Sync Delay from SFDC & Marketo

[Anonymous]

We have experiences a huge sync delay of up to 36 hours with our Salesforce instance.

We called support and they were seeing a half million account updates and a half million contact updates in the backlog queue. Normally, they don't sync over any contact information until they sync over the Account object data first. They used a tool to break the dependencies and allow each object to sync over on it's own. After 2 days in that tool there was still a 450k backlog for the Account Object. 

We have certain transactional emails that are sent out via web API from our developers. When those campaigns requests come in from the API to then fire off an email in the flow step. Instead of it going out right away, it gets pushed into the backlog queue and can take more than a day for the email to send out after the API campaign was requested.

I understand that we have a very customized and data heavy Salesforce instance which then makes our Marketo instance the same. We have tightened up the field visibility from Salesforce as to which fields can sync over to Marketo. But we need our emails to take less than 36 hours to send out.

Does anyone have suggestions or ideas for our transactional marked emails that are set up with web API for them to move to the top of the queue?

There has to be other companies out there who have transactional emails that need to be sent out instantly rather than a 36 hour delay like some of our transactional API emails have been experiencing.

Is it running a different instance and pushing the transactional API emails through that separate instance? 

I welcome any feedback; I’ve put in tickets with support but its not moving forward. Thank you.

[Josh_Hill13]

I have seen similar issues. Ways you can control this, short of getting engineering on board:

• Race Conditions - let campaigns wait longer
• Email Send - push a batch/trigger to the top with an empty Email Send step at the top.
• Reduce active triggers.
• Reconfigure to let API creation go to the top. But I think this is an engineering issue you can't fix.
• Avoid massive syncs or data value updates during the week.

Not sure they will 100% fix this though.

[Casey_Grimes]

Hi Amanda,

Unfortunately, once you start to get sync backlogs for the Account object that get to the degree you're experiencing, a lot of the conventional wisdom around syncing and priorities no longer apply—for instance, even if you theoretically blocked every Account field from being synced to Marketo, there are Salesforce structural issues that can cause you to get caught in a loop where you never actually clear the queue due to the way Marketo determines that it should look for field updates. Even if you move transactional email to have a priority by forcing your sync queue to behave differently, that's only a bandage on a bigger issue.

This can be solved, but does require some in-depth work in terms of Salesforce and Marketo's interaction. Please reach out if you'd like to discuss details. Thanks!

[Liliana_Cheng1]

Hi Amanda Wobrock, we have a similar issue with a large backlog on the account sync and delayed triggered emails. Do you guys have something integrated with Salesforce that updates account records? Have you pulled a Salesforce report to check last modified accounts and which user is making the most modifications?

We initially thought that blocking updates and hiding all unnecessary fields would help to cut down the backlog, but after several days of monitoring and still dealing with delayed emails, we spoke to another support rep and found out that hiding/blocking fields will only help a little bit.

What we needed to look for is something that is updating the SystemModDate on the Salesforce side. In our case, a third party integration with Salesforce was checking each record 3x/day for billing and backoffice changes, which then updates the SystemModStamp on the Salesforce record. Marketo sees a more recent SystemModStamp on the Salesforce record and will look for updates to make on the Marketo record. When you block/hide fields in Marketo, it does not stop Marketo from seeing the more current SystemModStamp so Marketo will still look for updates to pull into the record before it realizes the field doesn't need to be updated anyway. That's why there is still a backlog even if fields are blocked/hidden.

We're in the middle of testing conditional updates within the third party integration and Salesforce so all these records aren't updated 3x a day in Salesforce. We think it should cut the backlog significantly. Hope this is helpful for you!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Liliana and Amanda,

Updates to accounts can also come from other updates that propagate to the account through triggers.

-Greg