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How to Integrate Salesforce and Marketo for Better Reporting
Salesforce and Marketo’s integration allows you to connect your CRM data to your analytics. We walk you through how it works and what data you’ll be able to access.
Marketers working on high-value content across many channels and timeframes often end up using marketing automation tools. Currently, around 51% of marketers are estimated to be using marketing automation.
Being able to connect data from your marketing automation tool to your CRM is vital for better understanding the impact of your marketing efforts.
For users of Marketo and Salesforce, their integration is a fantastic offering.
It’s a great integration that can help marketers send and receive data to better sync sales and marketing teams.
In this blog, we’ll go through:
Let’s get started.
The Marketo-Salesforce integration is one fantastic aspect of the Marketo platform.
It’s a native integration with bidirectional information flow which means you can share data both ways.
Marketo and Salesforce’s integration can help you better understand your leads and marry data from your CRM to your Marketo platform.
📈Pro Tip
Only using Marketo for its attribution arm? Remember there are much more cost-effective and intuitive applications out there for attribution.
Here’s more on a reporting and attribution alternative to Bizible/Marketo you might want to consider.
This integration is key in marketing and sales alignment and can help you transform your marketing into a revenue generation tool.
There are a few things you need to understand about how this integration works:
It’s important to consider all of this as you need to be sure you understand how the data transfer works.
The connection between Salesforce and Marketo is bidirectional only for leads, contacts and campaigns.
For each record type, changes in either Salesforce or Marketo will be reflected in the other too.
Different elements that can be synced include
This integration will likely be a vital part of your marketing ecosystem.
But, there are two key things to keep in mind.
Setting up an integration between Marketo and Salesforce is all well and good. But if you don’t have the processes and a good grip on managing your lead data already, you’ll struggle to get benefit out of this sync.
You want sales and marketing to work together and this integration does allow that, but it only unlocks that potential.
For the integration to truly work, you need really effective lead management and an understanding of how you’ll use the data you’ll get.
🚀 Pro Tip
Many marketers, us included, want simple data at our fingertips. That’s why we created Ruler Analytics. To help marketers because marketing measurement is broken. Better data means better optimisation which means better results in the future. Our marketing attribution tool can help you unlock that.
See everything you can discover in Ruler and how it could be a better solution to the data gap you’re suffering.
While it doesn’t require a lot of maintenance, you will still need to tend to this integration and its data.
Sync errors occur, but also your team will likely evolve processes. So it might be the case that you need to review how your data is being moved around from time to time.
You definitely can’t set and forget this integration.
There are quite a few steps involved in setting up your Salesforce and Marketo sync.
So, bare with us!
They include:
First, sign into Salesforce and click on Setup.
From the Build menu, click on the Customise option and choose Leads.
Then click on Fields.
Click on New in the Custom Fields & Relationships section at the bottom of the page.
Select the suitable field type and click Next.
Then, insert the Field Label, Length, and Field Name for the field. Select, Next.
Here, you need to configure your access settings.
You want to fix the roles to Visible and Read-Only except for the profile of your sync user and system administrator.
Select the page layouts that should show the field.
Click on Save & New to return and produce more custom fields.
Any custom fields in Salesforce need to be connected to a corresponding field (from lead to contact) to ensure that data can be carried over.
Setting this up is simple.
In Salesforce, click on Setup.
Head to Fields, click that and then Leads.
Here, move down to Lead Custom Fields and Relationships and select Map Lead Fields.
Here, you can choose the field you wish to map.
You can then choose the corresponding contact custom field.
You’ll need to do this for every custom field you have.
When you’re done, click Save and move onto step 3.
In Salesforce, head to Setup and Profiles.
Click on New. Choose Standard User, name the profile “Marketo-Salesforce Sync” and click on Save.
Once that’s all set up, you’ll want to configure your security permissions.
You should see an option to edit these.
In the Administrative Permissions section, ensure the following boxes are ticked:
In the General User Permissions section, ensure the following boxes are indicated:
In the Standard Object Permissions section, ensure that Read, Create, Edit, and Delete permissions are indicated:
Once you’ve checked all those, click Save at the bottom of the page.
Now your profile is up and running, you’ll want to take a look at your field permissions too.
This helps you ensure the right data is moved across to the right fields.
Head to Field-Level Security in the profile detail page. Click on View and set the accessibility for the objects:
To do this, on every object, you’ll need to click Edit.
Locate the fields that are not required, ensure that Read Access and Edit Access are not checked. Click on Save after you are done.
Once you have disabled all the unneeded fields, you must check Read Access and Edit Access for the following object fields. Click on Save after you are done.
| Object | Fields |
| Account | Type field |
| Event | All fields |
| Task | All fields |
Head to the Manage users section and there, click on Users. Then select New User.
Fill in the required fields and then select the User License: Salesforce and the Profile that you already made. Click on Save after you are done.
Firstly, you need to get your Security Token from Salesforce.
Signed in to Salesforce as the Marketo Sync User profile you created, head to My Settings.
There, search for ‘reset’ and click on Reset My Security Token. Reset your Security Token, this will be sent to you via email.
Once you’ve done this, head to Marketo.
There, go to Admin and click on CRM.
Then, select Sync with Salesforce.
Input your Salesforce Security Token and click Sync Fields.
Confirm Credentials and you’re done.
Finally, you’re ready to start syncing data.
Click on Start Salesforce Sync to start the Marketo-Salesforce sync.
Click on START SYNC.
To verify your sync, head to Marketo. Here, click on Admin > Salesforce.
In this view, you’ll be able to check your sync status. You should be able to see it in the top right-hand corner.
It will show either:
If it’s failed, you’ll need to look at troubleshooting this.
And that’s it!
Take a breath because that was a lot. But, that’s how you set up the Salesforce-Marketing sync.
These seven steps are a lot.
And, as we discussed before, you can run into a few hurdles when setting up and running syncs between Salesforce and Marketo.
While it’s probably one of the better integrations out there, it has a lot of differences to get past since the data in Salesforce is stored so differently to Marketo.
So, if you’re looking for a simple way to manage this integration, then it might be worth considering a marketing attribution tool.
Related: Best marketing attribution tools out there
While it can be costly to incorporate another tool, the great thing about attribution is that it can push and pull data from anywhere.
Take Ruler, for example. Ruler can automatically sync data from Salesforce in and out to basically any app you’re using, whether it’s Google Analytics, Facebook Ads or more.
So if you decided to swap from Salesforce to HubSpot, you wouldn’t need to worry about the data being lost while you made that change.
Plus, all of your data integration is done completely automatically.
You don’t have to sequence a sync to push revenue data from your CRM back to your marketing activities in Marketo.
💡Pro Tip
Read more about marketing attribution and how it works here. You’ll learn how easy it is to integrate this tool into your marketing stack, plus how it can make your life so much easier.
So, if you’re considering integrating Marketo and Salesforce, then hopefully this was a good starting point.
Remember though, there are easier ways to get better data from your marketing stack.
Learn more about Ruler Analytics and what it can offer you by booking a demo.
Our team will run you through how our platform works and how it pushes and pulls the data you need, where you need it most.
