Use Form to Update Salesforce Account Information

[Jonathan_Haines]

We are have missing salesforce account information for several accounts. I have been tasked with creating an email with a form to send to contacts who we need information from.

1.) The information on the form needs to be synced to the account in salesforce. Is this possible? Other research says that accounts are the one type that only flow into Marketo (though this can be bypassed through support)

2.) Would you recommend that bypass, or is there a better way this can be accomplished?

3.) Assuming the connection is there to accounts, will the information automatically be added to the account, or will it be brought in as a lead?

Thanks!

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

OOTB as you'd know Marketo can't write data on the Account fields. You can have that behavior changed and enable writing data to certain account fields by raising a Marketo support ticket. But you'd need to be cautious and consider all the implications of going via this route as OOTB sync has been set to unidirectional sync Account data from SFDC -> Marketo for a reason. Alternatively, if this is a one-time thing, you can write data to a synced field on the lead and contact object and then have a workflow write that data to the associated account record. But there's more of a fundamental Q that you need to address before: a single account can be linked to multiple people and these people could fill in different account-related data on the forms. Do you have the plan to resolve these data clashes while transferring data over to an Account object? This is the primary reason why Marketo isn't allowed to write data onto the Account obj OOTB.

[Jonathan_Haines]

This is the solution I had worked out from other research, so thank you for confirming this.
To answer your question about multiple people submitting different information - in this use case we would only send to one contact at each organization to complete.

Thanks!

[Darshil_Shah1]

To answer your question about multiple people submitting different information - in this use case we would only send to one contact at each organization to complete.

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Cool! Thanks for letting us know. I'd also suggest you go through the caveats associated with this and come-up with a process so you don't encounter this in the future(as Beth explained in her comment.)

[Beth_Massura]

Hi Jonathan,

Salesforce is typically the source of truth for account information. Once a lead is converted to a contact on an account, any company information provided by the lead would generally be owned and maintained by the sales team. I wouldn't recommend the bypass to allow Marketo to overwrite account data, as then any one contact could submit updates that overwrite the account information for all of its contacts - and that data might not be accurate.

Here are some questions to think about:

• What is the volume of accounts missing information and what are the data points?
• Would the data be public and do you have team members who could do the research?
• Who on the sales team owns those accounts, and what's their current relationship with the contacts on it? Could they ask the contact(s) directly the next time they communicate with them?
• Could you consider a trusted enrichment service to supplement the data you already have? (using a Marketo webhook or a Salesforce integration)
• To avoid having this become a recurring issue: Are you asking new leads for this information?

Hope this helps you think through alternate solutions to fill in some of the data gaps.

Cheers,

Beth Massura | Consultant, Etumos

[SanfordWhiteman]

To accomplish selective updates to Salesforce for objects Marketo doesn't update OOTB, you can call a webhook-compatible service that in turn uses the SFDC API to make updates directly in SFDC (which will then sync to Marketo per usual).

We do this when we need more intelligent lead conversion logic, owner change, etc. than you can achieve with native flow steps.

To Marketo, it's just a change happening in SFDC - doesn't matter that it happens to be initiated via webhook.