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A
Anonymous
March 29, 2016
Question

Handling duplicate leads in Marketo

  • March 29, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 3029 views

Hi All,

Our current  SF instance is not uniquely identified by the Email address. The contacts are uniquely identified based off the SFDC contact/lead id. The Marketo instance is based off the unique email address however, the sync bypasses the unique identifier in Marketo hence we have duplicate leads created in Marketo. This causes confusion around who to target or not.

Is anyone else facing a similar problem ?  Is there a proposed solution to the same ? Any support will be highly appreciated.

Regards

Sugam

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2 replies

Grégoire_Miche2
Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10
March 29, 2016

Hi Sugam,

What you are describing is normal and is experienced by everyone: by default, SFDC has no mechanism to prevent duplicates on email and the SFDC ID is the ID, so by definition it is always unique. In other words : deduplicating on SFDC Id is not really deduplicating, except for SFDC admins to export data, change it and reimport to update the records.

The basic reason why Marketo and other Marketing automation solution deduplicate on emails is because it's easier to request leads to provide you with their email in a form than to ask them to enter their SFDC ID In other words, there in no possibility for Marketo to know the ID of an existing contact on a form fillout. It has to recognize it on some other criteria.

You need to define on which Business fields you want to recognize and deduplicate contacts and leads. Some businesses have a strong business reason for using other deduplication criteria than the email, but in any case, it will always be business fields, not technical ones such as the SFDC ID. Once you are clear on this, you can invest into some solutions to prevent the creation of duplicates and / or the cleansing. One of the them is SFDC own Duplicate Management tool (it can prevent, not cleanse). And if you end up with a deduplicate field that is different from the email address, then you can ask support to set your Marketo dedupe rule on this field (or multiple ones). But remember : whatever business field(s) you choose, it has (they have) to be info you can easily capture in forms or in import files, otherwise, it will be totally inefficient.

Also, I gather from your post that probably a significant number of leads and contacts do not have an email address. This is surely something you need to address from various standpoints

  • With the sales, to ask them to enter this data
  • From your data sourcing strategies

-Greg

Abaran
Abaran
Level 5
September 19, 2016

Hi Gregoire

What tool would you suggest to use to achieve the following

  • Prevent duplicates on form fill
  • Prevent duplicates on records uploads into Marketo
  • Prevent duplicates when Sales creates records in SFDC
  • Manage existing duplicates in the system

Thank in advance for the suggestions

Axel

Grégoire_Miche2
Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10
September 22, 2016

You do not need a tool to prevent a duplicate on form fill if you are using Marketo forms, at least on email. Same for uploads. If you are using another form system, Smartforms is a good one.

 

What's more complicated is preventing duplicates from SFDC. Ringlead is a good solution (especially since they have some specific capabilities with Marketo), as well as demandtools.

 

To clean dupes in Marketo, a couple of solutions exist, including Marketo's Merge Service (one of) or Paul Trushin​'s new solution. These are good if cleaning dupes in Marketo is a possibility (It may sometimes not work, because SFC blocks the merge).

 

-Greg

    A
    Anonymous
    September 22, 2016

    Hi!

    I saw the question above and I could suggest some!

    • Dupes on form fills - Reachforce Smartforms
    • Dupe management - Ringlead

    Would love to hear Gregoire's suggestions as well.

    This might also depend on your tolerance level for duplicates. We have a lot of duplicates too, but it's at around .02% of the entire database so it's not a huge issue that warrants spending 30k+ on managing duplicates. So on a data governance and cost analysis standpoint, it might be good to assess the % of your duplicates and define your tolerance threshold.

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