Does anyone have a solution that supports duplicate leads in SFDC?

[Anonymous]

Hi,
Our business model requires that duplicate leads exist in SFDC. This creates an obstacle for us when syncing data to and from Marketo.
Have you faced a similar challenge? if so - how did you solve it?
Thanks,
Jude

[Michelle_Tizian]

Our particular case involves individuals who work for a company, but is also board member of another company. It's a duplicate name but different companies, and sometimes with the same email adress.  The ones I catch in which they put the identical email address for both companies, I tell our list developer to clean up or only assign one email address to one record.  This unfortunately inflates our Marketo database but there's no getting around it.  Our research department needs both records in SFDC. 

[Anonymous]

Hi Jude,

Can you walk through your case for why you need duplicates?

[Anonymous]

Simply make sure leads are created in SFDC first instead of Marketo. Handle all imports and web to lead forms through SFDC and Marketo will not attempt to merge records with duplicate email addresses.

[Anonymous]

Michael - we sell via resellers, and have a rather long sales cycle. A lead can be created in 2 (or more) campaigns (lets say - visited us at a trade show and reached us through a PPC campaign), it can live with 2 different resellers until one of them advances in the sales funnel.
This business model is causing us majr challneges in the SFDC/Marketo sync process.

Courtland - your answer is interesting, however to my understanding it means we cannot use Marketo forms, to prevent leads from being created in Marketo. I will investigate this idea. Thanks!

Michelle - thanks for your reply; since we do want the duplicates to exist in SFDC it is not a matter of merging leads or cleaning up the data base.

[Anonymous]

Hi Jude,

So first of all...you guys do 3d Printing?  AWESOME!

Now to your schema...someone who comes in via a trade show and ppc campaign shouldn't necessarily be a duplicate in my eyes.  For example, Bob Smith comes in via a Tradeshow because I imported him from the .csv list of scans we got from the booth.  His Lead Source is now Tradeshow and there is an SFDC Campaign associated to him.  Tomorrow Bob comes in and fills out your Sample Part form via searching for "3D printing" (one of your PPC words).  That form should update the Bob Smith Tradeshow lead with a PPC Campaign, but not create a new lead.

Now when it comes to your resellers...I understand why you'd potentially have multiple distributors working with Bob.  We have a few clients exactly like this who deal with either competitive dealers/distributors OR just deal with multiple parties on one client.  How we typically deal with this is a related object for Partners to be associated on a one to many relationship OR to have them associated to an opportunity OR to have multiple opportunities associated to the one record (each opportunity unique to each reseller).

Some examples of where we see the above:
1.  We have one student who is associated to multiple universities (client helps place students at schools).
2.  We have one prospect who is trying to build a house and has a builder, financer, and architect all associated to the prospect
3.  We have an individual trying to buy a car and is looking for a rate from 2-3 dealers

Let me know if any of those are resonating and we can explore deeper.

[Anonymous]

I'm with Michael on this. I've had to build reseller deal registrations and always use the SFDC Web-To-Lead process (ie Salesforce forms vs Marketo) because I need it to create a duplicate in case multiple resellers register the same end-user. SFDC then creates a lead type = deal reg, and it goes to a human for approval/processing. That human can then determine if both deal registrations should in fact exist simultanesouly, or if one is really a duplicate, and in that case they can update the opportunity with the appropriate related list.

But even in this case, is the partner deal registration (that's based on the end user email) that is duplicated. I stil run all marketing campaigns through Marketo (ie trade shows + PPC campaign).

Hope that makes sense.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Michael & Grant - I will share your input with my colleagues and do some brainstorming.
And - 3D Printing is indeed awesome 🙂