Marketo as Gatekeeper to Salesforce

[Anonymous]

Hi Community

We are relatively new to Marketo (less than a year) and wanted to see if we could use Marketo as a "gatekeeper" to Salesforce.  What I mean by that is we are right now going through a process to get Salesforce as clean as possible.  We only want to sync over leads that show an interest in our service.  All the litterature I am reading is referencing syncing Saleforce with Marketo, can it work the other way.  Meaning we would upload lists to Marketo but those names would not automatically sync over unless they met a certain threshold.  I would love some direction here.

Thank you,
Mary
 

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

Mary,

The systems have a bi-directional sync, so be careful in thinking that it is just SFDC>Marketo. Most firms do what you want to do: funnel leads through Markto, dedupe them, and then sync certain leads to SFDC. Uploading lists to marketo is the preferred approach because Marketo only dedupes when the lead comes directly into Marketo.

Leads created in SFDC are not deduped in Marketo.

You can only move leads explicitly to SFDC anyway. Most firms do this at the MQL stage.

I personally disagree with this approach because it causes reporting and deduping issues.

[Anonymous]

Agree with your comment above Josh. We are currently looking into taking our systems off of the traditional Marketo sync to SFDC (after MQL) approach and to start having both systems synced in real-time. Have you seen any blogs or whitepapers on how to approach this task? Looking for best practices on this. Here are some of my initial concerns, I am sure there are many more the further we explore this:

- How to keep pre MQL leads from sales views (Queues? Statuses?)

- How to handle MQLs?

- Effect of adding large amounts of leads to SFDC (system lag while performing large sync MKTO>SFDC)

- Any negative effects to having a large amount of "junk" data in SFDC

- Will we need to rework rev model?

- What about the timing of it all? What needs to happen and in what order before we start syncing?