Recommendations on the best way to integrate Marketo and Salesforce?

[Anonymous]

We're currently using Marketo for our marketing automation and email campaigns, and Salesforce for our CRM.

We're having some issues with the current integration*, namely:

1. Non-immediate syncing to Salesforce -- if there is an issue with Marketo, it blocks the entire process.

2. Lack of error reporting and an audit trail when records fail to sync from our system to Marketo, from Marketo to Salesforce, and from Salesforce from Marketo.

Has anyone here had similar issues? How have you addressed them?

*Our setup: we use Marketo to cookie and store information about anonymous leads. Once they sign up and become 'known', Marketo creates the lead in Salesforce. We found that it was critical for deduplication purposes to have Marketo create the lead in Salesforce, instead of creating it ourselves using the Salesforce REST API. From then on, we update the lead/account/contact/opportunity record in Salesforce based on updates to that record in our database. Simultaneously, we have a Marketo JS snippet that sends in updates about a user's behavior and syncs it into Marketo. The two systems bidirectionally sync every so often, so updates in one system's lead record are sent to the other.

[Josh_Hill13]

Ruthie, you are describing a standard Marketo setup.

You can get error reports from Notifications at the top of the screen. Also, look at individual leads' Activity Log along with campaign Results. To add more log data:

• make sure your sync user is a regular user like Marketo User
• add change history to key fields like Lead Status, etc.

Marketo does NOT auto sync ALL leads to SFDC. You must tell it when to do this using a campaign and a SFDC Sync flow step. Some firms sync all leads over and using Queues or Lead Assignment rules in SFDC. Some firms hold back marketo leads until MQL, then it syncs.

Leads brought in from SFDC to Marketo are not deduped. But they are auto-synced if a lead's data changes in either sytem.