Changing Contacts Back to Leads in SFDC

Erin_Olsen2
Level 3

Changing Contacts Back to Leads in SFDC

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

8 REPLIES 8
Josh_Hill13
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

Re: Changing Contacts Back to Leads in SFDC

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
Level 3

Re: Changing Contacts Back to Leads in SFDC

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
Level 3

Re: Changing Contacts Back to Leads in SFDC

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
Level 10

Re: Changing Contacts Back to Leads in SFDC

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

Erin_Olsen2
Level 3

Re: Changing Contacts Back to Leads in SFDC

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
Level 10

Re: Changing Contacts Back to Leads in SFDC

Very cool! Nice one-off workaround

Erin_Olsen2
Level 3

Re: Changing Contacts Back to Leads in SFDC

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
Level 2

Re: Changing Contacts Back to Leads in SFDC

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.