Write to SFDCLeadId in Informatica

[Anonymous]

Hello everybody,

I'm trying to create a mapping in Informatica that writes a SalesForce lead id into the lead's SFDCLeadId field in Marketo. Informatica reports a successful upsert operation. However the change doesn't appear to get written to the Marketo record. When I examine the SFDCLeadId field after the mapping has finished, it is still empty.

Is Marketo silently rejecting the change or is there something else I'm missing.

Thanks for your suggestions!

[Kenny_Elkington]

SFDC ID is system managed for records in Marketo.  When a new lead is inserted into or pulled from SFDC, Marketo maps the corresponding SFDC id to the Marketo-side lead.  You can use mergeLead to associate a record to that SFDC ID if one with it already exists in Marketo, though.

[Anonymous]

Where can I find the mergeLead functionality?

We are not using the native integration but instead use Informatica to do the integration work.

In our scenario an insert operation triggers a mapping task in Informatica that adds the new lead to SalesForce. As soon as that lead gets written, an outbound message triggers another Informatica mapping that needs to write the SalesForce Id of the new lead into the SFDCLeadId field in Marketo.

Can we trigger mergeLead for this particular lead record via Informatica or with a SalesForce outbound message?

[Kenny_Elkington]

If you're not using the native SFDC sync, then you shouldn't attempt to write to the native SFDC ID fields at all.  You'll want to create a custom field for this purpose and you should leverage that instead.  I don't know if the informatica connector has implemented merge functionality at this point, but you can find the docs for it here: Merge Lead » Marketo Developers

[Anonymous]

That's some really useful information. Thak you for sharing.

My last question would be if there are any side effects we would be missing by going down this path? Does Marketo perform any clean-ups, validations, duplicate removals etc. when the native integration interacts with that field?

Our main goal is to provide a link between SalesForce and Marketo leads which in our opinion can be done by making sure that the Marketo lead records have always A field (which can for certain be a custom field) that provides us with the reference lead in Sales Force.

[Kenny_Elkington]

Not being familiar with Informatica's connector, I can't say what behavior might be missing, but there is a great deal of functional in the native sync, including company, opportunity, custom object and campaign association.