Deleting Leads From Marketo Only and not Salesforce

[Anonymous]

Hey guys,

We're thinking about removing a large number of inactive leads (no activity for more than 6 months) from our Marketo database. My strategy was to NOT remove them from Salesforce, then if they happen to comeback, rinlead should help link the lead back to the original SFDC record and we won't lose any history. I wanted to runt this by the community in case I was making incorrect assumptions, or there were caveats that I hadn't thought of.

Thanks in advance!

[Grant_Booth]

Hi Dane,

When you delete records from Marketo, their activity logs in Marketo are lost permanently. Their activity history *in SFDC* would be retained, of course, if that's what you meant.

-Grant

[Alex_Stanton1]

As Grant said - the activity log is lost so I tend to shy away from deleting records, unless it is necessary (budget constraint is the most common reason why). You could do a "wake the dead" campaign and revive those leads, or silo them and not touch them until they come back on your radar screen. Either way, consider not deleting.

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

Hi Dane,

we had an almost identical situation a while back when we wanted to reduce our marketo database size. We had a lot of old inactive records, Marketo charges for database size and we didn't want to waste money on those dead leads, but still wanted to keep them in SFDC for historical reasons, and we also have RingLead. So here are some things to consider in addition to what everyone else mentioned.

If you don't have any batch updates of the SFDC database, it should work. Some of the records might trickle through, but majority should stay out of marketo.

If you have any processes at all in your SFDC that run batch updates of the database (e.g. data enrichment), all the records you deleted from marketo will come back during the next update, so if you need to remove them from marketo permanently and make sure they won't come back you need some additional measures. The most common solution would be sharing rules - Marketo exists as a user in your SF instance, and like with any other user you can limit records it can access, you can create a sharing rule either based on existing set of fields or create a new field and use it as a filter, more on sharing rules -  ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEKZ2OjwzS8. The biggest potential problem with this is increased duplicates rate.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the insight - good point about the batch jobs.

For now, I'm going to just suspend the inactive leads. We leverage interesting moments pretty well in keeping track of significant lead history, so I don't think losing activity history is really a big concern.

Thanks everyone.

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

it's good you mentioned interesting moments! If you delete a lead from Mrkt all the interesting moments and other lead activity history (web, score, email) you see in MSI will be lost, because MSI works as a sort of window form SFDC into Marketo, so once you delete a record in Mrkt MSI has nothing to display.

As far as I know the only data you will still have in SFDC would be information stored in your Last Interesting Moments fields (Last Interesting Moment Date, Description, Type), all the the data on previous IM's will be lost

See screenshots of MSI for my testing record in SFDC before and after I deleted this record in Mrkt

[Grant_Booth]

I would advise caution when emailing to old leads. Especially if they're really old. It's a great way to hit a spam trap and hurt your deliverability to your actual live and engaged leads.

Grant

[Josh_Hill13]

Just make sure you focus on Marketo only or SFDC Leads only. Avoid anyone related to a Customer.

Also, extract the backup into excel file first.