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Anonymous
September 2, 2015
Question

Merging records & overwriting fields with NULL values?

  • September 2, 2015
  • 3 replies
  • 2012 views

Anyone have this experience? Sometimes a lead is being merged automatically, but some fields are being overwritten with NULL values. I'm losing valuable data. I can see that the field was changed to the values I need, but at the time of merge, it looks like, I must be losing those values because suddenly my fields are blank.

I've been back and forth with support about that, they suggested it could be because I was blocking updates, so I've adjusted the amount of updates I'm blocking (at this point only blocking updates from flow actions & form submissions), but it has provided no change and I am still losing data.

How can this happen? Why would Marketo want to overwrite values with NULL? It seems so absurd to me, but is there maybe a setting I don't know about that I can change to prevent this from happening? Anyone else ever have this experience?

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3 replies

Josh_Hill13
Josh_Hill13
Level 10
September 2, 2015

Is the merge occurring in Marketo or SFDC?

I suspect SFDC is doing this and the Master record has blank values and they are getting pushed back to Marketo. If you cannot determine this with your SFDC Admin, call Support.

Anonymous
September 3, 2015

well the thing is, before I was blocking the change from a salesforce sync, which is why I don't think it is SFDC. Support told me to modify my field block settings, so I did this but no change.

I have the exact same settings for the "lead source" field and have had no problem with that field. :/

Anonymous
September 9, 2015

I think that the issue lies with the fact that the leads which the values seem to be overwritten are being added to SFDC from an API as CONTACTS and then synced into Marketo and using a webhook to call the marketo token and associate it to the lead record. This is the time where I notice that I'm losing data. If the lead is synced into SFDC from Marketo as a lead, then it's no problem. Assuming this is the issue, would any one happen to know WHY Marketo would just overwrite that field value to NULL, and if there is a way to fix it? I've also tried to build a new Marketo custom field that does not sync into SFDC at any point, thinking that maybe it was the sync issue, but I have had no luck with that either. Values are still being overwritten. 

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