Customers records duplicating in Marketo?

Hi Jessica,

The Marketo sync should bring down all leads and contacts it can see in Salesforce, regardless of whether or not they're in a campaign that's synced with a program, with the exception of when the sync user doesn't have permission to see those records in Salesforce. To clarify,

This statement is true: "All records in Salesforce should come down to Marketo by default"

This statement is false: "All records in Marketo will get pushed up to Salesforce by default" (a campaign or synced program needs to tell them to sync)

It sounds like maybe the sync user isn't able to see all of the records in Salesforce. I recommend that you try logging into Salesforce using the sync user's credentials, and make sure you can see the lead you wanted it to update.

Grant

Hi Jessica,

First, there is a bit of a clarification here:

Jessica Ruffalo wrote: The Problem/Question – Not all of our customers are in SFDC Campaigns synced with Marketo therefore all of our customers in SFDC are not all in Marketo. (pretty sure this is a factual statement).

Not quite and not necessarily. When you first opened your sync between Salesforce and Marketo, Marketo automatically pulled down every record that is in Salesforce at that time--and if any new records are made in Salesforce.com are also automatically brought into Marketo. So, at least at one point, you had everything mirrored. Now, what may have happened is because Marketo charges per-record (unlike Salesforce, which charges per user), your company may have made the decision to remove these records from Marketo to save money thinking "oh, we don't send emails to X anyway."

Unfortunately in your case, the way Marketo handles records that come in from Salesforce is essentially to "protect them"--that is, unlike records created in Marketo, Marketo will not merge the Marketo-only version of a record and a Marketo-Salesforce linked version of a record together. All other data can be the same or otherwise compatible; it just won't do it.

As such, you're stuck having a non-SFDC Marketo record and a SFDC-linked Marketo record unless you specifically merge them on the Marketo side. Your choice on what to do next will be based on two things:

1. How big is your customer database? Could you reasonably bring all of those records over into Marketo? I highly recommend doing this if it is at all feasible from a budgetary perspective--even something as simple as making sure you can honor when someone subscribes/unsubscribes across both platforms can be worth the legal fees later. This will also force there to be no instance where there's a SFDC record but not a MKTO one.
2. How often does the form issue occur? Compared to the size of your database, it may not be worth it to perform a functional bidirectional sync--if this is an issue that only occurs a couple of times a week, I'd just manually merge them as part of the ongoing maintenance of your database.

Thank you Grant & Courtney - our instances were integrated years ago and our duplicates have gotten out of control (300k+).  We are looking to do a merge clean up on the Marketo side.  SFDC is currently cleaning up data on their side as well.  But a process must be in place to make sure this doesn't happen again and that's where I'm making sure I completely understand the sync and how it works.

So I've gathered then that because of the Marketo and SFDC auto sync, records in SFDC will be in Marketo.  BUT a net new lead in Marketo will not necessarily sync to SFDC unless pushed via a Marketo Program -> SFDC Campaign or a triggered campaign to add sync to SFDC.