Marketo Sync Person Updates to SFDC Reverting Lead Status After Manual Salesforce Update

Hi Everyone,

We're investigating an interesting Marketo–Salesforce synchronization behavior and would appreciate any insights from the community.

We have a Lead Status field that is synced between Salesforce Lead Status and the corresponding Person Status field in Marketo. The lifecycle progression is managed through Marketo lifecycle programs, while Salesforce users can manually update the Lead Status.

Here's the sequence we observed:

1. Marketo updates the Lead Status to New/MQL, which successfully syncs to Salesforce.

2. A Salesforce user manually changes the Lead Status from New/MQL to Not Qualified.

3. A Salesforce Flow is triggered, but it only updates the Lead Owner to the Marketo queue. It does not update the Lead Status or Status Reason.

4. A few minutes later, during Sync Person Updates to SFDC, the Lead Status is changed back to New/MQL by the Marketo Integration User.

We've reproduced this behavior on multiple test leads.

Adobe Support has confirmed the following:

• No second Smart Campaign or trigger campaign updated the Lead Status.

• At the time of the outbound sync, Marketo still held New/MQL.

• The update back to Salesforce occurred during Sync Person Updates to SFDC.

• Their available logs do not expose the field-level reason why Lead Status was included in that outbound sync payload.

On the Salesforce side:

• The only automation is a Flow that updates the Lead Owner when the status becomes Not Qualified.

• There are no Salesforce Flows, Process Builders, Workflows, or Apex Triggers that change the Lead Status back to New/MQL.

• The lifecycle automation is handled entirely in Marketo.

My questions are:

• Has anyone experienced Marketo resending an older field value back to Salesforce during Sync Person Updates to SFDC after a manual Salesforce update?

• Could updating another field (such as Owner) during the same Salesforce transaction cause Marketo to resend previously held values?

• Is there any known behavior or synchronization scenario where Marketo includes an unchanged field in the outbound sync payload even though no Smart Campaign updated it?

Any insights, similar experiences, or documentation would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!