Managing "company name" updates to CRM contact records | Community
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Dan_Stevens_
Dan_Stevens_
Level 10
May 11, 2017
Question

Managing "company name" updates to CRM contact records

  • May 11, 2017
  • 3 replies
  • 5467 views

As you know, CRM accounts are associated with CRM contacts.  When those contacts sync over to Marketo as new records, all of the information on the "Company Info" tab is read-only.  However, when doing some testing (using an online form submit) - and specifically entering a different company name - the record in Marketo did indeed reflect the new company name (all other information/data stayed intact).  But, as expected, the updated company name did not sync over to CRM (since Marketo cannot write to the account entity). 

But now we have a record that has a different company name in Marketo from what's stored in CRM.  This isn't unrealistic.  A known user could submit a form and enter bogus data; or enter a name that differs slightly from the formal company name contained in CRM. 

I'm curious as to how some of you deal with this.  Do you use custom proxy fields to store these values (when a record is tied to an account record)?

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3 replies

Josh_Hill13
Josh_Hill13
Level 10
May 11, 2017

Proxy fields and field blocking should work.

Brian_Law_MKTO
Brian_Law_MKTO
Level 5
May 12, 2017

Hi Dan, since Account fields are read only, the value in Marketo will eventually be overwritten during the next sync.

For CRM Contacts in Marketo you cannot manually edit Account fields in Marketo’s Lead Detail screen, while you can use a Flow Action to change an Account field value. The change will be temporary until the Account is updated. The value changed will revert to the CRM Account value the next time any update is made to the record and data is synced between the two systems. Cheers!

Dave_Cunningham
Dave_Cunningham
Level 4
May 12, 2017

That is good to know, Brian. That's what I have seen in my testing, but I was never able to get a "confirmation" on this behavior from Marketo... until now .

I am running into an issue related to our field mapping for Company. The way it was set up when we synced Dynamics/Marketo is shown in the below screen grab. The problem for us is that we don't work with the lead object in Dynamics and we have been told that Marketo is not able to map the field to both an Account and Contact object.

This is causing an issue when a Dynamics contact object has its company changed. The change syncs down to Marketo in the places in the screen grab below, but an activity is not listed in the associated lead's Activity Log and smart campaigns are not able to pick up on this as a trigger. This seems strange to me and I am wondering if it is a product "bug" or if I am just missing something or don't have the mapping correct.

Has anyone dealt with this same issue?

Dave_Cunningham
Dave_Cunningham
Level 4
May 16, 2017

Sean_Tierney2
Sean_Tierney2
Level 3
October 23, 2017

@Dan Stevens​ did you end up using proxy fields and field blocking updates...or find a better way to mitigate this problem? Finding ourselves in the same boat now.

Dan_Stevens_
Dan_Stevens_Author
Level 10
October 24, 2017

Sean, we havent had a chance to do any further with this yet.

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