Getting started with Salesforce sync

Hi, my name is James Leedung and I’m currently a customer technical advisor at Adobe for the Marketo Engage product. I was a member of the Adobe Marketo Engage 2022 Champion class and I’ve been using Marketo Engage for about seven years. I’ve been working with our marketing automation customers and consultants for years as well. Today, we’re going to be talking through the Marketo and Salesforce Sync. This tutorial will include how the sync works, setting up the sync to get the right data flowing, and finally, a few things to check on to make sure it’s working properly. This is a pretty significant undertaking, so expect to spend some time and effort ensuring that all pieces are correct before you flip the switch. It’s vital to remember that only one Salesforce instance can be synced to one Marketo instance. You cannot switch Salesforce instances or credentials once you’ve set this up. One of Marketo Engage’s most powerful features is its native integration with Salesforce. Your marketing team spends money and resources in order to engage the prospects and customers in Marketo Engage, while your sales team does their own outreach and account management in Salesforce. While neither system can fully replace the other, there are parts that can be managed in either platform, causing a need for the two systems to speak to one another. Basically, you can visualize the Marketo Engage and Salesforce Sync as a constant conversation between the two that look for an object, such as a lead or contact, to be updated on one end and then reflected as an update on the other end. This happens every five minutes. If a lead is updated in Salesforce, then on that cyclical five-minute mark, Marketo Engage and Salesforce will look to the fields that are synced between that object and update the record for only the field that changed. Let’s take a lead status update, for example. Say a sales rep makes a change in the Salesforce system to update a lead status from new to working, indicating that the lead is now being reached out to by the sales rep. In this situation, some organizations would want to pause marketing communications with that lead so the salesperson can have a tailored conversation regarding the product. Soon after the lead status is updated to working, Salesforce will send that information to Marketo Engage in order to update the person record on the Marketo Engage side. Marketo Engage will then reflect that the specific record has a status of working. Other objects may be synced between the systems as well, such as accounts, opportunities, users, campaigns, activities, and custom objects. For the most part, these objects will be read by Marketo Engage, but it will not have the option to update any fields on those objects. If your Salesforce system admin creates a new field and makes it visible to the Marketo sync profile, Marketo Engage will create the exact same field inside your instance and start syncing to that new field. The way Marketo Engage sees what’s happening is through a user in Salesforce called the Marketo Sync User. This user must have its own profile and permission sets in Salesforce, as this is how you limit the amount of fields and other data coming into your Marketo Engage instance. Consider this Marketo Sync User as a window into your Salesforce instance, as well as Salesforce’s window into your Marketo Engage instance. When you first sync your Marketo Engage and Salesforce instances, it could take up to a few days for all of the data to run through the systems. This will depend on the amount of data that both systems hold, but in general, the switch should be flipped during off hours, like a Friday afternoon. Make sure to communicate to all users of your Salesforce and Marketo Engage instances in case they see slowdowns or lags in data. It’s always better to over communicate. Now let’s get into the setup steps. The first step to set up the Salesforce Sync is to make sure you have access to the Marketo Engage admin section, and that you or another team member have access to the Salesforce API. You’ll want your Salesforce admin to add three new fields on the lead and contact objects – Score, Acquisition Program, and Acquisition Date. These three fields will be field types of number, text, and date time, respectively. All the field names of Lead Score, Acquisition Date, and Acquisition Program should be consistent with what you are seeing on the screen. Then map these fields for conversion between leads and contacts so that the data will be passed over to the new contact record upon lead conversion. You can also add a few other fields that can be synced for Marketo Engage to Salesforce, but that’s optional. Step two of setting up the Sync is to create the Marketo Sync user that we mentioned previously. Again, this user has to have its own profile to prevent all of Salesforce data from coming into your Marketo Engage instance. First off, create a new profile by cloning a standard user profile and name that new profile Marketo Sync. Now edit the profile detail and make sure the Administrative Permissions boxes for API enabled, Edit HTML Templates, Manage Public Documents, and Manage Public Templates are checked. Navigate down to the General User Permissions and make sure the Convert Leads, Edit Events, and Edit Tasks boxes are checked. Next, make sure that the Marketo Sync user profile has access