Business need to create duplicate record

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

We have a business case where one of my stakeholders has a need for creation of a duplicate record on the SFDC side.

Is this even possible?

I was thinking of hacks I could do on form submittal such as prepend the email with some identifier using JavaScript, and then strip it off after the sync to SFDC has occurred.

Looking to see if anyone else has ever needed to do this or has a way to do so.

Thanks!

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

A bit more detail:

The need arises from the fact that we need to create a new account with a new account number, and therefore do not and cannot have the lead sync or deduplicate against the current or inactive account they are associated with already in our DB.

[Josh_Hill13]

You can do this in SFDC without any issues. Marketo does not dedupe records from SFDC.

SFDC itself may have a deduper installed.

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

Thanks Josh Hill​.  In my past life (last company) we had DemandTools running nightly deduplication, and were not as integrated on the Marketo side.  This need is a very interesting one, and I'm trying to prove it out using Marketo as the requirement is to actually save the history of the user with their previous company.

Are there any other potential complications you can foresee by maintaining two records?  One for old company association and the second for their new company association?

[Josh_Hill13]

So are you saying you actually want something entirely different?

1. Person has email@company1.com and is a customer

2. Person moves to new firm, calls you up.

3. Person has email@company2.com

In this case, you should do nothing, the emails *should* be different and the system will operate just fine. The only thing to consider is adding an Account/Contact Status of "Former Customer" or "NLWC".

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

Yes, however in our case, the person may not have @company.com email address, and may be using @personaldomain.com.

This is why I am thinking to append or prepend (whichever) the email address with an identifier such as dupe.JoeSmith@personaldomain.com.

On the backend in SFDC or perhaps a campaign I will then remove the "dupe." from the email address.    

[SanfordWhiteman]

This is why I am thinking to append or prepend (whichever) the email address with an identifier such as dupe.JoeSmith@personaldomain.com.

On the backend in SFDC or perhaps a campaign I will then remove the "dupe." from the email address.    

That "encoding" is too fragile IMO. You should use a separator that may not appear in a legitimate address, like

     dupe\joesmith@personaldomain.com

Pet peeve: I hate legit formats being treated as if they're magically special!

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

You can ask support to enable an additional deduplication key; by default Marketo deduplicates based on email address, you can choose any of the existing fields or create a custom field to act as an additional deduplication key, in your case something like company name or job title might work.

Once support enables additional key, you'll have to add this script to to every page with a marketo form http://developers.marketo.com/blog/clearing-marketo-tracking-cookie-from-forms-2-0-submission/

So if john.doe@gmail.com at ABC Inc from your database moves to XYZ Inc and fills in one of your forms with his new company name, Marketo will create him as a new lead and you will end up with 2 records in Marketo and SFDC:

john.doe@gmail.com at ABC Inc

john.doe@gmail.com at XYZ Inc

It is safer to use a picklist field as additional dedupe key, makes it easier to avoid duplicates created through someone misspelling their company name, in our org we use product interest field for this purpose in certain cases, but it's difficult to advise without knowing more details on your situation

Regardless of the method duplication carries potential risks/problems, here are few that come to mind:

- if you send an email to 2 leads with the same email address that email will be delivered to that inbox twice

- it might create conflicts in sales channel (different sales people from your org trying to engage with the same prospect)

- larger database size increases the cost of your Marketo subscription

- too many duplicates can skew your scoring, funnel, lead lifecycle processes and revenue cycle metrics

[Geoff_Krajeski1 · Accepted solution]

We ended up using JavaScript to prepend the email address.

Then, upon entry to Marketo, we have an API script running to remove the prepended phrase.

Working like a charm.

Again, the real need here is that we have agents submitting on behalf of multiple clients, so activities need to be tracked under different SFDC records accordingly.