SFDC Account Fields Do Not Always Create Change Data Value Logs in Activity Log!!

[Michael_Langell]

Hi all,

I nearly fell off my seat when I found this out today, but I have gotten this confirmed by technical support and wanted to share this with everyone/ask if anyone else was aware of this?  I am going to start off by saying this is a BIG deal

So for the non-believers of the title, I have a screen shot below of a custom Account object SFDC field in my Marketo instance.  You will notice the date says April 14th, which means that on April 14th, this data value changed in SFDC and a change data value log on April 14th (or later if you have a syncing backlog) should appear in your activity log.  

Except, we DO NOT have that log...

This record was created on 3/30/16, so that is not the issue either.  What I was told by support is below:

Mike called because the field most recent demo set date was not showing up in activity logs. This is due to some backend Marketo logic to not show these updates on records because this would bog down the system. The data still comes through.

Support added that these data value changes will get logged randomly, but not for all accounts or contacts and there is no formula as to how it happens.  To give you an idea why this affects me, we do a lot of account level reporting in Marketo with progression statuses based on account fields and listening to data value changes on the account object.

So I wish there was clear documentation on this and this is certainly a big pain for a lot of B2B customers who use the Account object to a high degree for tracking.  This can be fixed by creating contact fields that mirror our account fields, but that is going to require a decent amount of work.  

-Mike

I have t

[Anonymous]

We've recently come up against this, less than 10% of accounts we create get the transaction lines. This started around 10 August 2017. Pretty frustrating, considering it's been working for us till this point. If it's an established issue on Marketo's end then they should prevent triggers being created against account at all.

[Sara_Greaves]

Wow - this is interesting. Thanks for sharing.

[Gerard_van_den_]

Does anybody know whether this problem also applies to Opportunities? We have a number of triggers that fire on Oppty data value changes, especially Stage.  Any insights are much appreciated.

[Michael_Langell]

Hi Gerard,

Cannot say I have an answer to that question, have not tested opportunities. 

I would do one of the following:

1.  Create a support ticket and reference this discussion or my BetterCloud case 00582509, (not sure if they can see that if you call in) and ask about how it relates to opportunities. 

2.  The easiest way to test this would be to take a field on the opportunity that is tracked in Salesforce, pull an opportunity history report.  Pull a report that displays only contacts with contact roles for those opportunities that have had the field change.  Create a smart list in Marketo on the same Salesforce field that should have the corresponding data value changed.  Make sure the time frames are the same.  Compare the email addresses/SFDC IDs in both lists.  If they are not the same, then the answer is Opportunities have the same problem.

If I have some time, I will take a look at this myself, but we do not use the opportunity in Marketo so it does not effect us.

-Mike     

[Gerard_van_den_]

After going through some support levels I feel I got the answer I was looking for, and actually it's quite interesting (and important) to hear what they have to say about it. I collected the bits and pieces that are the conclusion of the discussion:

[QUOTES]

The "Opportunity is Updated" trigger only evaluates against the activity but not the actual opportunity fields.

Basically, the working constraints are "Previous Value, New Value, Date of Activity, Min # of Times" and none of the other field value constraints will work.

It is however quite confusing to present such option in the UI I'm afraid and I apologise for any inconvenience this has caused you.

We've already petitioned our documentation team to amend the article and once again apologise for the missing information.

Regarding Opportunity updates being registered - the answer is yes - they will appear in the activity log. The only time when this does not happen is if the lead/contact was added to opportunity and the opportunity was updated in SFDC BEFORE the lead is created in Marketo. In this case, Marketo will only bring down the opportunity, but you won't see a Opportunity is updated activity in the activity log.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Thanks for the add'l info, Gerard.

To the last paragraph -- this is expected as it's the same behavior as when a lead/contact is updated in SFDC before being synced (and, for that matter, when there are multiple changes in SFDC in the sync window).

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

Anyone with a Revenue Cycle Model will likely have Opportunities tied to later model stages.

They may be able to check.  At the moment I am mired in team overload or I would certainly help test!

[Gerard_van_den_]

Thanks Mike, I'll start with a case as you suggested, any interesting info out of that, I will share here.

[Diederik_Marte4]

Just out of interest. Is it just not showing the log, or is a trigger also not firing?

[Michael_Langell]

Hi Diederik Martens​

The trigger will not fire because there is no change data value activity to fire upon.  I probably should have been more clear in my title/description that this is the major problem here.  Any Marketo customer who uses the data value changes trigger on account level fields will experience a failure rate where the trigger does not process.  Without the logged activity, it is if the change never took place.

-Mike

[Dan_Stevens_]

Wow, this is the first I've seen this thread (didn't catch it when it was originally posted in May).  As a member of the ABM Early Adopter Program - where we'll be interacting much more with the account entity in CRM (we use MS Dynamics) - I wonder how this will impact the activities that we'll be relying on within the Marketo ABM solution.

Mahesh Jeswani (MJ)​

[Michael_Langell]

Posting latest comment from Support on this.  Context here was I was asking if Project Orion may address the above concerns or if this may get addressed on the product roadmap at some point.  Did not get the answer I was looking for

Project Orion is a project to improve Marketo performance. Omitting the activity entries on lead records is not for a performance reason, but a design decision, and thusly Project Orion will not address this issue and there are no plans to change this type of reporting in the future. You could certainly post a Marketo Community Ideas post and try to get it some attention.  It's just apart of Marketo's 'Secret Sauce' that no one knows specifically how it works but just generally the results of how it works.

Miles Ybaben​ FYI

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

Thanks for the update!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Mahesh Jeswani​,

Is that you who could provide and answer to this?

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Mike,

This is puzzling!

And yes, this is a real, enormous problem for some customers that rely mostly on account info, rather than on contact info, to manage a lot of things (owner, territories, assignment, relationship statuses, ...).

We need to know more about this limitation, urgently.

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Important point: in large orgs, it is not possible to evolve the SFDC data model as we would like.

At minimum, these evolutions will require internal RFCs, cost evaluation, budget assignment, internal billing, tests on multiple platforms, planning in the middle of tens of other RFC required by other users with more political power, and a lot of push back from the IT teams more or less opposed to the Marketing Automation selected by the Marketing, despite IT recommendation. And finally months of patience to get it solved. All these processes and latencies are quite difficult to manage when we have good reasons, but here, it will be just impossible to really justify, simply because the Marketing teams needs it to compensable a weakness in the Marketing Automation product.

Really concerning.

-Greg

Kenny Elkington​, Louiza Verykiou​, John Clark we need your help on this

[Anonymous]

This is indeed a super concerning matter for which I expect full support from the Marketo team. Grégoire describes perfectly the situation that will be mine in a couple of weeks and I have no idea how we would justify any further investment to my steering committee.

- Aurelie

[Anonymous]

Thanks for sharing