Salesforce Implementation with 3-year old Marketo Database

[Megan_Reed1]

We just purchased Salesforce, but have been using Marketo for 3 years so we have a good amount of data in Marketo. We are in the initial planning stages for our Salesforce implementation and I am concerned with syncing our current Marketo database with Salesforce since I have never worked with Salesforce before. What problems should I expect to run into and how can I prevent them?

[Megan_Reed1]

Wow! Lots to think about.

@Greg - Salesforce is new to us and currently has no data in it. Marketo has 3 years worth. It sounds like Steven Vanderberg is right to upsert the data from Marketo to Salesforce for Leads but not Contacts and Accounts - is that right?

Emily Dick - We currently have a custom API integration with our current "CRM" Connectwise. Those API calls would be deactivated before any type of sync with Salesforce. Currently Connectwise is used for all of our customer support, etc. and our operations team will continue to use it, so we may take the lead and prospect data only from Connectwise and import it into Salesforce. Then it's just a concern that duplicates would occur since we are importing data to Salesforce that may already be in Marketo.

Phillip Wild - Thank you so much for your thoughts! With custom objects you mention this will need to be updated manually in Marketo after the sync, will those fields not sync too if I map those fields?

[Phillip_Wild]

No problem Megan Pulskamp​!

As far as I know, you will need to map over custom objects after you've done that initial sync. You then individually select the objects you'd like to map, and the fields you'd like to use as filters / triggers. However, that's just my experience - maybe you can do it all at once?

Alternatively, you could upload that same Salesforce data into the Marketo custom objects instead. This will give you a "one to many" relationship which you might require, but it's just a different place to house it. You can populate these using the API, amongst other methods.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Megan,

On point 1, yes, this is, Marketo can create leads and only leads in SFDC. But if you do so, you will still have an issue if you want to insert in SFDC all you leads from ConnectWise, if for instance you have some information (fields) that you want to move between the old and new CRM.

And the entire problem will remain for accounts/contacts.

At the end of the day, I would try to avoid a too complex process and do it that way :

1. Export the entire Marketo DB (all records, all fields).
2. Create some fields in Marketo for key value that might be stored in Standard fields and that you would want to keep. You do not need to do this for custom fields, they will not be mapped not overridden anyway.
3. Import the ConnectWise DB in SFDC (leads, accounts, contacts, custom objects).
4. Export from SFDC all leads and contact data
5. Establish connection and let the records flow to Marketo
6. Run the easy merge service and keep for each mapped field (standard) the source you think more reliable. For each merged record, of course, the wining record will be the one coming from SFDC.
7. run data management smart campaign to recopy from the backup fields you created in step 2 the values that are more recent / accurate
8. restore from the backups in Marketo the values that you think more reliable than what you had in your old CRM, using Marketo dedupe feature to update fields.
9. Map the custom objects from SFDC in Marketo and let them sync.

For step 7 and 8, do it selectively, for subsets of leads, not for the whole database

-Greg

[Lauren_Beth]

Hi Megan,

We transitioned from Saleslogix to Salesforce.  Our biggest issue was duplicates and general overall data quality.  If I could go back I would have told myself to just assume nothing will work as expected.  In the beginning our focus was on ensuring the sync was functioning, that fields were mapped properly, lead sources and statuses meshed and were cleaned up, merging leads rules were established, etc. We thought we had prepped for much of this before go live, but in the end we still had a significant amount of fixing to do once the sync was up. 

We did a lot of deleting of super old leads in Salesforce, then focused on duplicates in Marketo.  Our Marketo database nearly doubled in size when we transitioned with duplicates being a significant part of that.  We did a one time Easy Merge with Marketo.  This merge managed to take quite a long time due to the sync user rules not meshing between Marketo and Salesforce.  This was on us and Marketo so just ask lots of questions, get your IT support on the phone with Marketo whenever necessary.  We didn't find Marketo support tickets to be all that helpful during the transition - it took us several steps to get things answered.  I'd highly recommend getting a sandbox test environment as well.  Just ask lots of questions about the merge with support about doing an Easy Merge, test in the sandbox (but even though our sandbox environment was error free - our live instance pulled many errors once we switched the sync on).

After we finally got things in order, we set up daily clean up in Marketo to keep our instance in order.  This had to wait until after the dupes were gone, our Salesforce data was generally in order and we had the proper sync rules set up.

Generally our Saleslogix instance was not strong so our transition was difficult.  Hopefully you are in a better position with your current data than we were!  All in all, we learned a lot through the process and our Marketo instance is stronger as a result.  Best of luck and let me know if you have any questions.

Lauren

[Megan_Reed1]

Hi Lauren,

Thank you so much for your insights. Based on your experience I believe our experience will be similar. We used Saleslogix years ago until we transitioned to Connectwise for our CRM (which was already used by our Operations dept.). Now we are looking to get Marketing and Sales on the same page, hence the implementation of Salesforce. Our data is good, but has a lot of room for improvement.

Did you all tackle the implementation in house only, or did you work with any outside companies?

I appreciate all of your help!

