Something odd is happening - email fields are being set to null upon Marketo sync to SFDC

Anonymous · ‎02-03-2015

I was noticing that a bunch of new leads that came in through SFDC via Marketo sync don't have email addresses, which is odd bc it's a required field on my Marketo forms. On further research, it looks like indeed the leads are filling out their email on the Marketo forms, but something is happening upon the sync to SFDC that changes their email field to null. It's not happening to all, just a portion.

Here's the activity log for a new lead in Marketo.

Here's the same lead in SFDC - no trace on the history of email being changed.

I can only guess that something is set up weird with Marketo sync. However it's not affecting all new leads coming in.

Any direction to help troubleshoot?

Anonymous · ‎02-06-2015

Turns out the issue was a permission to WRITE the email field on the lead record in Salesforce.com.

For some reason Christine's Marketo User robot in SFDC couldn't write email addresses on Leads, and therefore caused this nasty glitch:

A new lead would come in from a Marketo form w/email address
Marketo would insert the lead in SFDC, but leave the email address blank (since it couldn't write it in SFDC)!
Next time Marketo would sync to SFDC, it would see a blank email address and DELETE it in Marketo too!

Ouch.

The issue was resolved by changing field level permissions in SFDC on the email field (letting marketo write it).

The good news is that the email address got recorded in Marketo's "Activity Log" - which isn't elegantly accesible, but is better than losing them all forever.

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