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A
Anonymous
June 18, 2015
Solved

Salesforce Formula Field Syncing

  • June 18, 2015
  • 3 replies
  • 9694 views

Hello -

I have recently discovered in my new Marketing role that our Marketo signature fields from Salesforce may not always be accurate.

We currently have formula fields on our SF Leads and Contacts that look over to our Territory object (Internal and External coverage for the record) and then over to the User object to pull in our User's contact information (Name, Title, Phone and Email).  These formula fields update based on coverage changes as well as when we have User updates.

The issue appears to be that Marketo doesn't notice these changes because the formula fields do not trigger an update to the Last Modified Date timestamp.

I was curious if anyone has come across similar issues and what you did to make your information accurate.

My current thoughts are to build a workflow rule that will update the timestamp whenever any of the fields are changed.  This would be the easiest solution that I've thought of but having briefly spoken with Marketo this may not work either as the timestamp doesn't check for everything.

The more drawn out plan would be to create a secondary text field for each of the signature fields that will be updated by a workflow rule when a value is changed.  This will create an update to the field that is recognized by Marketo with the timestamp.  This will also make us have to redo our current signature lines in Marketo to reference these new fields instead of our previous formula fields.

Any thoughts?

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Best answer by

We had an issue with multiple channel signatures being needed for each Contact/Lead with our IT team and as a result they have updated the tables to store the user contact information.  The results of this update no longer requires us to use formula fields to update the information.

I did however attempt this method prior to IT agreeing to work on my channel issue.  As simple of a setup as it was I could never get the information to function as I had expected.  We are using a custom "Territory" object with User lookup on it.  Not sure if that is what was causing my issue but I set one of my rules to look at the User First Name and if it were changed to reflect that change on a text field on the Contact object.  I'm sure if I messed with it some more I could have got it to work.  Seems like a good option to get around this formula issue.

3 replies

A
Anonymous
June 25, 2015

Let me change the question slightly:

How do you get Marketo to update a Salesforce field that has a formula data type?

Just found this but I still have some concerns.

How does Marketo see and pull data from Salesforce Formula Fields?

A
Anonymous
June 25, 2015

So it appears that the refresh to the modstamp actually did refresh the data as I was hoping and separate fields are not required.

Now it just looks as though I'll need to find a way to update the stamp when any formula field used by Marketo is updated.

Any ideas?

I'd hate to have to make a long workflow based on ischanged but that's what I'm leaning towards currently.

A
Anonymous
June 30, 2015

Tried building out a workflow using ischanged() on the formula fields I'm trying to update.  It did not work as the ischanged() formula can't be used with the "subsequently meets criteria" which would be necessary when referencing a formula.

Then tried using ischanged() with the actual fields referenced in the formula referenced above and it too did not work as it gave an error stating that it could not reference the field.

So I'm back to the question:

How do you get Marketo to update a Salesforce field that has a formula data type?

ie - How do you get Salesforce to update the modstamp when a formula field changes?

I think it could be done by creating workflow rules that populate new fields with the formula values but that would cause us to have to rework more information than I would care to.

P
PhillipWi1
Level 9
July 20, 2015

More info on this since we are having the same problem. Even a sync from Marketo won't resolve this (either through a Smart Campaign or a Single Flow Action) since Marketo looks at that regular SystemModStamp in Salesforce. Even if you force a sync, unless that timestamp is updated, it does nothing.

Quite frustrating!

A
Anonymous
September 3, 2015

If I understand this correctly, it sounds like you want an update to the Territory (which I think is a parent to Leads and Contacts) to cause the Marketo sync to grab the newest formula value for all the related Leads and Contacts.

If that is correct, you may be able to achieve this with the Process Builder in Salesforce. The Process Builder allows you to update all child records for the triggering record - which means you could trigger a simple update (e.g., check a checkbox) to all child Leads and Contacts for the Territory. This would update the 'Last Modified' value for these records, causing Marketo to include them in the next sync.

If you are not familiar with the process builder, it does not require any coding knowledge. Here are the instructions from Salesforce on updating child records through the process builder:

Update child records from parent using Process Builder

Note: The Process Builder is not currently 'bulkified', which means it only triggers correctly off of a user updating the record. I assume you are manually updating the Territory records, so that is probably fine.

The Process Builder is supposed to be properly bulkified in Winter 16, in case you need to trigger updates to many Territory records at once(e.g., through the API or data loader)

A
Anonymous
Accepted solution
September 8, 2015

We had an issue with multiple channel signatures being needed for each Contact/Lead with our IT team and as a result they have updated the tables to store the user contact information.  The results of this update no longer requires us to use formula fields to update the information.

I did however attempt this method prior to IT agreeing to work on my channel issue.  As simple of a setup as it was I could never get the information to function as I had expected.  We are using a custom "Territory" object with User lookup on it.  Not sure if that is what was causing my issue but I set one of my rules to look at the User First Name and if it were changed to reflect that change on a text field on the Contact object.  I'm sure if I messed with it some more I could have got it to work.  Seems like a good option to get around this formula issue.

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