CRM Users - Best Practices for Deleting Marketo Hard Bounces and Disqualifying them in CRM

[Anonymous]

We use CRM and are planning to delete hard bounces from Marketo but unsure how to disqualify these contacts in CRM since the invalid email information doesn't transfer from Marketo to CRM. Does anyone have a work-around or best practice for this? We have about 18,000 hard bounces so manually disqualifying these leads in CRM is not an option. We are looking for a way to automate or at least pull these into an advanced find in CRM. Any ideas or feedback appreciated.
 

Thanks.

Emily 

[Bruce_Jeffers]

Hi Emily -- a couple of questions & ideas for you:

1. Do you have a specific Lead Status value that marks leads as disqualified or invalid?
(We have "Invalid" as a Lead Status, which automatically dq's them in our SFDC)

If so, you could set up a Smart List in Marketo that queries for any hard bounces (I can suggest a couple of ways to query on this if you'd like), then run a single flow on all of them that changes their Lead Status value to the Invalid or DQ status.  This Lead Status change will sync to SFDC if you have that field mapped.

2. Are you looking to pass the actual hard bounce reason into SFDC?
If so, Marketo has an "Email Invalid Cause" field that you can map to a custom field in SFDC.

Let me know if I can provide more clarification or tips on this. Happy to help.

-Bruce

[Anonymous]

We're in the process of actually just deleting invalid leads from Marketo and CRM altogether. 

Maybe do a little more analysis on the bounced leads you are considering removing from Marketo -- you might find that those leads are years old, have invalid mailboxes, and perhaps have never opened or responded to any marketing.  This was the case with our junk data and made the decision easy to delete entirely.

[Anonymous]

Hi Bruce, Thanks for your feedback. We use Microsoft Dynamics CRM, not Salesforce. 

Yes, we have a "disqualified" lead status in CRM as well as a reason code "cannot contact". We already have a smart list in the lead database to identify hard bounces as email invalid is true. As far as the flow you suggest, I assume that would be under an operational smart campaign, but under flow we do not have "change lead status" as an option. Let me know your thoughts. 

Thanks.

Emily

[Anonymous]

Well immediately after posting this I realized I overlooked the correct field on the flow. Change data value - lead status is disqualified. This should work, right? My smart list is the hard bounce list. 



So then if I delete these leads from Marketo (to keep our record count down) and keep them DQ'd in CRM, won't they just sync back to Marketo? 

[Bruce_Jeffers]

Hi Emily,
Yes you're correct in the Change Data Value step. Your screenshot looks right, and this is how we do it as well.

Sorry about the SFDC comments -- I always assume people are using Salesforce. My bad   🙂

I'm unfamiliar with Dynamics CRM so I don't know about the deleted leads syncing back. I know in SFDC, you can "hide" certain record types from the Marketo user, so when you mark leads as Invalid you can also change them to a different record type and Marketo is no longer able to see them.

Maybe a similar process can be replicated in CRM?
These articles on Dynamics integration may help:  https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Sync+Setup

[Anonymous]

So this was successful in Marketo with changing the status and deleting the leads, but it did not update anything in Microsoft CRM. So all of our bad emails are still "open" in CRM. Any ideas? 

[Bruce_Jeffers]

Bummer... Did you get any notifications of a sync error?  Was the lead status field mapped to CRM?  Do you have any settings in CRM that would have blocked certain field updates from Marketo?