Moved from SFDC to NetSuite

[Valerie_Whitin2]

I'm curious if there is anyone out there that has experience moving their CRM from Salesforce to NetSuite, while integrated with Marketo. Would love to ask a few questions about that process if there is anyone out there.

The background is that my company used to be on SFDC but moved to NS a couple of years ago, long before I was here. We have been seeing a lot of issues with the syncing between our NS and Marketo, as we have dug into it with our integration provider we we were told that part of the issue is that we used to have our Marketo instance linked to a SFDC instance. Would love to learn more about this and what the ramifications from that are? Will we need to get a new Marketo instance to fix that?

Thanks in advance!

[Josh_Hill13]

sounds like you need a consultant to help you dig more into this.

If you aren't using SFDC anymore, can you disable the sync?

[Zak_Pines5]

Hi Valerie,

A *guess* at what’s going on here: one of the drawbacks of the Marketo-Salesforce integration is once it’s turned on in a Marketo instance, it’s forever locks up your Marketo API access.  This limits your API access only to Marketo lead/contact records, and not company or opportunity data.

Company & opportunity data is going to be key for use cases such as:

1. syncing account data from NetSuite to Marketo, for use in Marketo smart campaigns / targeting
2. syncing opportunity data from NetSuite to Marketo for closed loop reporting

Again, I’m not 100% sure if this is the issue you’re facing, but if that is the issue then the only solution per Marketo would be to copy into a new Marketo instance.  Happy to chat further about it.

Zak Pines

[Valerie_Whitin2]

Hi Zak,

Yes, that pretty much sums it up. I was thinking we were going to have to move instances, but I just found out yesterday that apparently Marketo recently released a "desync" tool that can remove the SFDC connection from our Marketo instance. I haven't been able to scope that out with Marketo yet, we heard this from our integration provider. So I'm curious to learn if it is easier than migrating instances, stay tuned I guess for how this turns out.

Thanks,

Valerie

[Zak_Pines5]

Hi Valerie - OK interesting, a Marketo "Desync" tool. I'm interested to hear what you learn on that - Zak

[Jep_Castelein2]

Just for reference, I worked with Valerie to run the experimental 'remove crm sync' tool, which removed the SFDC sync, all Opportunities, Company records, Sales People (= SFDC User object), SFDC Campaigns and SFDC Activities from Marketo. It also opened up the Company, Opportunity and Sales Person APIs. That allowed the NetSuite integration provider to populate those Objects with data from NetSuite using the REST API. There is still a fair bit of work involved, but it's a lot easier than moving to a new instance, and most importantly it retains all activity data.

The 'remove crm sync' tool is currently still 'experimental', meaning that it is not yet officially supported. So far we have seen good results, including changing from one SFDC instance to another (same for Microsoft CRM), going from SFDC to MS CRM and vice versa. Switching between natively-synced CRM instances is more work than removing an old native CRM sync, because the switch also requires extensive field mapping and deduplication of new records. But it usually beats having to migrate to a new instance.

[Zak_Pines5]

Hi Jep,

This is super interesting! It's always been a pain point for Marketo customers switching CRMs.

Would you up for talking about this via phone? I'd love to learn more.

Best Regards,

Zak

[Valerie_Whitin2]

I would like to just add to Jep Castelein's comments - we did go through with the project with Marketo and it worked great for us! Sounds like they are still in a "beta" phase with it. But if it is something you are going through definitely explore this option. From our end we had pretty minimal work to do for it to get done. I'm sure it is different for every instance, but I would definitely recommend this route over switching Marketo instances!

[Anonymous]

Hi Valerie,

Our company is about to do the same thing, move from SFDC to Netsuite. Are you fully integrated yet? Is there any drawbacks you could share with me?

Thanks!

Megan

[Valerie_Whitin2]

Hi Megan,

I'm happy to know there will be another Marketo person on NetSuite! Yes, we are currently integrated with NetSuite and have been for a couple of years now. Unfortunately I wasn't here during the initial cut over, but here are a few things I will note just from being a previous SFDC user at previous companies. We are in the process of fixing our integrations.

1) There is no native integration, which prevents a lot more room for error in data transfers. I would highly recommend spending time with your integration partner and making sure everything is set up exactly how you want it, and that you understand how to edit the integration should you need that. We are in the process of cleaning this all up because previous managers of the two systems didn't really pay attention to it, so now we have a lot of issues of the data not passing correctly. DOCUMENT EVERYTHING! If you document everything now, it will pay off in the long run. Do you know which integration partner you are planning to use?

2) One draw back, in my opinion, is the lack of a good tie between Marketo Programs and NetSuite campaigns. It makes it hard to work with the sales team on helping them identify what leads are in marketing campaigns.

3) The architecture and vernacular of how leads, contacts, companies, opps, etc  are classified is different in NS vs SFDC. Which can impact how your lead scoring and lead funnels is operating. I would think if you are doing ABM, NS actually has a pretty nice architecture for that strategy.

4) Make sure to ask Marketo about their new de-sync tool. Apparently it isn't very well known yet, but that is what we are using to remove our SFDC integration from Marketo. It will save you a TON of time rather than having to also migrate Marketo instances at the same time.

Luckily, you are starting from scratch so you can help shape what it is from the beginning! It is much harder to go into a messy system and try to slowly clean it up without breaking a bunch of other workflows Let me know if you have any additional questions, I'm happy to chat about it.

Thanks,

Valerie