Megan

[Lauren_Beth]

Forgot one thing!  We did as much cleaning as we could of contacts, accounts and leads in Saleslogix before we transitioned.  This did help make the transition slightly less painful.

[Lauren_Beth]

Hi Megan,

We did most everything in house with some basic help from Salesforce, however their priority was the Saleslogix to Salesforce transition.  They just ensured A linked to B essentially - mostly field matching and setting up our lead assignment process.  These areas still needed significant improvements and changes after we went live with the sync.  We had a sandbox environment in Marketo and also used Marketo's in house Easy Merge tool which most people seem to have had a good experience with.  We did not as ours took months to complete, rather than the promised days, due to some assumptions both on our and their part with the sync.  While we were waiting on the Easy Merge process to finish, we met with a Marketo consultant for a few hours to get suggestions on ways to improve the sync.  This was very helpful in getting our road map together.  We subsequently started working with Perkuto as well.  I would recommend bringing someone in for support as soon as you can if you have the budget as we would have saved so much time.  At the same time, we learned a lot about Marketo and Salesforce in the process and are a better team for it, thus there is a bright side!

Happy to answer any additional questions you may have.

Lauren

[Phillip_Wild]

Depends on a bunch of things. Here are some things to think about:

* What's going to be your unique identifier in the database? Is it Salesforce ID? Or email address? Bear in mind while Marketo can support using Salesforce ID as the unique identifier, when anyone submits a form or you upload a list, it's deduping on email address. So it's not perfect.

* Does Marketo need to see all the leads, contacts and accounts in Salesforce? If not, then edit your sync rules to ensure you aren't bringing over unnecessary information. Not only will this add to your sync backlog, it will mean you run up against your Marketo lead cap pretty quickly.

* Field management. For the leads, contacts and accounts Marketo DOES need to see, does it need to see all the fields? Every field it has access to will be synced. So if you can never see yourselves using a particular field that lives in Salesforce, don't bother giving Marketo access to it. It will only slow your sync down.

* Custom objects in Salesforce. If you want to sync over custom object information from SF, then this will need to be done manually after you sync all of your lead / contact / account fields. As with regular fields, don't sync any custom objects you won't ever need to use.

* The sync is 5 minutes, bi-directional. So if there's not a backlog things should appear very quickly. One thing to remember is that Marketo will sync Accounts first, then Contacts. So if you keep up a backlog of Accounts that Marketo never gets through, it might never sync your contacts....we ran into this problem and had to enable a temporary "sync both at the same time" solution.

We did the "sync Salesforce to Marketo", not the other way around. It's definitely not a barrel of laughs! But the results are worth it.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Philip,

These are all very valid points, but none of them are specific to the case of starting to sync 3 years after Marketo go-live and a Marketo instance full of leads . Each of your points also apply to anyone starting sync with an empty Marketo instance.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Exciting! Are you syncing to another CRM currently and migrating that data or just syncing Marketo to your new SFDC org? SFDC has Lead and Contact objects whereas Marketo sees these as one record, so depending on how you will define Leads, Customers, Prospects, etc. you may want to spend some time with you SFDC Admin to determine which Marketo fields sync to each object.

[Anonymous]

Well, you should not expect to have any problems except you need to manage the sync process from both the marketo side and the sfdc side.  From Marketo you need to determine when leads should be synced to SFDC, based on lead score, behavior, deomgraphics etc...  From SFDC you need to create the appropriate user profile to integrate with Marketo, one that has access to only the set of leads you want synced back to Marketo

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Jamie,

Unfortunately, this is not that nice

Expect 2 types of issue that are specific to the "post go live" sync, when your Marketo database is already fully loaded:

Duplicates

If you have imported your leads and contacts in Marketo, when you will connect the 2 software, These leads and contact will be created again and not deduplicated by Marketo. So all these leads and contacts will be created a second time. You will suddenly see your database double in size. You will have to merge this ASAP as you cannot live with a database were almost 100% of records have duplicates. The good news is that Marketo is offering a service (for a fee), call easy merge, that can help.

Data model.

But then, once you are ready to merge the records, you will bump into the second issue: it is likely that you have created Marketo fields that may more of less correspond to fields that you have also created in the CRM. When you will be connecting SFDC and Marketo, all the fields in SFDC will be created in Marketo and these field will not be mapped with the fields you have created in Marketo. You will not be able to map these fields together. May be support can do the mapping, but I am not sure (Ask them). And even if they can do it, it is likely that the SFDC fields and its Marketo equivalent will bot have values, making merging the field difficult and risky.

-Greg

[Steven_Vanderb3]

In regards to the duplicates, if you use Marketo to upsert the records qualified for Sales into the SFDC database first, you wont run into the duplicate issue.  You'd probably need to buy an increase of SFDC API calls for that period, though.

For the fields, you can perform a field mapping during the initial integration process.  Edit Initial Field Mappings - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Steven,

You are right, but it will work only if the SFDC database has not also been populated for 3 years

And also, this will be good to upsert leads in SFDC, but it will not work for accounts and contacts.

-Greg