TotalRequests Limit Exceeded - Killing our Inbound Leads & Sales Process

[Anonymous]

Over the past few days, many leads are now getting stuck in marketo and not syncing to salesforce (professional).

BACKGROUND:
Following the directions on the community, we Synced our Salesforce (Professional) with no issues at all. Since then, we have created several Marketo Forms for our website (on non marketo landing pages) which include a Sync with Salesforce flow step, paired with email alerts, escalations and follow-up alerts (if lead status has not changed for a given time) for our salesteam.  Now, receiving only about 20 inbound leads each day via our Marketo forms, many inbound leads are getting stuck in Marketo with the "TOTALrequests Limit Exceeded" notification in the Activity Log. However, from 12 - 3pm , 4 leads got stuck. And later, from 4 - 5pm, 2 inbound leads made it through. But now, all inbound leads are getting stuck again. 

We also encountered this error last week, when just testing a few nurture email campaigns (with a test list of only 6 email addresses).

As one can imagine, this is very frustrating for our business.

If it helps, we still have not deployed sales insight, scoring, interesting moments (all hopefully next week).  We are also hoping to launch our first big nurture campaign in a few weeks. However, with leads not syncing between marketo and our salesforce, I'm starting to consider going back to our old marketing platform for these activities.

We have also contacted our Salesforce rep and requested the limit to be lifted, but I believe it will only occur for a few days. So in other words, it's not a solution.  Inbound leads come in all the time and I expect my salesteam to have a 1-2 hour response time (not waiting for Marketo and Salesforce to start talking to each other).

I'm assuming the Marketo architecture is pinging salesforce more times than it should. Are we going to be forced to purchased unlimited API access from Salesforce? 

Side note: We really wish these things were discussed during the trainings, consulting, and initial sales process.  I explicitly asked if there were any limitations or common challenges with salesforce professional syncing.

[Anonymous]

Ron, if you haven't done so, I would encourage you to open a case with Marketo tech support on this one.

[Anonymous]

Hi Ron,

By delfault Marketo syncs with SFDC in the background (via the SFDC API) in 5 minute intervals, in this process alone Marketo makes 25 API calls to check if your Salesforce objects need updating. This means that each day Marketo makes about 7200 API calls to your SFDC account just to see if any updates are needed.

Now this won't pose a problem for most Enterprise and unlimited customer of SFDC but Professional edition customers tend to have a lower 24hour API limt meaning that checking for updates alone will cause them to run into the total request limit exceeded problem, i.e. surpassing then 24 hour limit.

For more info on how Marketo uses the SFDC API : https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000Kyr6CAC

As Elliott suggests please log a case with Support. We can increase your sync interval making it less frequent. For example if we change it to 10 minutes we would effectively half the amount of API calls that are used checking for updates.

This would not affect or delay any campaigns that you have set up with SFDC flow actions, SFDC flow actions are an immediate and seperate from the background sync.

Regards,
Cathal

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the message Cathal.  We created a ticket with your support team, but only received a similar message but with no real-solution that isnt going to cost even more money --- just to get Marketo and Salesforce effectively working together.  This should have been correctly communicated during the sales process, trainings, and consulting sessions. Happy customers dont stay customers at all --- when "bait and switch" occurs on a weekly basis when rolling out a platform.