Moving from Sage CRM to Salesforce with an Existing Marketo Instance - Suggestions Appreciated!

[Sheila_Baker10]

We have an existing Marketo instance with about 5 years worth of data and information. The Marketo instance has been syncing to Sage CRM but Riva, the software company providing the sync, has told us they will no longer be supporting Sage CRM. We are considering moving off of Sage CRM to Salesforce Professional edition. There are many good reasons to move to Salesforce but we need to do it economically.  I'm trying to work through the challenges and gotchas specifically around the data migration.

The current Sage CRM data is all Account/Contacts and the plan would be to move these Account/Contacts (along with Opportunities and all the other data) to Salesforce. However, since the people already exist in Marketo, if they get imported into Salesforce, when they sync to Marketo we'll have duplicates on them all. If we sync the existing people in Marketo up to Salesforce, they are all Leads - which then we will have to figure out how to convert to Account/Contacts. There are about 95,000 records in Marketo so we aren't talking about a massive database.

Is the best way to do this to move the data into SFDC Accounts/Contacts, let them sync to Marketo and then use a dedup tool to clean up Marketo?

What's the best way manage this and what tools would be good to use? Any ideas would be really appreciated.  Thank you!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

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Is the best way to do this to move the data into SFDC Accounts/Contacts, let them sync to Marketo and then use a dedup tool to clean up Marketo?

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Certainly not if you want to keep the one system you'll still have (Marketo) as intact as possible!

Without fuller information, it's hard to be sure, but generally syncing from Marketo to SFDC is the way I would start out. Conversion from Lead to Contact/Account is far more easily done in SFDC than the equivalent merges in Marketo.

You should have an SFDC whiz (both Apex & PB/Workflow) tightly involved with the migration for sure.

[Sheila_Baker10]

Thanks @SanfordWhiteman 

One of the challenges is they are purchasing SFDC Professional Edition. This will allow only 5 process builders and flows but no APEX code. (thank goodness SFDC is now at least allowing the 5, at one point there were none allowed.) We do have an easy way to match existing records in Marketo to an Account in SFDC (there is a custom company id field that can be used). So pushing the Marketo record into a Lead and then coverting it to an Account in SFDC with the matching company id can be used. I was originally thinking this would be hard to automate, but it looks like I should be able to create the process and flow to do the initial conversion, then turn it off so that we free up the few process builder/flows for ongoing needs.

Thanks again. Happy New Year!