to read, create, edit, and delete the following standard objects, accounts, campaigns, contacts, leads, and opportunities. Click Save. Marketo Engage will not delete any records besides leads and contacts and only then if specified in flow steps within Smart Campaigns. The next few steps are about selecting which fields to sync from Salesforce to Marketo Engage, which can take a while and are best done with feedback from other parts of the business. So, it’s helpful if you and some other members of your organization go through them together. A quick piece of advice here, you can always add more fields later, so don’t stress about getting everything absolutely perfect on the first pass. The more fields that you sync, the more data needs to be passed over and the slower the sync can be. A general rule of thumb is that if you don’t need to view it or you can’t action it in Marketo Engage, then it likely doesn’t need to be there. As you go through the account, contact, lead, and opportunity fields that you want created and synced in your Marketo Engage instance, be sure to take notes of field descriptions. Sometimes a field can say type and another field can say record type, so having a data dictionary that will explain the difference between those two fields will be helpful in the future. Finally, we’ll create the actual user within Salesforce. You want to put a username of marketosync at your company domain or something similar. An extra tip here, you can use an internal email distribution list for the email section so that when you reset the password, a few different people can access the email. You can also put your email address as well. Click save and now you have your Marketo user. Step three of the Marketo and Salesforce sync is hooking it up from the Marketo Engage admin tab. For this, you’ll need two things, Marketo Engage admin permissions and the Salesforce security token for your Marketo sync user. Also know what we covered before. Only one Salesforce instance can be synced to one Marketo Engage instance. You cannot switch Salesforce instances or credentials once you have this set up. Side note, if you see a login to Salesforce button instead of the username, password and token fields, then OAuth is enabled in your Marketo Engage instance and there are a couple other steps to complete before syncing. You can find these steps within the experience league documentation linked below. You’ll select the security token and the email address that you use to set up the Marketo sync user will receive the email reset link. From there, you’ll navigate to the admin tab Marketo Engage and then to the left tree to find integration and click on CRM. You’ll select salesforce.com and insert the username, password and security token from Salesforce. If this is a Salesforce sandbox instance and not production, you can designate that here. Click sync fields. Remember, the amount of fields that sync over will dictate the amount of information being passed between the systems. The next screen will be a bit dramatic, but it is true. Once Marketo and Salesforce are synced, you cannot switch to another Salesforce subscription. Click confirm credentials if this is the instance you want to connect to. Next, navigate to the Salesforce tab in the admin section and click start sync. Again, you’ll want to do this after working hours so you don’t bog down the system with the impending data transfer. Click start sync and off you go. Once your sync is started, you can check on your sync status by clicking the Salesforce tab on the left side of the Marketo Engage admin section and looking in the top right for either messages last synced, sync in progress or last sync failed. Let’s go over some tips and tricks for managing your Salesforce sync. As we talked about before, your sync speed will depend on the amount of objects and fields that are passed between the two systems. For example, if you have a large account in your Salesforce system that has a few hundred or even a few thousand contacts associated, all of those contacts will need to be passed to a Marketo Engage for an update to a related account field. If there are fields that do not need to be in Marketo Engage, but they’re already synced, you can simply hide the field from the Marketo sync user in Salesforce and it will break the sync for that one field only. Once you see there is no CRM field mapping in the field management tab in the admin section of Marketo, you can remove all dependencies and hide the field. If you want the field completely deleted, you can request a ticket with Marketo support, but a field with that same name can never be introduced to your Marketo instance again. Better to leave them hidden just in case. And with that, you’ve synced your Salesforce and Marketo Engage systems. It’s important to remember that things will occasionally change on both the Marketo Engage and Salesforce sites, and the managers of both systems will need to be notified of any field updates that occur. It can be an ongoing project to make sure the systems are both playing nicely together, so don’t just set it and forget it. We’ve covered how the Salesforce sync works, setting up the Salesforce sync to get the right data flowing, and finally a few things to check on to make sure it’s working properly. As always, reach out to Marketo support with any concerns or issues that arise. Thanks so much for tuning in.