Duplicate leads with and without SFDC ID

[Andy_Zebulske]

Hello,

We are running into an issue where SFDC creates a lead in our Marketo DB (which is correct and working great!) and then that same person fills out a form on our website/landing page and instead of updating the existing contact it creates a new one. What is the best way to manage this?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Fundamentally, this shouldn't be happening -- or infrequently at worst -- if you're using the default dedupe key (that is, Email Address) and the lead already exists in your database.

Tell us more about your workflow. Are you sure you don't have a process that creates the Marketo lead first? (It will not be deduped against a lead that later comes in from SFDC.) Are you changing the Email Address of a lead after the form is posted? (This, too, will not dedupe.)

[Andy_Zebulske]

Hi Sanford,

The way we have our Marketo set up is data can only sync from SFDC to Marketo. Marketo can not write to SFDC. But leads come into Marketo from SFDC, Web Service API and then Marketo forms. 84% of our "possible duplicates" have 1 record with a SFDC ID and the other without but the same email address.

And if i am reading your above comment correctly, if the lead is created in Marketo first then that same lead is synced from SFDC it will not update the Marketo lead, it will just create a new one?

[Jep_Castelein2]

Hi Andy, in the past your instance had a custom dedupe rule for Email + Partition ID, which means that dupes are allowed across Partitions, but not within a single Partition. This rule may still be in place. However, within a single Partition it should not create dupes, unless the dupe comes in from SFDC. It is a common issue that dupes are created when records are created in Marketo and SFDC concurrently, then the SFDC record sync to Marketo and creates a dupe.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

One of the reason why this might happen is if your workflow is forcing the person owner to be a Lead Queue in SFDC ("sync to SFDC flow" step with the owner set to be a lead queue). This forces the creation of a new lead in SFDC insteadof updating the existing contact.

-Greg