SFDC/MKTO Sync Questions

[Monica_Koran]

Hello-

We have been manually sending emails out of Marketo for quite some time for past 9 months via List Loads (we did this while SFDC was being built)

We synced the two systems about a week ago to begin testing and none of the data within MKTO synced over to SFDC. I am fine with this and I understand that I would have to create a campaign to push all of these leads into SFDC if I wanted to do that.

My questions is we are ready to do a massive database load into our new SFDC database, will this data:

a) automatically sync over to MKTO?

b) create duplicates or sync up with the leads already in MKTO based on email address

Thanks for any insight on this!

Monica

[Ankit_Dua]

- Any data uploaded in Salesforce should be available in Marketo (provided Marketo users have sufficient privileges to read the data) but if you are uploading huge amount of data make sure you do that on weekend. so that the process can be completed over the weekend.

- Salesforce will create a duplicate lead if any new lead is created in Salesforce and that already exists in Marketo

[Monica_Koran]

Thank you Ankit - How do I prevent the duplicate leads? I have about 60K records in MKTO currently from list loads, I don't want 60K dups. Thank you for your help!

[Grant_Booth]

Making sure I understand the situation:
- you have 60k records in Marketo
- the same people already exist as leads and contacts in SFDC
- Marketo and SFDC are not yet connected
Is that all correct?

[Grant_Booth]

Rereading your post, I see you haven't uploaded them to SFDC yet.

Assuming you need them to be uploaded to SFDC as contacts associated with accounts...I have bad news. When you create new leads or contacts in SFDC, they will sync down to Marketo as new people, causing duplicates. Your best options in that case are (A) delete all your people in Marketo and start fresh there, or (B) pay Marketo's professional services team to set up something to merge the existing leads in Marketo with the new contacts in SFDC.

If they can be leads in SFDC, rather than contacts, then your situation is much brighter. You can just sync them from Marketo to SFDC using a smart campaign like you described.

Marketo treats SFDC as an authority when it comes to creating new records. If it sees a new record in SFDC, it creates a new record in Marketo, even if there was already another record in Marketo with the same email address.

[Monica_Koran]

Thanks Grant -

Quick question:

Can I push the 60K from MKTO to SFDC creating 60K new contacts in SFDC. Then, when we load the new database (which most likely will contain records from the 60K) to SFDC they will dedupe in SFDC?

[Ankit_Dua]

You can push the 60k leads from Marketo to Salesforce which will assign an unique SFDC ID to them once it is done, you can upload the leads in Salesforce with correct values and let them sync over.

[Ankit_Dua]

Golden Rule: Always try the things with small set of leads to check everything goes well. Once you feel like everything goes well you can push the remaining leads.

[Grant_Booth]

Two things:
1. When you push the 60k in Marketo, they'll be created as leads, not contacts. That's an important consideration if you need them to be contacts in SFDC.
2. I don't believe they'll dedupe in SFDC when you upload them there. Operations in SFDC rely entirely on the record's SFDC ID - there's no built-in dedupe based on the email address like there is in Marketo. I recommend removing the people who are already in Marketo from the file before you upload it in SFDC (perhaps with a vlookup in Excel). If you need to update the records that were already in Marketo, do that separately.

[Veronica_Holme4]

Agree with what everyone else has to say about what will happen here - you are headed for heaps of duplicates.

Firstly, I'd say that this scenario is too complex for a post on the community. You need a Marketo consultant (partner/professional services) to advise you ASAP and build a strategy that fits your circumstances. having done this hundreds of times, when I read your post I had a million questions that would go into advising you what to do.

1. When you say that you are doing a massive dump into Salesforce, how is this data coming in? If you are using the Salesforce API rather than list import functions you get a heck of a lot more flexibility in terms of deduping that data based on email or other criteria on your way in. In your scenario of syncing the Marketo data as leads back into Salesforce, you could do a dedupe on SFDC after that, but it would depend on what format your data is in, and whether the data coming from Marketo as leads causes you an issue.

2. Is the email activity you've done in Marketo so far worth saving? You could push all your email reports out into another database so you have the results, if you can use the API you could push out activities into a database first, empty your Marketo and start again.

3. I'd want to know how many fields we are talking about in Marketo that you've already uploaded data into - just the standard fields or have you built custom fields in Marketo that now need to be remapped into your Salesforce sync? (there are more considerations here than just data).

4. Have you looked at third-party tools to help you de-dupe Marketo if you did go down that road? Sometimes that solution is just easier if the data volumes are not that big.

Do yourself a favour here, hire a consultant to help you plan your next steps, or you could spend weeks/months undoing a decision based on something somebody told you on a message board that doesn't have a hope of considering ALL the factors in your environment.