Delink SFDC contact and Marketo Lead

[Anonymous]

Hi,

We are planning on creating a SFDC lead record for every marketing records, and convert the SFDC leads to opp/contact when BANT qualified. This will help us create the conversion report in SFDC.

However, once lead record is converted to contact, it remains so in SFDC and marketo display the SFDC Type = Contact. Trying to implement a mechanism :

1. Once lead record is converted to contact in SFDC, let it update marketo with SFDC Type = Contact

2. In marketo, write a trigger based campaign (whenever a lead is changed to contacts), clean-up the marketo record and de-link the tie between Marketo and SFDC

3. Run "Sync Lead with SFDC" to create a new lead record in SFDC

4. Periodically run contact deduce in SFDC to remove any possible duplicates

Please help how to "Clean up" the marketo lead record (with SFDC type = contact) so that a new lead record can be created in SFDC.

Thanks

Deepak

[Kenny_Elkington]

There's not a way to remove the link from an existing Marketo record, other than deleting the SFDC-side record.  One option would be to use a Sync Lead to SFDC flow step on your Marketo-side records where you want to create an intentional duplicate in SFDC by synching it to an SFDC queue.  This will result in the creation of a net new lead in SFDC, which you can manage from there on out.  It will not be linked to the Marketo-side record, however, and will create a duplicate Marketo-side record when it is pulled from SFDC.

[Alex_Stanton1]

Deepak, Marketo does not play well with duplicates and implementing the process you are looking at would probably create a number of headaches connected to duplicates (difficulty in adding people to an engagement program, for instance, or getting accurate figures from a Revenue Cycle Model are two that come to mind). What is the business need? If you post it, the community can help find you a solution that will maintain the system working properly.

[Josh_Hill13]

I agree with everyone here on this. Think through this need and why you really need to do this. I suspect someone in Sales wants to only get Lead records and have Sales convert them as part of their process. It is far, far better to use Tasks to assign Contact alerts. You can still use Leads, Lead Alerts, and Lead Queues at the MQL stage.

Marketo already does most of what you want:

• Marketo record syncs to SFDC and creates a new SFDC Lead
• If SFDC Lead is Converted to Contact, then Marketo will see that, and update the Marketo side accordingly. Now this record is SFDC Contact.
  • only in some rare cases, which I have seen, is it possible for a Converted Lead to retain the original Marketo SFDC Lead and end up creating mismatched dupes. This seems to occur when the Marketo User does not always have the right permissions or gets unsynced during the SFDC conversion moment. It's rare and I wouldn't build a system to handle it.
• Once converted in SFDC, both Marketo and SFDC can report on this.

In your Step 2, if you cleared the SFDC Type value, it would break the link and cause all sorts of havoc. DO NOT DO THIS.

Step 3 is what Kenny suggests - you can just assign any record to an SFDC Lead Queue and if it is already a Contact, it will create a dupe lead. Again, not really a good idea...because in Step 4 you need a very good deduper to clean up problems later. Why do all this when you can just follow the standard practice?

[Anonymous]

I have a variation on the original issue, but similar enough i thought I'd add it here (and I can't believe Im the only one with this issue.)

We follow a pretty standard revenue lifecycle flow.  Once a lead is converted, it goes to field sales and we stop marketing to the lead.  If that opportunity is "closed - no decision" the contact status gets set back to "recycled" which puts it into our nurturing program in hopes that they become an MQL again. The problem is our BDRs only work on leads w/in Salesforce, not contacts.  So if this recycled contact became an MQL again, they wouldn't see it--doesn't show up in their lead views or management flows.

So I"m looking for a way to convert a contact back into a lead.  I'm thinking about a marketo campaign that would delete the contact record and then create a new SF lead record based on the existing Marketo record, keeping all the original information.  I haven't tested it, or even thought it all through yet, but I'm wondering if anyone else has come up with a better mechanism.

Thanks

[Alex_Stanton1]

Hi Jeff,

If you delete the contact you lose the entire activity history related to the record so I would advise against it. However, what you bring up is not an uncommon issue and there are few ways to work around it. Here are a couple that are rather quick to implement:

1. If you are using a field to track the lifecycle stage, you could use it to create an MQL view in the contact object as well as the lead view.
2. You could group all MQLs, leads and contacts, in an SFDC Campaign that acts as container for all MQLs - depending on the volume of MQLs this might or might not be a practical solution.