Migrating to a New Marketo Instance

[Anonymous]

Our organization is having to make a migration to a new Salesforce org. We've been told that in order to set up the Marketo integration with our new Salesforce org, we would also need to migrate to a new Marketo instance. I'm wondering if anyone has gone through this process before of migrating from one Marketo instance to a new one. What data do you lose and what did the process look like for getting the new instance up and running? Any advice or lessons learned or heads up on roadblocks you  encountered would be greatly appreciated.

[Darrell_Alfons2]

Hi Cori,

I've done this before. It's important to know that the migration is really an implementation, the migration is really happening on the salesforce side. The data will be moved from one SFDC to the other, and the new marketo instance will sync with those records.

Without significant developer work or consultant, you will lose all of the marketo activity data. There is another thread on how to bring over as much as you can, I'll look for it for you.

[Darrell_Alfons2]

Update: The one I found wasn't really helpful.

This post is good though, even though it refers to migrating to marketo from a different MAP, the points are still relevant: 6 Steps For A Painless Migration To Marketo

If you are leveraging SFDC campaigns to mirror Marketo programs and can get sales ops to migrate that over, that will be ideal because you can easily know which leads/contacts were in which program/campaign.

Otherwise you will have to use static lists to bring over historical program membership.

[Josh_Hill13]

There are also some threads on this topic. Please do a search.

[Tom_Kerlin2]

Hey Josh,

Referring to #2 in the following article (mentioned by Darrell Alfonso😞 6 Steps For A Painless Migration To Marketo , is it possible to migrate archived assets from one instance to another?

Thanks,

Tom

[Anonymous]

Thanks Darrell, this is helpful. You mentioned that there might be a possibility of saving activity data with significant developer/consultant work. Any idea of what this might entail? Or do you know anyone that found a solution to be able to do this?

[Chris_Johnston]

Do you know what type of Activity Data you are hoping to save? Marketo has launched a new Bulk API http://developers.marketo.com/rest-api/bulk-extract/bulk-activity-extract/ that you can use. As Ben (who I work with at Salytics, a Gold Marketo Digital Services Partner) pointed out, our client has saved a lot of data in a Data Lake that they will still be able to access which is partially why they are less concerned about saving activity data as part of their project. Depending on your needs, you could look into extracting some of the activity data and then repopulating it into Custom Activity Data. It's not the cleanest solution, but it is an option available. We're happy to have a call with you if you would like to go over your options and the obstacles you will be facing in more detail. You can reach me chris@salytics.com to setup some time.

[Ben_Griffith1]

We are in the process of doing this with a client right now.

We opted to do a config copy, where Marketo copies your existing instances' assets (programs, smart campaigns, lists, landing pages, emails, etc.), but no record data (leads, activities, list/program membership).

Additional things we've run into (w/ a config copy) include:

• program sfdc links are lost after config copy
• add to campaign flow steps have their campaign reference lost
• webhook flow steps lose webhook configuration
• all launchpoint services are lost
• picklists on forms are out of sync with sfdc picklists

Marketo has scripts to populate program membership and list memberships after the config copy and one to add old munchkin ids to leads.  We've written scripts for other items, like mass updating program sfdc links.

The current deployment process looks like this:

1. perform config copy to new marketo instance

2. migrate old salesforce data to new salesforce (lead, contact, account, campaign, opportunity, etc.)

3. turn on salesforce metadata sync

4. turn on marketo smart campaigns for sfdc program acquisition

5. turn on full salesforce sync

6. run marketo scripts (program memberships, list memberships, marketo only leads, munchkin ids)

7. mass update program sfdc campaign ids, smart campaign flow steps, form picklists

8. update other marketo items: users, launchpoint services, webhooks, etc.

We are accepting that all activity data will be lost.  A lot is stored outside of Marketo though too in a data lake.

We've also had issues using the program import wizard to move programs in from old marketo to new marketo during the migration.

There are other issues we've run into too, but these are the main ones I can think of.

[Anonymous]

Hi Ben- Thanks for this outline, it is extremely helpful. Question, how long did you plan for this migration process for your client? I know it probably differs from instance to instance, but just looking for a rough timeframe to plan a successful migration?

For the scripts to help bring over program and list membership, will Marketo do this automatically in the migration process, or does that require additional consulting services from them?

[Chris_Johnston]

Hey Cori, our client engaged on a year long project to do this. They are doing way more than just a migration as they are hoping to declutter and setup the new implementation for success and are taking advantage of the fresh instance. They have a very large and complex database/marketing stack with more than a dozen connections into the system. So depending on the scale of your system and if you are looking to have just a quick migration, it could certainly be done in less time.

I'll check with Ben as I am not working on this project specifically, but Marketo doesn't usually do much for free is my understanding with regards to the scripts.