Why are my custom fields in SFDC being duplicated in Marketo?

[Anonymous]

We are integrating Salesforce with Marketo and followed the Marketo integration guide to sync the fields. We noticed that the custom fields we created in Salesforce are now on their own tab in Marketo, rather than allowing to sync with the custom Marketo fields that had already been created. Now we have duplicate fields in Marketo.

This doesn't seem right. Has anyone run into this? And if so, how would you recommend removing the duplicate fields and syncing with the already-present Marketo custom fields?

Thanks in advance!

[Dory_Viscoglio · Accepted solution]

Hi Jackie, any custom fields that you want in Marketo should really be created in SFDC and then allowed to sync over. If it's visible to the Marketo sync from SFDC, it will be created in Marketo regardless of whether it's a duplicate.

Marketo support can do some custom mapping for you to resolve this, but make sure that you save all of your data in these fields first! I've had one or two custom mappings done, and it deleted all of the data that was in the custom Marketo field. 

[Josh_Hill13]

Easiest to do the custom mapping when the fields are NOT in use in Marketo and have no data.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the insight, Dory. We have been using Marketo for about a year now and looking to launch a sales team so we have lots of custom data that we wouldn't want to lose in the integration. We will treat carefully and contact Salesforce support for assistance.

Josh, can you please elaborate on your comment regarding active field use?

[Anonymous]

Piggybacking on what Jackie said, be careful if you have support map custom Marketo fields to SFDC fields–especially if the info in SFDC differs from Marketo.

Marketo fields that are "blocked for updates" and then get mapped to SFDC will not be blocked for "Sales Force Sync". So there's the risk that when you map them, one set of data willoverwrite the other.

[Anonymous]

Jace, we are new to SFDC and only have a few sample records that are currently in there. If mapped, would we lose the data in the custom marketo fields when we run the initial Sync? Or should we wait to do the custom mapping until after the initial sync is done?

[Anonymous]

You shouldn't lose the information in Marketo (or at least we didn't) because SFDC didn't overwrite existing data from blank fields (although Marketo support may be able to confirm). I just didn't notice that there was an issue until someone made some changes in SFDC and those changes synced to Marketo - altering the historical data I thought was blocked.