Creating Duplicate Leads

[Nicola_West1]

We would like to be able to create a duplicate lead in SFDC when an existing lead in Marketo performs a certain action on receipt of a Marketo email i.e. fills a form, downloads content etc.  Marketo natively does not create duplicates so we are having a challenge with this, any ideas on a workaround?

[Josh_Hill13]

First, are you sure you want to do this?

Second, you could just post the lead to SFDC via other methods as Marketo does not dedupe leads inbound from SFDC.

There are other methods. I think you do a search for "purposeful duplicates" you will find ideas.

[Neil_Robertson6]

I have the documentation on the Purposeful duplicates but be warned that this is not a sanctioned or Marketo developed process.   

[Lexine_Pishue]

   Neil Robertson-Ravo  Do you still have the documentation, and does it still work?

[Dan_Stevens_]

Like Josh and others have mentioned/warned, think twice before doing this.  We deployed a purposeful duplicates process a couple of years ago (to allow existing CRM contacts to process as fresh leads all over again).  And now our environment is a mess - especially due to how Marketo treats the "lead of record" (see this thread: If duplicate leads are an issue, be aware of how Marketo determines which lead is active ).

You might also be interested in my lengthy response in this thread: Re: Lead Process Updating

[Tim_Madel1]

Thanks for the details.

From my perspective (we are a Salesforce shop) - it's all how you handle lead objects in CRM.  For us Leads are disposable and how we work Marketing Qualified Leads.  Only if they become Marketing Qualified do they get passed to sales as Opportunities.

If we did not create new leads (duplicates) for existing contacts - we would have to rely on Tasks on the Contact to manage the qualification process.  This makes it hard to track lead to order etc.

We have tried to prevent the messiness by blocking visibility to the lead records in Salesforce once created,  If the lead becomes Marketing qualifed it turns into a contact and account which would be synced with Marketo. 

Not optimal by any stretch.

[Lexine_Pishue]

Thank you for the links - more information about how marketo decides which record is active and what to do with duplicates is really appreciated, and has given us some ideas of how better to handle our need for duplication while still preserving history in marketo.

[Edward_Masson]

I'm not a fan of creating duplicates, but you can add an existing contact to a lead queue and this will add a duplicate lead.

What we do when an existing lead does something of major interest (like another trial download) we trigger a task for the lead owner. We created a new task type in SFDC and added Lead Statuses into it. With a subject naming convention applied to the task, we pull all tasks with subject line starts with: Trial Download into SFDC reports and our BI tool to measure existing leads with net new.

[Tim_Madel1]

Why aren't you in favor of creating duplicates?