n-Marketo + Salesforce Integration: What the Native Sync Actually Covers
Marketo and Salesforce sync natively out of the box, Adobe built the connector itself, not a third party. Leads, contacts, and campaign membership flow between the two on a short interval, and Marketo activity shows up right inside the Salesforce record through Sales Insight. Here's what that actually handles, and where custom automation picks up.
What the native sync handles
Lead and contact records. New leads created in Salesforce sync to Marketo, and leads that meet your sync rules in Marketo (commonly, once they're assigned or match an existing record) sync back to Salesforce as leads or contacts.
Campaign membership. When Marketo moves someone through a program, Salesforce can reflect that as campaign membership and status, so a rep can see program history without opening Marketo at all.
Marketo activity inside the Salesforce record. Sales Insight surfaces email opens, web visits, and score changes directly on the lead or contact, which is the single most useful thing the native connector does for a rep day to day.
Where it stops
The native sync is built around standard leads, contacts, and campaigns. Custom Salesforce objects, non-standard opportunity fields, or anything specific to how your pipeline actually runs sit outside what it covers.
A score crossing a threshold updates a field. It doesn't, on its own, create a task, send an alert, or route the lead to a specific rep based on territory or product logic that lives outside both systems. That's a rule someone has to build.
And the connector is built for Salesforce specifically. If your sales team runs a different CRM, the native sync simply doesn't apply, and connecting the two systems means building against both APIs directly.
What we've built on top of Marketo and Salesforce
A B2B software company running Marketo for nurture and Salesforce for the pipeline had the native sync in place and still had a gap: a lead crossing the hot-score threshold showed up correctly in Salesforce, but nothing told a rep it had happened. Reps checked a report when they remembered to, which meant a hot lead could sit for a day or more before anyone called.
We built a rule that fires the moment a lead crosses that threshold: it creates a Salesforce task, assigns it to the right rep based on territory, and attaches the nurture program context so the rep knows what the lead has already seen before they pick up the phone. The score change stopped being a field nobody checked and started being the thing that actually gets a call made.
Running Marketo and Salesforce side by side and still relaying messages between them?
Tell us what's supposed to happen the moment a lead crosses your score threshold or a program finishes. We'll work out exactly where the native sync already has you covered and where it doesn't. And if it's a different pair of systems with the same kind of gap, that's fine too, this isn't just a Marketo problem.
Let's talk