How to tell salesforce I merged a contact? | Community
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A
Anonymous
June 16, 2015
Question

How to tell salesforce I merged a contact?

  • June 16, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 1763 views

Short question: Is there an id that's a custom field on a lead in salesforce that I can copy to a contact within salesforce that tells marketo that I deleted the lead on salesforce and "merged" it into a contact?

Context and longer version of the question:

We regularly have an overlapping lead/contact in marketo: a lead is created in marketo via the munchkin API when a user signs up to our platform, and a contact is created in salesforce from our billing system/CRM. In marketo we see the duplicates, but any future web activity tracked in marketo goes to the lead, not the contact. We want to be able to automatically merge the lead into the contact when a duplicate is identified.

I understand from from this support doc https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/SFDC+Sync%3A+Contact+Sync that we should be doing the merge in salesforce, since we don't want to create a new contact and account. So I created a simply flow that pushes marketo leads to salesforce once they have been identified as a possible duplicate to an existing salesforce contact. And this is where our question begins.

In the lead generated in marketo I only care about the marketo custom fields and marketo web activity. I don't care about any existing lead activity in salesforce (none will exist, since the lead was created in marketo). and I don't care about any contact data, since everything will already have been inputted correctly directly to the contact by our CRM.

What I would like to do is create a trigger in salesforce that looks for these leads in salesforce, and then copies over the key Marketo Sales Insight field values and any necessary Marketo ID's onto the contact and simply delete the lead.

Can I do this? If yes, what field is the default marketo id? If not, any suggestions?

Thank you!!

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1 reply

Josh_Hill13
Josh_Hill13
Level 10
June 16, 2015

MSI values exist in Marketo, so this isn't going to work well.

What I would do is buy DemandTools or RingLead and let them automate the process better. There is no reason to overthink this when a vendor has a great solution already.

A
Anonymous
June 17, 2015

Hi Josh,

Thank you for your response. It is tricky for us to use one of the existing de-dup tools, since in our case, we have many of our contacts within Salesforce are not associated with accounts. Otherwise we would definitely go in that direction.

We would love to merge the two contacts within Marketo entirely and never need to push the lead from Marketo into salesforce to then de-dup there. Is it possible to create a smart list that takes a lead added to a 'possible duplicates' list, and then merges it into the duplicate? The only data we want to keep on the lead is the activity history. All the actual data fields could be overwritten by the salesforce contact.

Any ideas how we could go about this? (Our dev team could probably manage it if you can just point us in the right direction).

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