Why when a lead converted to Contact in SFDC it updates Account & associated contacts?

[Anonymous]

Hi -

We are noticing that when a new lead is created via API or form fillout that belongs to an existing account then converted into the account, that the # of employees field is being updated account level, and updating the # of employees field for all contacts in the account. Apart from this, we have an interesting moment created when a lead has a favorable employee size, so our Sales reps are getting interesting moments for not only the lead they converted, but all contacts in the account. We don't want all other contacts and the account to be updated or get an interesting moment.

I read some of the documentation on it here on how accounts are synced, but it still doesnt make sense to me: https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/SFDC+Sync%3A+Account+Sync

"If you update an Account field for a contact in Marketo, it changes the values of all those contacts belonging to that account in Marketo. It does not sync to SFDC. However, the next time that account is updated in SFDC, the changes will override all account information in Marketo."

Why does Marketo/SFDC sync update account, and all contacts when one new lead is converted into the account, and are their configurations to block this in Marketo?

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

This is probably cause by the following process:

- existing account in SFDC has number 10-20 value in the number of employees

- new lead is created in Marketo through a form/API with an 50-100 value in the number of employees field

- when that lead is converted to the account the 10-20 value is overwritten by 50-100 value

This happens because your "Number of employees" fields on lead and account objects are mapped in salesforce, if you do not want the behavior described above to happen, have your SFDC admin unmap the fields.

As for account data appearing on all the contacts from an account that's how SFDC standard functionality works, Marketo just uses the data coming from SFDC.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Iryna,

Unmapping the fields is not a good solution, because it means that when you convert a lead and create a new account, all the unmapped fields will come empty and all the values collected in the lead will be lost.

The actual solution that works is a little more complex. It takes to replace the default conversion assistant with a custom one upon which the process order is different  :

1. the account is selected first,
2. All values existing in the account fields and that you want to keep are copied to the lead fields
3. the lead is actually converted.

Salesforce Flow technology is the one we use to do this.

-Greg

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

Hi Greg,

that's a nice solution, will bring it up with our SFDC admins, thanks

We don't map many of our key fields directly from lead to account actually, we map it lead to contact and for certain fields we have roll up fields on the account level. The thing is information on the account is usually verified through either data enrichment or direct contact with the company, and is usually much more reliable than the info on a net new lead, so we do not want to overwrite the account data, but to make sure we don't lose anything we store it on the contact level.

Unmapping the fields is not ideal, but for this specific case I think it's the best option since it's fast and simple, cuz it seems Shirleen has a lot of trouble with all those contacts getting interesting moments