Managing "company name" updates to CRM contact records

[Dan_Stevens_]

As you know, CRM accounts are associated with CRM contacts.  When those contacts sync over to Marketo as new records, all of the information on the "Company Info" tab is read-only.  However, when doing some testing (using an online form submit) - and specifically entering a different company name - the record in Marketo did indeed reflect the new company name (all other information/data stayed intact).  But, as expected, the updated company name did not sync over to CRM (since Marketo cannot write to the account entity). 

But now we have a record that has a different company name in Marketo from what's stored in CRM.  This isn't unrealistic.  A known user could submit a form and enter bogus data; or enter a name that differs slightly from the formal company name contained in CRM. 

I'm curious as to how some of you deal with this.  Do you use custom proxy fields to store these values (when a record is tied to an account record)?

[Josh_Hill13]

Proxy fields and field blocking should work.

[Brian_Law_MKTO]

Hi Dan, since Account fields are read only, the value in Marketo will eventually be overwritten during the next sync.

For CRM Contacts in Marketo you cannot manually edit Account fields in Marketo’s Lead Detail screen, while you can use a Flow Action to change an Account field value. The change will be temporary until the Account is updated. The value changed will revert to the CRM Account value the next time any update is made to the record and data is synced between the two systems. Cheers!

[Dave_Cunningham]

That is good to know, Brian. That's what I have seen in my testing, but I was never able to get a "confirmation" on this behavior from Marketo... until now .

I am running into an issue related to our field mapping for Company. The way it was set up when we synced Dynamics/Marketo is shown in the below screen grab. The problem for us is that we don't work with the lead object in Dynamics and we have been told that Marketo is not able to map the field to both an Account and Contact object.

This is causing an issue when a Dynamics contact object has its company changed. The change syncs down to Marketo in the places in the screen grab below, but an activity is not listed in the associated lead's Activity Log and smart campaigns are not able to pick up on this as a trigger. This seems strange to me and I am wondering if it is a product "bug" or if I am just missing something or don't have the mapping correct.

Has anyone dealt with this same issue?

[Dave_Cunningham]

[Brian_Law_MKTO]

Hi Dave, are you saying you have two different company name fields on your contact entity? The company field which is related to the account entity and another custom field which is only on the contact entity?

[Dave_Cunningham]

Hi Brian. Hope you are doing well.

We are going to have two company name fields on the contact record in DCRM. We've found that changes to the native Company Name field in DCRM don't get tracked as an activity in Marketo since the field is a lookup to the account object in DCRM. This causes problems when trying to use the Company field in Marketo trigger campaigns since there is no activity logged for them to pick up. What we are going to do is create a custom "Marketo - Company" field (hidden to end users) on the DCRM contact record and then have a workflow to keep this in sync with the native Company Name field. Then we will use this custom field in Marketo trigger campaigns.

Does this make sense to you based on your experience with DCRM/Marketo? I was surprised that Marketo didn't log the Company Name changes made in DCRM.

[Brian_Law_MKTO]

Hi Dave, Marketo should be able to pull in the change to the lookup field if you can enable your CRM to update the system last updated date when a change occurs. Marketo uses the system last updated date to determine if a sync should occur with the record, at least that is how it works when integrated with SFDC. The intergration might be different with Dynamics and you may have to check with Marketo support. Thanks!

[Sean_Tierney2]

Dan Stevens​ did you end up using proxy fields and field blocking updates...or find a better way to mitigate this problem? Finding ourselves in the same boat now.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Sean, we havent had a chance to do any further with this yet.