Marketo Migration from Pardot - Order of Operation Best Practices

[Brian_Hansford2]

Hey folks -

For anyone who has successfully migrated from Pardot to Marketo - what were the order of operations steps you followed, or would recommend following?  We have a few caveats where Pardot is still running but we need to start the Marketo "build" for the cutover to Marketo. There are some issues like creating new fields in Salesforce, or doing it 'wrong' and creating the desired new fields in Marketo first, while Pardot is still running.  Ideally we would create the fields in SFDC first and have them auto-created when we integrate with Marketo.  But if we create new fields in SFDC and not Marketo, we can't start building programs for the cutover date... (the fact that it's Pardot really should NOT be an issue. Too many people seem hung up on "I don't know how Pardot works".  The order of operation is the big question.)

Lots of chicken and egg. 

Marketo support/services seems stumped by this, which is greatly disturbing since competitive migrations happen all the time. 

Curious what you learned or found to be best practice.

Thanks!!

-Brian

[Josh_Hill13]

I'm not totally following you.

It sounds like you need to flesh out an Implementation Plan. There are a lot of threads on this and you would have to consider several questions:

• What new fields do you need?
  • Yes they should be created in SFDC first, always.
  • They would need to be visible to the Marketo User for Marketo to map them.
• Will pardot need to see those new fields? does it matter?
• Will pardot or Marketo be able to have a field sync collision during the overlap period?
  • Does it matter?

So think through this more and you should be fine. Marketo Support typically won't walk through this with you because it's a Marketo Consulting area that has a fee.

[Keith_Nyberg2]

Hey Brian,

We migrated from Pardot to Marketo back in Aug of 2014, so it's been a while but i'd love to provide any assistance that I can assuming my memory doesn't fail me...TBD! Some initial thoughts that I have are listed below (not sure how feasible all of this is w/ SFDCbut assume they should be possible, as always I'd recommend involving whatever team manages your other existing integrations to get their take on best practices).

• I would recommend asking for a cloned sandbox of your SFDC instance. From there, make your desired field changes in the sand box and integrate the sandbox to Marketo to have the fields you desire created (don't recommend syncing lead/contact data yet, but just integrating the systems).
• From there, you can build out all of your Marketo flows and do testing between the systems to ensure that everything is behaving as expected (without real data updates happening in the progress). This allows you to keep using Pardot until you are really confident with how data will move between the systems and through your smart campaigns.
• After that, should just swap out the sandbox credentials with your production instance credentials and sync your record information (not exactly sure how to action this from SFDC but sure other users can advise). I would just avoid importing your records into Marketo as that could cause more headaches than benefits, but really depends on the number of records in your instance (may take a while).

Other considerations in this process include migrating your assets into Marketo (landing pages, forms, form flows, data management campaigns), all of which should be tested before integrating your production instance.

Lastly, the largest issue you will run into is migrating your legacy program information. This was such a pain for us that we just decided to abandon ship and walk away from historical event attendance, etc. Not sure if I cen recommend anything here other than prepare to give yourself lots of time correcting this if needed (can even happen post migration)

If you have any other specific questions, please let me know, but kinda hard to remember other issues we ran into as it's been nearly 4 years since we cut over ourselves. I also found this migration checklist that had some useful points.

Sincerely,

Keith Nyberg

[Brian_Hansford2]

Thanks Keith!  Yes, the sandbox is a component we're looking at using. Thank you for confirming its value! 

We're in good shape with our plan for migrating the assets.  A critical stumbling block was the chicken and egg with the field changes or adds.  I have just heard from some very skilled folks that have created fields in Marketo first and had Support help with the reverse process of then creating the fields in SFDC.  (They had good reasons to do this)

Fortunately, we're in good shape with the legacy program data too.  I completely agree it's a HUGE pain.  We have narrowed what we're importing for the same pain you described. Good news: We will still have the SFDC campaign object data.  All of the other micro activity data is being skipped.

[Keith_Nyberg2]

Hey Brian,

I'm sure other users would love it if you shared your progress along the journey. Telling us what worked well or what you would re-do as your migration occurs. These events happen for businesses, but not as common for users to have experience with multiple migrations unless its something they specialize in or are consultants.

Good luck! And looking forward to hearing your progress.

Keith Nyberg

[Lisa_Heay2]

Hi Keith - I work with Brian and had a couple additional questions you might be able to answer - sub-bullets to your points below.....

• I would recommend asking for a cloned sandbox of your SFDC instance. From there, make your desired field changes in the sand box and integrate the sandbox to Marketo to have the fields you desire created (don't recommend syncing lead/contact data yet, but just integrating the systems).
  • The fields we need already exist in SFDC - we just need to sync them down to the new Marketo instance.  Is it possible to do all of the SFDC/Marketo integration set up (except the actual syncing of the leads) prior to the cutover?
• After that, should just swap out the sandbox credentials with your production instance credentials and sync your record information (not exactly sure how to action this from SFDC but sure other users can advise). I would just avoid importing your records into Marketo as that could cause more headaches than benefits, but really depends on the number of records in your instance (may take a while).
  • I read somewhere that you can't integrate a Marketo instance to a SFDC sandbox, and then re-integrate it with the live SFDC instance without starting over with Marketo (though admittedly I don't know what was meant by "starting over".)  Is it possible to connect Marketo to the SFDC sandbox and then switch to the SFDC production instance?

Thanks for your help!  It's great to hear from someone who has been through this process in the past.  We'll be sure to share our experience when it's all said and done.

Lisa