Moving Contacts Back to Leads in Salesforce Creating Duplicates in Marketo | Community
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Leah_Hurt
Leah_Hurt
Level 2
October 18, 2019
Question

Moving Contacts Back to Leads in Salesforce Creating Duplicates in Marketo

  • October 18, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 6155 views

We are trying to move several thousand contacts in our Salesforce instance and reupload them back as leads while retaining their historical info. In doing this, it creates a duplicate record in Marketo only (the contact is deleted from Salesforce after the data is uploaded as a lead), and it seems we're having to merge the two records in Marketo in order to retain Marketo data for the lead. 

The only options we can think of is to manually merge duplicates in Marketo one-by-one, or pay extra for a service to do it, which or neither great options. Has anyone had this problem before and is there another way around it?

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    2 replies

    Amit_Jain
    Community Advisor
    Amit_JainCommunity Advisor
    Community Advisor
    October 21, 2019

    Hi @Leah Hurt‌

    Can you try following instead:

    1. Take the back-up of all your contacts
    2. Delete those from SFDC
    3. Wait until the deleted information sync back in Marketo. i.e. all the deleted contacts will now have "Deleted from SFDC" Marketo flag as "True".
    4. Re-upload those in Marketo and then sync in SFDC. Do not try to re-upload in SFDC as a lead directly. Otherwise it will create duplicate in Marketo.
    5. If you follow the above, Marketo will have only single record and sync the contact as lead in SFDC. Moreover, it will retain all the history in Marketo.

    I tested it at my end and it's seems to be working fine. One thing that I notice is that when it was a contact, there was a "Record Type ID" assigned to the contact record. You have to update the Record Type ID with Null before you sync those in SFDC, sync will fail otherwise i.e. no record will be created.

    Regards,

    Amit

      Courtney_King
      Courtney_King
      Level 2
      October 21, 2019

      Amit,

      What if there isn't the ability to delay/prevent salesforce from creating the lead? We are using a salesforce tool that moves the contact back to the lead in SFDC and keeps all the contact history created in salesforce with the lead that it creates. So step 4 may not be possible. any thoughts?

      Courtney_King
      Courtney_King
      Level 2
      October 21, 2019

      @Grégoire Michel

      Sally_Duda
      Sally_Duda
      Level 2
      October 28, 2019

      Hi Leah,

      Check out this community post from Brian Law from Marketo Consulting. It is possible to set up a custom sync filter with SFDC to manage the syncing of the Contacts when a Lead already exists.

      https://nation.marketo.com/community/product_and_support/blog/2017/05/14/instructions-for-creating-a-custom-sync-rule 

      -Sally

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