Salesforce Implementation with 3-year old Marketo Database

[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

[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.

[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?

[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

[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.