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May 19, 2016
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Failed to merge leads [3223918]

  • May 19, 2016
  • 3 replies
  • 6972 views

I just received this error trying to merge two leads.

Any ideas on what might have caused this error?

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Best answer by Roxann_McGlump1

Hi David,

The most common cause for lead merge failure is lack of permissions on the CRM you have synced to your Marketo instance.  If you have Marketo synced to Salesforce, for instance, when you merge the leads in Marketo, the Marketo sync user will attempt to merge the leads in SFDC.  If it is unable to do so, the merge will fail on both sides.  The way to test this is to log into your CRM using the Marketo sync credentials and try to merge the leads on the CRM side.  If you are unable to do so, that confirms that the CRM permissions issue is blocking the merge in Marketo.

3 replies

Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10
May 19, 2016

Hi David,

Is the activity log detail giving more details?

-Greg

Roxann_McGlump1
Roxann_McGlump1Accepted solution
Level 5
May 19, 2016

Hi David,

The most common cause for lead merge failure is lack of permissions on the CRM you have synced to your Marketo instance.  If you have Marketo synced to Salesforce, for instance, when you merge the leads in Marketo, the Marketo sync user will attempt to merge the leads in SFDC.  If it is unable to do so, the merge will fail on both sides.  The way to test this is to log into your CRM using the Marketo sync credentials and try to merge the leads on the CRM side.  If you are unable to do so, that confirms that the CRM permissions issue is blocking the merge in Marketo.

Ellie_Boardman-
Level 4
May 19, 2016

Hi David,
I've also had this same problem. We found that merging leads in Marketo didn't work when we used a Salesforce Person Account. For these leads the merge needed to occur in SFDC...

Although saying that we're now looking at this as a separate project as each case is different with which lead we wanted to be the 'winner' and which details to overwrite

Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10
May 19, 2016

Hi David,

As Roxann wrote, in fact, expecting to merge leads in Marketo and having them merge in SFDC almost never works and is not really recommended. There always rules that will prevent merge to happen, person accounts being one of them. The only that works well is merging a non sync'ed lead with a sync'ed lead in Marketo, as this causes no merge in SFDC. For the other use cases, we have given up and run the merges only in SFDC .

-Greg

May 19, 2016

Interesting . . . we have been running lots of merges with no issues reported (so far). Most are the circumstances you have described, however.