Changing Contacts Back to Leads in SFDC

[Erin_Olsen2]

Hi everyone -

I am trying to do some clean-up in salesforce and would like to revert a batch of accounts/contacts back to leads. These were people who were converted up to accounts based on our previous process, but now we have SDRs that are working at the lead object. From what I am reading on SFDC community, most people say just delete them and reimport them as leads. There are a couple of concerns I have with this.

1) the historical marketo data (campaigns they were a part of, emails they received, etc.)

2) the created date would then show one date vs. the actual date they came in as an inbound. This would have a bad effect on our reporting.

Has anyone ever done this before? Any recommendations you have?

Thanks for your help -

Erin

[Josh_Hill13]

Pretty sure this is a bad idea and will break your data history in Marketo. Marketo does not dedupe on leads created in SFDC, so it won't match them back. You could use a tool like RingLead or more to better handle this.

[Erin_Olsen2]

Yeah - after doing more research I realized that I can't take a contact back to a lead. I am leaning towards just deleting them from salesforce and marketo and then just importing them again into marketo and then routing them to salesforce as leads.

Doing it this way, I will lose the original created date... but I might just be willing to deal with that in order to have them as leads instead of accounts.

Erin

[Erin_Olsen2]

Hi Josh-

I had a thought about this. I was planning to just delete the leads from SF and Marketo and start-over (knowing I would lose a lot of the data history - but since we are an early company and it's only 1K leads, it's not a huge deal).

Then I wondered, would it be possible to just delete the contacts/accounts from salesforce and then resync them from Marketo (sending them over as leads?) Or would it not work because Marketo thinks they are already sync'd with salesforce?

My thought is that it would be one option to maintain the marketo data history and not have to delete them from Marketo all together and start-over.

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hey Erin, this is definitely an interesting thought. I'd test it.. I'm curious to see how it works out!

[Erin_Olsen2]

I did a test of this with one lead, and it seems it works fine. The only things I lose are...

- Activity History (emails sent back and forth)

- Campaigns they are associated with in SFDC. (which I can batch update if I want to).

Erin

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Very cool! Nice one-off workaround

[Erin_Olsen2]

I did my big clean-up! despite running into an issue exceeded my API calls, all has gone well. I was able to delete the contacts/accounts and resync the leads over to salesforce w/out losing any of my precious marketo data! yahoo.

Erin

[Leah_Hurt]

Did you end up losing your activity history and SFDC campaign data when you did this or did you end up finding a way around it? I'm working on this same thing, but need to find a way to do it without losing that data.