Keep Marketo from updating Contacts?

[Anonymous]

My company does not use the Contact object in SFDC as a lead, so we're running into problems when someone who's already a Contact fills out a web form and gets synced from Marketo to SFDC - there's no place for their comments in a Contact, and I'm not allowed to change ownership of Contacts, and the owners so far just get confused if they get an alert email about one of their contacts.

I've thought of a few possible options for dealing with this, but convincing anyone else to change how they do things is a non-started, so I need options that I can enact as our Marketo admin.

If I changed the Marketo credentials so that it no longer has permissions to edit Contacts, would it start creating new lead records instead of syncing to the Contact? (this would work well for us, since duplicates are part of our process.)

What about if I changed the credentials so it can't see Contacts at all?

Thanks,

Anthea

[Anonymous]

Do you use sales insight?
If you use sales insight it will stop working if you remove access to the contact object.

[Anonymous]

No, we don't currently use Sales Insight.
Thanks for the info, though!

[Anonymous]

If there are contact fields for which you never want Marketo to push updates to SFDC then the best thing to do is to edit the Marketo sync user's profile and set the field level security for these fields to read only.

Think twice about it though, it may prevent good and more accurate information from reaching your sales team.

[Anonymous]

The effect I'd like to achieve is that Marketo syncs over a new Lead even if there is already a Contact with that email address...

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

This is getting complicated.

You would need to look into sharing rules in SFDC, hiding all contacts from the Marketo sync user so that no contacts will be pulled into Marketo.

Then when these people fill out a form they will be created as a new lead in marketo and the eventually sync to SFDC as a new lead and that lead can continue to be updated.

There is no easy way for one record in Marketo to become a brand new record in SFDC everytime it is created, it's possible but would require a lot of work, mainly on the SFDC side with triggers etc.

[Anonymous]

Thank you! I'll have to see what our Salesforce admin thinks, and see if we want to move forward.