Marketo & Salesforce - Your Assistance and Opinion Needed!

[Victoria_Taylo2]

My company's senior management team is hesitant about syncing Marketo and Salesforce. We push contact data from Salesforce into some of our client-facing products. There is concern that if a known lead fills out a form and spells their name wrong it will flow from Marketo to Salesforce to our products, thus being visible for a client. We've been talking with a Salesforce consultant about writing a program to help us monitor the changes but there is still hesitation (and a steep price tag).

One recommendation has been to sync only the users email address and activity (but not their name, title, company - we'd update that manually). It doesn’t seem like the best idea to me (and is it even possible to only sync back the email address and not additional information)? This solution makes marketing hesitant.

Has anyone overcome push back when it came to syncing Salesforce and Marketo? How did you overcome it? We've been going back and forth for 5 months with no end or good solution in sight.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Have you thought about using different record types for your leads/contacts. We use various record types at my company and are customizing SF rules around these records to be able to do different activities or have certain fields of data.

If you're looking to keep your marketing database separate from your client facing data, you can hide Marketo user in SF from viewing/editing say your "client facing record type." With this setup, Marketo will only write to the leads/contacts it has visibility too which could be your "marketing record type."

[Anonymous]

Hi Victoria,

We have big data integrity concerns also, so what we did was make all but a few necessary fields one-directional instead of bi-directional. That way, no matter what info is changed in Marketo, the Salesforce value will stay the same. I'm unsure if you're able to do this with a native integration, though, because ours is completely custom, but it may be worth a shot.

[Steven_Vanderbe]

Hi Victoria,

Two options:

1.  On customer facing Marketo forms you can choose to block the fields from updates inside of Field Management.  Blocking first and last name from updates on form fillouts would, for example, prevent a lead's typos in their first and last names from being saved to Marketo (and in turn prevent a typo from reaching SFDC).  New values would still be able to populate those fields, just not updates/changes.

2.  Take away write access on the fields in question for the Marketo sync user.  If the Marketo sync user does not have write permissions to a field then Marketo would not be able to update it.

Option 1 is probably preferable so that new leads could still be synced to SFDC with all values without running into write permission failures.  Option 2 is also not a supported method (we support the permission configurations detailed in our documentation).

[Victoria_Taylo2]

Steven,

Thank you so much for your response. If I understand, if we block name, company, and title if it is a new lead being sync'd all of the information will flow? That was a concern of mine.

Do you know if there is  a best practice for tracking changes to blocked fields?

Victoria

[Steven_Vanderbe]

Hi Victoria,

Blocking fields from updates will only block changes made to already existing values.  This still allows leads to submit values to the field the first time.  So yes, if you were to block Name, Company,and Title new leads would still be able to fill out a form and that info would be saved so it can be sent to SFDC for the first time.  On subsequent form fillouts the lead would not be able to overwrite what was already in that field.  You can also choose to only block field updates for form fillouts so that sales team still has the ability to correct typos in SFDC and have that corrected info flow down into Marketo.

There's not really any best practices for tracking changes to blocked fields since blocked fields can't be changed   If there is a field you are concerned about you could always set up a trigger campaign to send an alert to someone whenever a value on the field is changed by something.

[Victoria_Taylo2]

Thank you!

[Anonymous]

I agree with Steven,

Blocking field updates is the way to go!

[Victoria_Taylo2]

Thank you all so much for your help! It seems like blocked field are the way to go.