MK > SF Field Change Behavior

[Carrie_Lawson]

Hello fellow Marketeers!

We are in the midst of an integration to SFDC and will be using the direct sync that is provided.  I have a few concerns about using default sync fields on our forms and would like to know if my concern is valid or unfounded.  I also want to know, if my concerns are valid, what other companies are doing to mitigate the issue that might be caused by default fields being updated.

Question: What happens when a contact fills out a form on the website and provides different company information, or any default field, that what we have in Mk & SFDC?  My understanding is that Marketo is updated and therefore SFDC is updated.

My concern: it WILL change the company name in MK and in SFDC and cause issues, but i am unsure what those issues might be?

Possible Solution 1: Use non default fields for form fill outs and then create a smart campaign that updates the defaults fields with the form value if the default fields are empty?

Possible Solution 2: Use the form functionality and create a dynamic form so if the SFDC Type is not empty Default fields are shown and if not then other fields could be used?

Reason for the concern revolves specifically around Customers and those with active opportunities.  If we are quoting or they are paying customers then we can't have Marketo updating certain sync fields.

Are there other solutions I am not considering?

[SanfordWhiteman]

If your worry is simply that non-empty fields will be overwritten with new data, then block field updates from forms (in Field Management) and you'll be fine.

If your worry is that *some* updated data may be valuable, while other data should be discarded, you should submit data to a proxy field instead for manual human review.

[Jessica_Kao3]

Also,

Company Name is a field on the lead/contact object.  This does not affect the account name which is tied to the opportunity object.  Before you go and create a bunch of parallel fields and then have to write a whole bunch of smart campaigns to populat those proxy fields, you might want to consider how often this happens and what data that is going to impact. 

[Dory_Viscoglio]

One additional thing to keep in mind. Unless you have specifically requested that Marketo allow your instance to make updates to the account level, typically you cannot make changes to account fields from Marketo. So, things like Company Name will not be impacted once there is an account that they're linked with.