Bulk merge - Contact always wins

[Michael_Florin]

Hello!

I have a scenario where we have uploaded ~10k persons into a Marketo instance before we synced with CRM (Dynamics). I was expecting these persons not to be merged with potential CRM persons that have the same email address and it turned out to be so. (Documentation states that too btw: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/marketo/using/product-docs/core-marketo-concepts/smart-lists...).

Now we have ~6k persons in the database that also have contact counterpart with the same email address. Is there any way to merge these with the simple rule that the contact always wins?

Thanks,
Michael

[Darshil_Shah1]

When you merge a lead and contact record in Marketo, it's the contact record that'll remain in the end, i.e., the contact is always going to be the target record to which the data will get updated. Check out Merging Leads and Contacts section in Understanding Merges in Marketo knowledgebase article here.

However, there's a caveat here that although the target record is gonna be the contact record, but that won't necessarily guarantee that the conflicting field values of the contact record are not over-written by the lead record. In order to avoid surprises/data loss, I'd probably resort to creating an in-house/exploring third party de-dupe solution to ensure that the data in contact record is always retained in-case of conflicts.

[Michael_Florin]

Hi Darshil,

don't think the scenario in the docs applies to my case. I'm not merging leads and contacts - I want to merge Marketo-only persons with Dynamics contacts. Looks like this for me:

If I could bulk merge and have the contact always be the target record, I'd be fine. But how would I do that?

[Darshil_Shah1]

Well, still the target record would be the contact record (even if you select the winning leadid corresponding to the marketo only person), i.e., keeping the conflict resolution aside (which will be settled based on the winning record), the target lead record would be the contact record only. All the data and activity updates would occur on the contact record only upon merge irrespective of the selected winning record while intiating the merge action. I tested this in our sandbox instance which is hooked up with the SFDC CRM (and not MS Dynamics), but I think this merge logic would remain same for the Dynamics as well since logic to use the contact record as target record upon contact + Marketo only record merge action is built in the Marketo. 

Also, you may face error upon trying to overwrite the field values that cannot be overwritten on a contact record while merging records, e.g., trying to update the company fields on contact record with that of the Marketo only record's.

On the other hand, do you think it'd be easier to export these duplicate Marketo only records from Marketo, delete them from Marketo, and then import the CSV back to Marketo? The respective contact records in Marketo would be updated with the data and you can also remove the data from the csv file before importing, this would be the data/fields that you do not wish to update on the contact record upon import. This method of course wouldn't bring in the corresponding Marketo only record's activities in the corresponding contact record unlike the merging method.