Best practice to sync to program to SFDC campaign or not to sync

I think "best practice" is kind of an empty phrase. Too often it's just an excuse to avoid critical thinking or a way to masquerade one's own personal preferences as some kind of universal truth. 

[disembarking from the soapbox]

Anyhow, I think it really depends on how you're reporting. If Marketo meets 100% of your reporting needs and you will not want to look at campaign data or campaign influence within Salesforce ever, then you'd have no need to sync to campaigns. 

Also, I think Salesforce campaign reporting out of the box has a lot wrong with it. 

However, the campaign object in SFDC also offers a lot of flexibility, and Salesforce reporting engine in general is more flexible than Marketo's in many ways. If you are smart about how you structure your campaigns in SFDC, you now have data that you can report on in different ways, you can enrich that data by adding custom fields to campaign member records, etc. to really match the reporting to your needs. 

So my advice is, look at what your reporting requirements are, what data you need to fulfill them, and in what place that data should reside to give you the flexibility and reporting power you need. That's your best practice. :D

Justin Norris | Perkuto

Justin gives good advice.

My personal preference is to sync it all and to sync Programs to SFDC Campaigns to get more data into SFDC. Then you have options on reporting as Justin suggests.

There are a number of reasons to sync it all because

• easier deduping
• data is in both systems - not beholden to Marketo for your data
• options to report increase
• better sfdc campaign data for future options.

Thank you Justin and Josh,

Both of your responses are informative and most appreciated.  

I like the idea of customizing the campaign member fields for reporting. (We've barely scratched the surface for this.)

Your answers have shed some light on what I believe is my MD's core concern -  losing the option of changing or adding statuses to a synced SFDC campaign after it's been synced to a whole program.

As I understand it, If she does change an existing SFDC campaign status, or add an additional SFDC status, but doesn't make a parallel change/addition to the channel related to MKTO program -  she runs the risk of invalidating MKTO program flows for updating statuses in SFDC when they update in MKTO.

That's correct, yes? 

Thank you so much for your time,
Lynn