Preventing forms from overwriting exisiting job title

[Anonymous]

Hey Community,

I'd like to prevent someone's Salesforce record from being overwritten with bad information entered into a form.  

For example, when an exisiting contact (who isn't cookied) fills a form on our website, their Job Title in Salesforce is overwritten with the data entered in the form.  We had "CMO" and then the user entered "asldfkajsdf".  

I'd like marketo forms to be smarter and say "If the Job Title in Salesforce is blank, insert data entered by user into the form. If Job Title in Salesforce is populated, do not overwrite."  Is this possible?

Thanks!
-Lee
 

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

Hi Lee,

You might want to lock the field from updating in the Admin area.  That way, whatever is entered in SFDC is the accepted Job Title.

That change will be made globally, however, so you probably won't want to do this for just one form.

I would also toy around with the CHANGE DATA VALUE option in your FLOW, but I'm not sure that would work correctly.

Hope this helps at least a little!

Jenn

[Anonymous]

Hi Jenn, 

Thanks for the idea.  I might go that route and make the job title field at the contact level "read only"... but it would be pretty cool  if there could be logic so the field it is populated by the form when the job title field is currently blank.  

Thanks,
-Lee

[Josh_Hill13]

Yes, the best way is to do Field Blocking:

Admin > Field Managment

then pull over the field you want and choose Field Blocking. You can block various input sources from overwriting existing values. Usually Form and some others are good choices.

You'll want to do this for Lead Source and probably a few other fields that should never be overwritten.

[Anonymous]

Hey Lee,

Marketo does allow this. If the field is not empty, it will not overwrite. But if empty, it will add the value.

[Anonymous]

Hey Jeff, 

I also thought it did... but i tested in and it did overwrite exisiting values.  I also remembered it working that way at my previous company, but here it actually does overwrite.  I'm going to check out Josh's suggesstion and post back with more info.

Thanks,
-Lee

[Jenn_DiMaria2 · Accepted solution]

I think I may have come up with an alternative solution that a) won't overwrite data that's already there and b) be done on a form-by-form basis instead of blocking the field updates for your entire account.

In Marketo, create a field called something like MKTO JOB TITLE

This is the field you'll add to the form on your landing page instead of JOB TITLE.

In the FLOW, you'll then add:

CHANGE DATA VALUE
If JOB TITLE -> IS EMPTY -> {{lead.MKTO JOB TITLE}}
Otherwise, -- DO NOTHING --

Let me know if something like that might work.

Thanks!
Jenn

[Anonymous]

Jenn, 
 

That's a really cool work-around.  Thanks for sharing -- this will also allow me to occasionally compare what we have in Salesforce with what people are submitting on their own.  We are in a relativelyh small market so the majority of people filling out our forms are already in SF with clean data. 

Thanks!
-Lee