Cannot sync previously deleted Marketo person to sfdc

[mirouk-rg]

Hello Marketo Community

I have a question about Salesforce sync of previously deleted Marketo leads. We are running a data cleanup management program in Marketo where we periodically delete leads from Marketo but we do retain them in Salesforce. We use the sync filter to prevent Salesforce synching them back to Marketo. The issue we have is that if any of those deleted leads comes back ie. by filling out a form we want them to sync back to an existing record in Salesforce but when Marketo tries to sync the lead to Salesforce we get a sync error saying {FIELD_CUSTOM_VALIDATION_EXCEPTION: Cannot create the Lead or Contact as a Lead or Contact with email ... already exists}

Has anyone had similar issue to overcome? I'd greatly appreciate any suggestions on how to fix the problem.

Thank you

Mirek

[Darshil_Shah1]

Normally in this case, a duplicate lead with the same email address should get created in SFDC - do you have any setup in place that may be blocking the duplicate lead creation in SFDC based on the email field you're using?

[mirouk-rg]

Hi Darshil

Thank you for your feedback. I believe that may be the case but if we allowed to create duplicate leads in this case I assume we would need to set up some kind of a workflow to merge them? Do you have any advise on best practice in such scenario?

Best

Mirek

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

In most cases, given that it's pretty rare case for an inactive deleted record in Marketo to re-enter - I've seen folks having their SFDC admin take care of manually merging the duplicate records in SFDC and updating the custom sync field so that record remain in sync. With that said, you can scout for a way to automate this via a workflow or third party deduping platform but do you expect getting too many inactive deleted records getting created in Marketo?

[mirouk-rg]

Hi Darshil

Thank you for your advise, these are very useful tips. We do not yet know the volume of returning leads but we anticipate there may be quite a bunch of them. I think we will start manual processing and see how that works then if it becomes unmanageable we will see to automate it.

In any case thank you very much for your help it's greatly appreciated.

Best

Mirek 

[Darshil_Shah1]

Sure, let us know if you need any of our help. 🙂

Thank you!

[NadineThomas]

I am looking to solve this exact problem - very thankful to have found someone with a similar problem. Perhaps you have some extra advice for me on your solution? Did you change the duplicate rules in SFDC? 

I am still wondering why SFDC is giving a duplicate error. Shouldn't the person be updated if the email address exists instead of trying to create a new lead? 

Any feedback much appreciated

[Darshil_Shah1]

Well, the reason behind this is that the Email Address field isn't used to map the SFDC and Marketo records together, rather they're linked by the unique SFDC ID which gets created and associated with the Marketo record when a record is synced b/w both platforms. Additionally, when you have custom de-duplication rules based on email address setup in SFDC, it would throw an error while syncing a Marketo-only record that has the same email address as the record in SFDC (as the system tries to create a duplicate record in SFDC, and runs into an error).