Marketo won't let you upload a list with an owner pre-assigned?

[Anonymous]

We are trying to upload a list of contacts / leads into marketo that already have an owner assigned. We have marketo integrated with salesforce and Marketo is preventing us from loading the lead owner. Apparently it wants sales force to assign. However, we can't have salesforce assign  because there is more than one contact per company and round robin will end up assigning the same company to multiple reps. Is this a marketo limitation or a marketo salesfoce integration setting?

Thanks for you help!

[Anonymous]

Lynn Jones FYI. I moved your post to the Products and Support​ section. You will get an answer there sooner since this more of a Product related question

[Anonymous]

Lynn Jones​ is the Lead Owner field accepting field updates from List Imports? Are you using the SFDC id for the owner? not the name?

[Justin_Norris1]

Lynn Jones​, you can't update the lead owner field via upload, but you can use a "Change Owner" flow step.

To make this work you need to create a new field (can be in Marketo only) called "Temp Lead Owner" or something similar. Upload your target lead owner names or emails to this field when importing via list.

Then you need a separate flow something like:

SMART LIST

Trigger - Data Value Changes - Temp Lead Owner

(alternatively, you can run as a batch using member of a static list as a filter)

FLOW

Change Owner

- If Temp Lead Owner = X, Owner = X

- If Temp Lead Owner = Y, Owner = Y

Downside of this approach is it is a pain if you have a lot of potential owners, obviously, and difficult to maintain.

A slight possibility you could use a token (Lead Owner = {{lead.Temp Lead Owner}}) if in your list upload you populate the Temp Lead Owner field with the exact text expected from the Lookup field ("User: John Smith") or alternately if you use the SFDC user ID.

That would be a lot more robust but I have yet to test either of these approaches.

[Owen_Millard1]

Following up (several years later) to confirm that the tokenized approach for this doesn't work seem to work, unfortunately. Maintaining the choice-dependent flow steps as of now is likely the only viable (if not all that scalable) approach for automating change of SFDC owner based on a list import.

[Justin_Norris1]

Thanks Owen Millard‌ - yes it's unfortunate. 

Since this was posted I've used a few different advanced tools in SFDC to extend the capabilities of standard lead assignment rules.

To really make this dynamic, I'd include the SFDC user ID of the intended owner in that temporary field and then look at dynamically assigning to that user in Salesforce using one of those advanced tools. Pretty sure this would be possible with Distribution Engine using their tags feature, for example. Distribution Engine can handle really complex assignment logic quite elegantly. 

Overall, just another good reason to keep all lead assignment functions centralized in SFDC in my opinion. The toolset there is more robust and you have more options.