SFDC Account Fields Do Not Always Create Change Data Value Logs in Activity Log!!

[Michael_Langell]

Hi all,

I nearly fell off my seat when I found this out today, but I have gotten this confirmed by technical support and wanted to share this with everyone/ask if anyone else was aware of this?  I am going to start off by saying this is a BIG deal

So for the non-believers of the title, I have a screen shot below of a custom Account object SFDC field in my Marketo instance.  You will notice the date says April 14th, which means that on April 14th, this data value changed in SFDC and a change data value log on April 14th (or later if you have a syncing backlog) should appear in your activity log.  

Except, we DO NOT have that log...

This record was created on 3/30/16, so that is not the issue either.  What I was told by support is below:

Mike called because the field most recent demo set date was not showing up in activity logs. This is due to some backend Marketo logic to not show these updates on records because this would bog down the system. The data still comes through.

Support added that these data value changes will get logged randomly, but not for all accounts or contacts and there is no formula as to how it happens.  To give you an idea why this affects me, we do a lot of account level reporting in Marketo with progression statuses based on account fields and listening to data value changes on the account object.

So I wish there was clear documentation on this and this is certainly a big pain for a lot of B2B customers who use the Account object to a high degree for tracking.  This can be fixed by creating contact fields that mirror our account fields, but that is going to require a decent amount of work.  

-Mike

I have t

[Anonymous]

Thanks for sharing

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Mike,

This is puzzling!

And yes, this is a real, enormous problem for some customers that rely mostly on account info, rather than on contact info, to manage a lot of things (owner, territories, assignment, relationship statuses, ...).

We need to know more about this limitation, urgently.

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Important point: in large orgs, it is not possible to evolve the SFDC data model as we would like.

At minimum, these evolutions will require internal RFCs, cost evaluation, budget assignment, internal billing, tests on multiple platforms, planning in the middle of tens of other RFC required by other users with more political power, and a lot of push back from the IT teams more or less opposed to the Marketing Automation selected by the Marketing, despite IT recommendation. And finally months of patience to get it solved. All these processes and latencies are quite difficult to manage when we have good reasons, but here, it will be just impossible to really justify, simply because the Marketing teams needs it to compensable a weakness in the Marketing Automation product.

Really concerning.

-Greg

Kenny Elkington​, Louiza Verykiou​, John Clark we need your help on this

[Anonymous]

This is indeed a super concerning matter for which I expect full support from the Marketo team. Grégoire describes perfectly the situation that will be mine in a couple of weeks and I have no idea how we would justify any further investment to my steering committee.

- Aurelie

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Mahesh Jeswani​,

Is that you who could provide and answer to this?

-Greg

[Michael_Langell]

Posting latest comment from Support on this.  Context here was I was asking if Project Orion may address the above concerns or if this may get addressed on the product roadmap at some point.  Did not get the answer I was looking for

Project Orion is a project to improve Marketo performance. Omitting the activity entries on lead records is not for a performance reason, but a design decision, and thusly Project Orion will not address this issue and there are no plans to change this type of reporting in the future. You could certainly post a Marketo Community Ideas post and try to get it some attention.  It's just apart of Marketo's 'Secret Sauce' that no one knows specifically how it works but just generally the results of how it works.

Miles Ybaben​ FYI

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

Thanks for the update!

[Diederik_Marte4]

Just out of interest. Is it just not showing the log, or is a trigger also not firing?

[Michael_Langell]

Hi Diederik Martens​

The trigger will not fire because there is no change data value activity to fire upon.  I probably should have been more clear in my title/description that this is the major problem here.  Any Marketo customer who uses the data value changes trigger on account level fields will experience a failure rate where the trigger does not process.  Without the logged activity, it is if the change never took place.

-Mike