We synchronize leads from forms and imports over to Salesforce.com using a standardized set of Marketing Activities. We set values for custom fields that track programs and sources. And then a "Sync Lead to SFDC" block sets the owner and syncs the lead. This "Sync Lead" block first checks to see if the lead is a member of a few different smart lists. The first match determines which owner is assigned - sometimes an individual, and sometimes a queue. And the default setting is a marketing-owned queue.
We've run 10s of thousands of leads through over the past few years. Nothing has changed in this block since last October, and nothing has changed over in SFDC. But starting late Friday or early Saturday, the "Sync Lead to SFDC" block just stopped working as it previously had.
In the Activity Log, the step where the lead syncs shows all of the values that are being passed to SFDC; at this stage, the correct lead owner is still set. But SFDC doesn't recognize what Marketo is telling it about ownership, and since it doesn't have an understandable owner assignment, SFDC uses its auto-assignment default to a general-purpose queue. This is how we know when a Marketo sync has failed - normally we see one or two a week of these leads assigned the SFDC auto-assignment default. But in the past few days, every completely new lead fails this first assignment.
However, we can select the newly created lead that has the default SFDC ownership, rerun the same standard sync Marketing Activity, and voila ... now the owner assignment succeeds. It suggests some sort of racing condition, where Marketo is inserting the lead into SFDC before it is telling SFDC about the ownership, and SFDC is accepting it and is falling back on its default auto-assignment. On the second try, SFDC sees it as an update to an existing lead, and has a chance to read the assignment from Marketo as an "update."
Anyway, the essential question is: has anyone seen "Sync lead to SFDC" creating incorrect assignments in the past few days? Does this jibe with anything you've been seeing? We've been up and down Marketo and SFDC looking for changes might be having an effect, and aren't coming up with anything. We've also logged a support ticket, but thought it couldn't hurt to get other insights if possible.
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