Marketo and Salesforce

Hi Colleen:

Here is how I would approach this:

1. Create a custom "How did you hear about us" field in Marketo (custom fields created in Marketo will not sync to SFDC).

2. Add the field to your form

3. Create a campaign that triggers off of the form fill-out.

In the flow, use a Change Data Value flow step with the following Choice: If Lead Source is empty, then enter the following token for the new value: {{lead.How did you hear about us}}. The Default Choice of the flow step would then be "Do nothing".

Add another Change Data Value flow step that sets the field "How did you hear about us" to "NULL" (Note: This must be all upper case "NULL" to reset the field - "null", or "Null" will not work)

 

There might be business reasons that you want an extra field to capture the source that I am not aware of but here is another alternative.

Your Lead Source field in SFDC is probably already mapped/synced to the Source Field in Marketo and you don't really need to create an extra field to achieve what you want.

(1) In your form, you can just label the field to "How did you hear about us".  The field is still called "Source" in your Lead Detail Page

(2) Make the Source field to be Blocked from Update from Form Fillout so this won't override whatever value is already stored - http://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000KypCCAS

New value will still be captured.

Here is the challenge: Once the field was filled-out, it will be pre-populated next time the lead visits a form -- unless it's a progressive profiling form, of course.

In such cases, you need a Marketo only field to capture the information in the form, and then some logic (a campaign) to transfer that information into the actual data field while resetting the field that is used in the forms.

Clear as mud? ;)