Marketo and Salesforce Campaign Sync Best Practices

[Anonymous]

A new user here. Curious if any one can share their thoughts, experience and best practices on syncing Marketo and Salesforce Campaigns. We have our Marketo instance and SF instance synced but we have not yet allowed for the syncing of campaigns. One of my concerns is the amount of storage that may be consumed in SF. Would love to hear from anyone in the community on this

[Josh_Hill13]

• I would not worry about storage so much unless you are really pressed and SFDC is calling you about data storage. The only time this could be a concern is if you are running LOTS of campaigns a week with hundreds of thousands of leads. The real challenge is # of API calls.
• If you sync every program to an SFDC Campaign, you will bypass the regular lifecycle and ALL leads will end up in Marketo.
• If you want, you can not sync the PRogram, but rather use the Add to SFDC Campaign flow actions. I'm not a big fan of this one, but it's up to you.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Josh. You gave me a few things to think about.

[Anonymous]

Julia,

We have been using Marketo and Salesforce for almost a year now.  All my campaigns sync in Salesforce, I could not image not.  What industry do you work? I have not found capacity to be an issue at all.

[Anonymous]

Karen,

Thank you for the reply. We are an IT company for the transportation and agriculture industries. Good to hear you find that capacity is not an issue.

[Anonymous]

Does your company follow a lead lifecycle or lead waterfall model?

Some thing like,

In the above example, all the leads that do not meet a certain 'lead score' threshold stay in Marketing (i.e. Marketo). Only the leads that meet that threashold are sent over to sales (SFDC).

If you sync all the Marketo campaigns by default, 'all' the leads in all the campaigns will be sent to SFDC. In many b2b scenarios sales people do not want to get bombarded with too many unqualified leads.

But in some business models, for some companies this is not an issue. Sales people want each and every lead whether qualified or not.

Hope this helps

Rajesh

[Anonymous]

Hi Rajesh,

Right now, we follow more of a waterfall model. I'm leaning towards syncing campaigns moving forward so sales can see what is going on with their leads and help prevent duplicates from being created.

Julia

[Casey_Grimes]

Hi Julia,

In terms of syncing campaigns, the available space used by Salesforce is relatively small; where things get chaotic space-wise is having Marketo write Activities to Salesforce. With that being said, depending on the relative size of your SFDC/Marketo databases and any SLAs that you have in place, you may want to give some thought to sync timing and what should be prioritized in terms of data moving back and forth. For instance, I recently dealt with a client's sale team that had a crazy fast turnaround time—to the point where a Marketo program execution took longer than the time for them to qualify a lead! As such, secondary functions like Tasks had to be throttled by a few minutes to make sure both systems ran in harmony.

Once campaign data comes in, other teams acting on that data is the next natural step and something to plan for.