Lead Counts and waiting for SFDC Campaigns to Sync

[Anonymous]

Has anyone had issues with the syncing between a Smart Campaign's leads and the number of leads in a SFDC campaign?

We use campaigns in SFDC to store contacts and send messaging.  Yesterday, we lost communicating to a whole segment because Marketo, after 6+ hours of waiting for the system to see the 4k contacts we added in the SFDC campaigtn, it never saw any of the @4k.

We had been told in the past not to worry about this, that upon launching the smart campaign, Marketo will do a fresh sync to read all the contacts in the SFDC campaign before it sends. Wrong. It does not do that.  I had to launch it when Marketo still saw none, but came in today to see none of the emails ever sent.  On top of that, only about 90% of the other 2 campaigns we ran actually fulfilled the full amount of contacts.

Marketo - we need a better way to manage this.  There is no forced syncing, and can't set it.  We're just at the mercy of whenever the system decides to sync.  5+ hours for Marketo to see 4k contacts seems a crazy amount of time to wait and just watch the lead counts slowly tick up. Even today, after over 19 hours, only about 80% of those 4k are seen. It seems unnecessarily slow and doesn't allow us to pivot. I wonder what other syncing mechanisms are this slow to operate.

[Josh_Hill13]

Ryan,

i agree that it should not take several hours for Marketo to know a lead is part of an SFDC Campaign. I suggest speaking to Support because there must be something not right with your sync that it is slowing down.

I assume you are using Member of SFDC Campaign in your smart list?

Have you considered using a different method, such as criteria based? You can also take that list from SFDC and import it as a static list with just email addresses. Then force a sync with Sync Lead to SFDC. That will ensure Marketo sees everything. Now you can just use the Static List.

Another method might be to update a hidden flag on the records you put into the SFDC Campaign. This flag change tells Marketo to resync the leads immediately because the value changed. Marketo may not be updating the records because the records' fields haven't changed and that is the way Marketo decides to sync updated records. Perhaps it is not understanding SFDC Campaign as an update?

In general, it is good to get away from using SFDC Campaigns as lists because Campaigns can be used for attribution and your list use could conflict with this, giving false readings.