Marketo & MS Dynamics CRM 2011 - sync restriction

[Anonymous]

Hello,
 
Is there anyone who has experience with integrating Marketo with MS Dynamics 2011? We're trying to synchronise them two but we're facing issue with restricting certain leads going from CRM to Marketo. We don’t want all our Dynamics CRM leads to get synced with Marketo, and it seems there is no option to restrict them entering. We even tried by creating new CRM User that has security permissions set to view (read) only those leads that are shared with this user. Idea behind was that this CRM user can read only those leads which are shared with it and which should be synced with Marketo. But unfortunately, this security role didn't work out.
Is there anyone that managed to restrict leads going to Marketo from MS Dynamics?
 
Market application (plugin) doesn’t seem to be very flexible. The best solution that we can think of would be to add custom field on the lead entity in CRM called “Sync to Marketo” that is bool type (default set to No), then check within the plugin should the lead be synced to Marketo or no.
 
Thank you.

[Anonymous]

Hi Sara!

We had a similar issue. You are on the right track; the crux of all the solutions we found were in limiting the permissions of your "Sync User" so it can only interact with the records you want on Marketo. I am surprised that the sharing option didn't work out. Was the problem with the logics of sharing that many records (stupid POA table) or did the user fail to sync the records? Just to clarify, did the user have read/write permissions or read only and did you modify the Marketo Sync User security role or create a new one?

I don't know the details of your business requirements, but our case was admittedly pretty simple. We have a lot of records going back to 2001 that we wanted to keep in CRM, but did not want on (or near) our active marketing lists. We tried a few things, but we eventually created a new business unit, "Legacy Records," with a single user ,"Legacy User". We limited all the permissions on the Marketo Sync User role so it could only see records on its own BU and assigned all our old records to the Legacy User. Since our sync user was on our main BU, poof, all the old records were invisible to it.

Admittedly, this doesn't work if you have multiple business units or if ownership matters on the records you're trying to hide. One option could be to limit the sync user to only records it owns then create set of teams for each of your users with the sync user. If the user wants the lead in Marketo they choose the "User Name - Sync to Marketo" team as the owner otherwise they pick themselves. Probably not practical, but possible.

I do like the idea of creating a "Sync to Marketo" field, but modifying the plugin was not an option we were able to explore. Please let me know how that works out if you pursue it.

Finally, if its not a matter of space in Marketo but just "Leads we market to" vs. "Leads we don't market to", you can create the "Sync to Marketo" field as you mensioned and set up an operational program in Marketo to set all leads with "Sync to  Marketo" = "No" as "Marketing Suspended" = "Yes" and add them to a "Do Not Use" or "Global Exclusion" segment. Then just train your marketer to tack a condition that the records are not in the "Do Not Use" segment to all of their smart lists.

I hope this was at least somewhat helpful. Let us know how it goes!
 

Zach