If duplicate leads are an issue, be aware of how Marketo determines which lead is active

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Jenn,

I really feel sorry for you to have to bear web-to-lead, which is a 15 years old technology that creates headaches to Marketers all around the planet.

It comes from a time when the online form had just been invented. The precedent tool for targeting was phone directories. So, being able to call only people who had filled out a form seemed a tremendous progress, compared to calling every one in the city or the region

The underlying process was also quite straightforward: when a lead would enter the DB, it was qualified ASAP. If it was good, it was converted and if it was not not good for the sales, it was discarded. So duplicates were not really an issue...

What is really an impressive success from SFDC is that, 15 years later, companies are still using it, although the underlying concept is completely obsolete.

-Greg

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

It really is painful and stems from the fact we wanted to use all of SFDC's features; we also didn't have Marketo at the time of our website's implementation. We've looked into switching to Marketo forms, which I'm hoping happens soon as I use them for every other form on our website and it's a beautiful thing! It's a shame Marketo wasn't included in our site's redesign, as the main concern now is the forms won't fit in as seamlessly as we may like (nor be as responsive).

That said, I honestly can't believe W2L doesn't automatically de-dupe anyway, especially now they have Pardot/the technology to do so.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Jenn,

As I wrote, W2L is a very old technology that was never updated and has absolutely nothing to do with Pardot. In fact, Pardot is not there to enhance W2L but to replace it, as Marketo does.

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Not to take this discussion too far off-topic, but for our contact-us form on our website, nothing is even considered a lead unless the submitter selects one of the appropriate values from the "Relationship with Avanade" field:

In the trigger campaign, we classify "current customer" and "potential customer" different from the others - and based on this program status, these leads proceed through our "fast-track to MQL" workflows (actually they're in an "Evaluation" stage until the marketer physically qualifies it in CRM.

We understand that other values - like "other" - can be potential leads for us as well.  We have workflows in place to fast track these types of requests, just like the other ones.

[Dan_Stevens_]

As I posted within the idea I created ( ), one way to remedy this would be to offer an option in the Qualification rules of a batch smart campaign (this last option does not exist - this is just a mock-up):

[Gerard_Donnell4]

Thanks for sharing this info! It definitely answers a few questions.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, everyone.  Very helpful.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Niranjan Kumbi [PM], near the bottom of this thread ( ), you mentioned that you would investigate internally to determine if this is an issue.  Do you have any updates for us?

Sanford Whiteman​

Aaron Dear​

[Nicholas_Manojl]

The use case isn't really a one-size-fits-all approach though.

You have a very complete lead record that was updated 6 months ago.

You have a duplicate lead that was created 1 minute ago, but it contains just an email address.

In your scenario, you want to email the lead record that only has an email address.

I think the problem is much harder than this.. in reality we need a way to methodically judge the quality of a lead record. But how? It's a very difficult problem.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Totally get that.  The premise of the Idea was to have consistency across the entire environment - for batch/trigger email sends, list imports, form submits, etc.  But that's not what I'm referring to here in my most recent post.

If you look at the Idea comments/replies - beginning with Aaron's post on January 29, 2018 - he uncovered a pretty serious flaw in the system where Marketo will reuse leadIDs (when leads are deleted/purged from the system) and allow new leads to assume those older IDs.  This could have some significant implications for those of us that rely heavily on the API.  As Sanford put it:

"This is far and away the most fatal and mind-boggling technical detail -- if indeed it's true -- I've heard about w/Marketo, ever."