Migrating Salesforce instances

[Jay_Jiang]

Wondering if anyone might have some experience regarding this. In the following hypothetical, what are the implications?

Marketo is synced with an existing Salesforce instance that's not in great shape. If IT bought and set up a completely new Salesforce instance (because it'd be easier to set up best practices from fresh) and migrated the data over, what are the implications for Marketo? Will we need a new Marketo instance? What kind of data and how much data will be lost? Any other implications?

[Anonymous]

I have done a similar migration and I can say that it is akin to rebuilding the Marketo instance from scratch. When I did this at a former company, I believe Marketo was able to do a clone of our instance and I was able to build out things from there. It took a few months to get everything in Salesforce and Marketo migrated.

If you go this route, a couple of things to be sure not to forget about:
1. What it may mean to your dedicated IP if you have one associated with your current instance.
2. The workflow you use to populate contacts back into campaigns (and does that import affect any lead scoring or other smart campaign triggers).
3. What kind of data, such as lead activity and last interesting moments, you will lose in the process, and how you might archive and document these things.

While the above may all sound daunting, and it is, Marketo was a great partner to us in helping see through the migration. And obviously what I am describing may not at all describe what your instance looks like.

[Valerie_Whitin2]

Marketo now has a beta CRM de-sync tool.

Historically you had to migrate to a whole new instance, where you had two options. Either get a full instance copy where all programs and assets were copied over, you would be responsible for migrating contacts and assigning them back to the appropriate programs, as noted by Jason. Or the second option was to build from scratch.

But now, they have a tool where you can de-sync an old instance of SFDC, thus opening up that API connection and allowing you to sync a new instance or a different CRM. You will definitely want to ask your account manager about this. I went through it as we had migrated from SFDC to NetSuite, and it was SO MUCH EASIER!

[Josh_Hill13]

Cool. Good to know!

There are earlier threads on this process so be sure to do a search. I've participated in a few of them and it's more about planning out the steps in advance so everyone understands the implications of change and what they should do when.

[Miles_Ybaben · Accepted solution]

Hello Valerie Whiting​
Josh Hill

This is Miles on the Marketo Support Team.

This tool that Valerie speaks of is unsupported.

If you find someone with high-enough clearance to run the tool, your Marketo Instance will essentially become unsupported.

The Marketo Application is not designed for migrations, so this move is not supported.