SalesForce/Marketo resynchronization

Jamie_Barclay
Level 5

SalesForce/Marketo resynchronization

Our Salesforce/Marketo synchronization has been disabled for about 2 years (not sure what the reason was for the desynching).

We are getting ready to resynch it but given work has been done independently in Marketo and SalesForce during that time and some new fields have been added in our Marketo instance, I'm concerned that there will be issues when we resynch - and what those potential issues may be.

Do you have any documentation that you can share that would help us prepare for this.

Thanks for anything you can share.

Thank you.

3 REPLIES 3
Josh_Hill13
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

Re: SalesForce/Marketo resynchronization

There will be issues. There isn't documentation on this, however, if you search this topic, there are suggestions in the forums.

  • Current SFDC Schema vs. Marketo
  • Fields that have changed
  • Picklists changes in SFDC
  • deduping (marketo won't dedupe incoming SFDC records)
  • orphan fields.

I'd almost suggest killing off your current Marketo instance and starting over in a new Marketo instance and porting over any data you can recover from your old instance. Support would have to help with some of that.

Steven_Vanderb3
Marketo Employee

Re: SalesForce/Marketo resynchronization

With two years of backlog it could take months to even catch up, if ever.

Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10

Re: SalesForce/Marketo resynchronization

This really depends on the volumes. If your DB is small, the backlog could catch up, but even though, it will never be complete. For instance, in SFDC, when a lead or contact is deleted, it is flag as deleted but remains there for about 2 weeks. If your DB had been sync'ed every 5 minutes, Marketo would have had time to "notice " these deleted records before they are gone. But after 2 weeks, they have simply vanished without notice and Marketo will raise sync errors.

Another error that you might face is that the same field might have been updated on both side. AFAIK, in such a situation, when you resync, the CRM value will win.

If the DB is not too big, instead of starting from a fresh instance (which would force you to recreate or migrate all your programs), you could do the following :

  • Export all the records in Marketo, with all columns. Let's call this export BkP#1
  • Delete every record in Marketo which field "SFDC type [Person]" is not empty, but paying attention to not delete them from the CRM
  • Enable the sync
  • In the CRM, create a field named "force update" on leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities. Then, using a data loader in SFDC, update all the records, which will cause them to be pushed and recreated in Marketo.
  • Review your duplicates in Marketo. If you find a lot of them, one of them being sync'd and the other not, then consider buying the Easy Merge service from Marketo or a licence from Leadonnance (look in the lauchpoint)
  • Extract all these new records (this is BkP#2) and match them with those from BkP#1. Only for those in Bkp#2, field by field, consider if you want to keep the field value from bKp#1 or bkp#2. of you want to keep bKP#1, then reimport these values, together with the email value, to udate the data in Marketo

-Greg