SFDC Accounts - Major Changes are pending to our accounts and hierarchy

[Shari_Horton]

Our account data is a mess - dirty data, duplicate accounts, no standardization etc.  To fix that, our IT team has purchased a clean set of accounts and account data they plan to load. Once installed, they will be editing existing accounts and by extension the associated contacts. The good news is that this will bring in loads of demographic data and standardized account names, proper hierarchies etc.  But when big changes happen in data ... its time to measure twice and cut once!

What I would like to anticipate is all the data synching back to Marketo, triggering off other processes (like lead scoring).  Where are the gotchas. What's the smartest way to do this?

If this was happening at your company, what would you take into consideration and prepare for?  Has anyone done such a project - what did you learn? 

Thanks in advance for your ideas.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi Shari,

It's good to hear that your company values quality data and is willing to put significant initial investment to making that happen.  My company did a similar account database cleanse, which involved increasing volume, reducing deplicates, and boosting quality of account data (much like you're doing now).  I was involved in that project & being admin for Marketo.

A lot of the questions you asked are dependent on your instance of Marketo, including:

• database composition (lead volume, contact volume, opps)
• lookup relationships & formula fields in SFDC
• field management in Marketo
• how you configure your workflows for lead processing, assignment, scoring, etc.

Since Marketo is primarily a lead/contact management platform, it is only designed to change information on leads & contacts.  It only looks up information on accounts, if leads are converted to contacts (which must be tied to accounts).  If a large percentage of your database is contacts tied to accounts, then you may want to do new contact-to-account association in SFDC in a few waves.  Test each association run on gradually larger scale and see how it affects your campaign queue.

The most important thing you brought up is workflows.  If you have triggers that look for changes in account information (like lookup & related formula fields), then you may want to turn them off or at least run these processes during low activity times.

Hope that at least provides a framework for you to answer those questions yourself.

Best of luck,

Phil