Avoiding duplicates with both associateLead and Salesforce sync

[Jon_Wu]

I'm ending up with duplicate leads in Marketo because we convert anonymous users to leads with associateLead and Munchkin, but also have Salesforce sync setup to add custom objects such as customer order data into Marketo.

I've read some documentation that says to 'solve' this by only adding leads in Marketo, but I don't think that's an option for me. I need behavioral data from Munchkin so I can see what pages users are viewing on the site. Eventually, the user will (hopefully) place an order on our site which will create custom Order objects in Salesforce and the lead and custom objects from Salesforce will be synced back to Marketo - thus creating duplicates.

Since I need both Munchkin data and Salesforce data, how can automatically make this data merged and not worry about duplicates?

Thanks!

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

We have a mergeLeads API that would work well for this use case:  
http://developers.marketo.com/documentation/soap/mergeleads/

[Jon_Wu]

Thanks! I created a webhook that calls mergeLeads automatically any time a lead is created in Salesforce so that fixes this issue.

[Anonymous]

No problem. Let me know if you have any follow-up questions. 

[Jon_Wu]

Hi Murtza,

We've had this running for a while, and it turns out it's not quite working as expected.

QUESTION: In what scenarios can duplicate leads be created?

When you fill out your email on our site, I call associateLead from Munchkin. We are seeing many duplicates, but from the Munchkin documention for associateLead, I see "Marketo will automatically de-duplicate the lead if one already exists in your database".

However, we also create a contact in Salesforce which then syncs back to Marketo, then we use a webhook to call mergeLeads with the SOAP API to merge the original Marketo lead to the Salesforce one synced one. It was my impression that only the synced lead from Salesforce could result in a duplicate since associateLead is supposed to deduplciate automatically.

Instead, I can just keep calling associateLead from a fresh session and I get duplicates like in this screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6mrsiy7nby7pfl3/Screenshot%202014-08-11%2016.26.30.png.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Jon