Sync one marketo to two Salesforce instances with intent to merge salesforces together

[Jason_Krall4]

So here is the situation:

We are using Marketo synced to SFDC. We bought a company using Eloqua tied to their Salesforce. IT is going through the process to merge the Salesforce systems and we are going through the process of merging MAS systems. 

In our analysis the SFDC merge will take more time than the Eloqua to Marketo move.  My question is, how could we use our instance of Marketo, use partitions and separate munchkin codes etc to keep our main marketo synced with SFDC and use the partition to move over and integrate their site and their SFDC together? I know we can only tie one Marketo to one SFDC but someone mentioned using APIs on the partioned version.  

The second area for discussion: Once the SFDCs are combined into one, will this partition process be easier to move as the API would need to be broken anyway? 

Or should I keep them separate until the SFDC systems are synced for ease of transition?  I am looking for advice on this process and can talk offline as needed.  Thanks

[Josh_Hill13]

My thought is to keep your MAS separate until SFDC is ready for the merge.

Some ideas if you still want to go ahead:

• you could "tag" the Eloqua and SFDC 2 leads as they are imported into SFDC 1 so you know which ones are supposed to be separate.
• you could use a separate workspace/partition as you noted to try to segregate the Eloqua leads. You might pull them out of SFDC2 with SFDC2 IDs and put them into Marketo 2 so that you can properly merge things once you merge the SFDCs.

[Kimi_Heskett1]

I would also keep your MAS separate until you are ready. 

[Jason_Krall4]

Thanks for your responses and a big Ohio hello to you Kimi.  

While I would love to wait for the two SFDC systems to be merged, the timing is off in terms of contract end date for the E-system. It will end 6 months before the SFDC systems are expected to be merged. In addition, I believe that I will end up running both systems at the same time until they are merged and I would prefer to not do that.

Thanks for the advice Josh, I will def consider as I am merging the two DBs.  My current issue is how do I tie the partition/workspace to the second version of SFDC and how easy would it be to integrate afterwards? IIf anyone has experience on using one instance of Marketo with multiple instances of SFDCs please let me know.  

 

[Anonymous]

Jason,

I'm in the same boat right now. Since it's been some time since you initially posted, do you have any updates on how you ended up handling this? My main concern right now is that IT is pushing for our instance of SFDC to merge into theirs...and from what I hear, you have to provision a completely new MKTO instance and you lose all activity data.

Thanks for any advice you can share.

[Jason_Krall4]

Hi Trask,

We ended up briefly extending the contract of Eloqua until the SFDC systems are merged.  Due to branding issues we have to take down one of the corporate sites.  As a result we are using Marketo landing pages with Eloqua forms for a few of the campaign pages.  The team using Eloqua still needs to run campaigns tied to their SFDC.  This will make it much easier when we covert everything over to Marketo in a few months.  

While this was not the perfect scenario, it was our best option for supporting each business unit while reducing the programming work.