Integrating with SFDC, help!!

[Brianne_Foster1]

Hello Marketing Nation!

We are preparing to integrate our Marketo instance with SFDC this year, and we're considering using Marketo Professional Services to help with the design and implementation. I would love to hear how others who have integrated with their CRM executed the project. Did you use Marketo Professional Services, an implementation partner, or your internal IT team? What was your experience like?

Also, what do you know now that you wish would have known going into the project? Is there anything you would have done differently?

We did integrate SFDC UAT environment with our Marketo sandbox last year, but our Marketo sandbox only contained meta-data, and we synced every. single. field. between the two systems. Needless to say we've since learned a few lessons since then, but those are the two major watch-outs we have thus far.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Brianne

[Ronen-Was-SRpro]

Hi Brianne,

I will PM you.

[Jason_Keller3]

Hi Brianne,

I had to do a reintegration a few years ago and a couple of things stood out to me about the process (will bullet below). We did contract with a Marketo ProServ team; they were helpful but it was still a heavy lift on our end.

Issues to think about (from my experience; may or may not be applicable to your integration):

• Be sure to think about what active trigger and trigger criteria you have in Smart Campaigns in Marketo (if it is "added to campaign" and for whatever reason campaigns are mapped between SFDC and Marketo but Marketo doesn't have SFDC members accounted for, it may trigger the smart campaigns)
• Be very disciplined with your field mapping - this was a key area I spent a lot of time. You want to make sure all fields (and field types) are mapped correctly across SFDC objects and Marketo person records
• Aligning your campaign types and member statuses in Marketo/Salesforce is a critical setup component you want to think through. If member statuses aren't aligned from Marketo Programs to SFDC Campaigns, then it could cause issues with syncing
• One of the more complex configurations was how to set up the revenue modeler in Marketo and how it mapped to SFDC. These, along with whichever Lifecycle Stages you have set up, are important to think about, especially how they map to SFDC given that Leads/Contacts may be set up differently in your SFDC environment. A good example here is how "Lead Status" is a standard field on Leads is not for Contacts
• As part of the Lifecycle Stage stuff, thinking through how you want to manage lead scoring (in either Marketo/SFDC) is also worth a closer look. I actually use a SFDC formula field that sums Behavior and Demographic scores for my lead scoring (many different articles and viewpoints on this one)
• Last thing I would mention is how you leverage automation in both platforms - I use a combination of operational smart campaigns in Marketo and marketing-specific process in Process Builder in SFDC for our automation setup; it will vary for you, but there will probably be opportunities for you to leverage process builder for some automation that may be more challenging in Marketo

Hope those thoughts help!

Jason

[Brianne_Foster1]

Thank you, Jason! Regarding your third bullet point on campaign types and members statuses, did you change the SFDC out-of-the-box campaign member statuses (Sent and Responded) to align with your Marketo program member statuses (Member, Engaged) or vice versa? I understand that they must match in order to sync a program directly with a campaign. Our company just recently implemented Leads and Campaigns in SFDC, so our Campaign Member statuses are still simple at this point, but we have added some additional campaign member statuses that align with our program member statuses in prep for the integration. Thanks for the advice!

[Jason_Keller3]

Glad that was helpful. For campaign statuses, I did a couple of things in Marketo:

• To make sure any campaign members in SFDC, with native SFDC campaign statuses (i.e. "responded") would sync to newly synced Marketo programs, I made sure that all program channels in Marketo had Sent and Responded as statuses (and usually I would keep these hidden in Marketo > Admin > Tags > Program Tags > Statuses). This was more of a safeguard then a necessity
• Then, in the same spot in Marketo, would usually use "Member" and "Converted" as statuses for most channels. For webinars I would add "Registered", "Attended" and "No Show" and for event-related channels would usually use "Registered", "Visited Booth", "No Show" and "Attended" (FYI I like to keep demo requests/trial request as a separate program channel, and in those use "Demo Requested" or some similar status)
• The nice thing is that if the campaign in SFDC is created from a Marketo program that has been set with these statuses, then you don't need to do anything further on the SFDC side; those campaigns in SFDC would add these new statuses as members status updates push from Marketo (member statuses in SFDC are unique to each individual campaign. The only scenario where syncing is a challenge is existing SFDC campaigns that are retroactively synced to Marketo where Marketo statuses don't align to the statuses set in SFDC.

Hope that further clarifies; happy to answer any follow ups, and good luck!

[Matthew_Gomez1]

Good insights from other commenters. Just FYI I have used Pro Services from Marketo multiple times at different organizations and have always had a fantastic experience. They are knowledgeable, supportive, innovative and easy to work with. Highly recommended.

Going into project, make sure you leave time for your data to sync from Salesforce to Marketo. We had a particularly large (in the millions) database that took several days for initial sync. Make sure you properly set up SPF/DKIM authentication and whitelisting in advance, because the back and forth with your IT team can take a while on those requests and can easily delay your planned launch. Pay particular attention to your data model and how it will play with Marketo; a solution architect should be able to analyze and recommend native or custom objects sync; this will affect how your campaigns are designed forever, so it is a good idea to talk it through to avoid any unpleasant surprises.

Pro services can help with these and many more questions and help keep you on track. Go for it!

Matt

[Amber_Hobson]

The other item that I would add as a thinking it through is if you are using SFDC Leads & Contacts, make sure the fields are tied together in that system where they need to be before syncing it to Marketo. We had to go back and do a lot of clean up because our Lead field and Contact field were showing as 2 different fields in Marketo and causing issues on our filtering. You may not want them all synced together, but you'll want to think that through.

[Brianne_Foster1]

Great point, Amber. When we did the test sync, the Lead and Contact fields were syncing just as you described, so we had multiple First Name, Last Name, Email, etc fields for the different objects. We definitely want to avoid that next time!

[Veronica_Holme4]

This is easily solved with jason's point 2 above - ensure that your Lead/Contact field mapping for lead conversion is correct before syncing Marketo.

[Carrie_Chandle1]

Great insights above. We worked with Marketo, but it was mainly an IT lift for us working with our SFDC admins. Something to think about if you haven't already is the read/write permissions now and in the future. We have a conservative viewpoint on field read/writing between the systems since our CRM is used across multiple business units, not just Sales. Make sure to document what Marketo will/won't have access to, and agree with your IT team how new fields will be approached between the two systems.

We found out that we were actually too conservative with our initial field list and field rules, which has caused us to need to go back and allow Marketo new permission to view some account-level fields that it couldn't view previously - but sharing an existing field requires a forced update to all accounts for the data values to pass over to Marketo, which is a mild headache for everyone