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?

[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

[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.

[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

[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