported into Salesforce, and most of them are already in Marketo. Would you recommend to set up the integration before or after loading all data into Salesforce? Is there anything else we need to consider prior to setting up this integration and the initial sync?

Thanks
Linus

[Anonymous]

Hi Linus, interesting use case here.  You mention leads and contacts; are these coming from a previous SFDC instance, and/or another CRM entirely?

One thing to keep in mind is how Marketo resolves duplicate records.  Basically, its designed to respect Salesforce's database; this means records that exist in both Marketo and Salesforce, before the sync, will not necessarily deduplicate when you sync.

Given this, I'd recommend integrating before loading the data, and then using Marketo to pass the data to Salesforce, as much as you can.

Interested to hear if others have more insights to offer.  For example, managing the contact data can get complicated as Marketo resolves SFDC lead and contact objects into one group.