Marketing Suspended Cause not accessible in flow

[Roxann_McGlump1]

Hi Geoff,

The "Marketing Suspended Cause" is only populated with a reason for Marketing Suspended if Marketo suspends a lead through an automatic process. This almost never happens which is why this field is almost always empty. The example I was given was this:

• A Sales Insight plugin user has sent a sales email to a new email address (an address not currently in the Lead Database). They will see the following message:

"Lead created by Sales Insight with unknown name"

[Jamie-Carey]

Roxann, this may be how Marketo systematically decides to use this field, but it certainly doesn't make sense in the UI to marketers. Can you open a bug report or push this back to engineering to request that it be changed? If marketers are the ones using the "Marketing Suspended" field, then marketers should be the ones using the "marketing suspended cause" field OR at the very least given access to use it instead of only letting the system use it.

[Elizabeth_Bonin]

this just happened to 100 of our leads! is this truly a bug?

[Jamie-Carey]

Essentially the answer is this is by design according to Marketo.

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Geoffrey Krajeski - Production​

Here’s all the info we’ve gotten from our Product team about this field and how it’s managed:

"The purpose is to provide additional details about why a lead may have been marked by Marketo as “marketing suspended”. This does happen from time-to-time, for example in the following situation:

• A Sales Insight plugin user has sent a sales email to a new email address (an address not currently in the Lead Database). They will see the following message:

I can’t find other examples of when the system sets this field, but this is why it exists and one example of how it can get populated. The customer can also create a Smart List in their subscription with “marketing suspended = true” to browse through leads that have been marked this way and understand more about why it is happening in their particular instance. If it is blank, it almost always means a Smart Campaign changed the field through a Change Data Value flow step (maybe by a lead disqualification campaign)."

Jamie Carey​​ This is the expected behavior for how the field operates, so it wouldn't be considered a bug at all. Best way to get the behavior changed would be through submitting an idea in the Ideas section of the Community here. Of course, if you'd like to make the field do specific things depending on specific circumstances, you could do what Josh Hill had suggested and create a new custom field. Then you can use smart campaigns to populate the field however you want for whatever the circumstances.

-Mike

[Jamie-Carey]

Hey Mike, thanks for answering. I do understand that it's expected behavior from how it was designed, but it's not expected behavior from how the UI presents the Marketing Suspended field (since that is not system managed.) It's confusing and adding another custom field that is for the same purpose and would be named similarly named creates system clutter and is a workaround. I'll open an Idea, I'm just surprised to see this being controlled by the system for an actual edge case instead of opening it up to the user.

[Mike_Reynolds2]

I agree. There's always going to be rough edges that need to be filed down. This is one of them. Best I can really offer is a work around (the custom field) and a means to get the behavior changed (submitting an idea) for the future.

[Jamie-Carey]

I made the idea here for anyone who wants to add their support! ​

[Anonymous]

I encountered this today.

Have you considered creating an Interesting Moment > Milestone 

and fleshing out the Description with details eg "Marketing Suspended due to Inactivity (Six Months)" ?

[Jamie-Carey]

We wouldn't want to necessarily sync that information to SFDC especially since we try not to put operational issues into Interesting moments since we tokenize them into MQL alerts.