Duplicating a lead when syncing to SFDC

[Anonymous]

We have mutliple programs that look at different trigger values.  These define a business criteria as a new lead to our salesforce.  Currently Marketo Lead to Sfdc syncs to the exisiting lead and overwrites the existing lead.

How can we add a flow step to create a 'new lead' in sfdc.  Meaning we want the duplication of leads created.

Please help!!

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Would you share more about the programs looking at these values?  Do you mean other apps outside of SFDC and Marketo?

The sync of existing leads is critical to core features in Marketo, so if you can adjust other things to keep this you'll probably find more success.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Steven.  These are programs that evaluate when lead activities are entered.  Certain forms by the same person actually qualify as a new sales cycle in our biz.  with that we need to create a new lead.  Using the flow action of just sync to sfdc not only keeps the original lead, but overwrites the previous data.  We need to maintain integrity of both leads and create multiple leads in sfdc.

thanks for your help in advanced

[Anonymous]

One way to do this would be to use Salesforce web to lead forms instead, as these will create new records and not deduplicate.

[Anonymous]

Can you automate that, so the smartlist in the program is being created in SFDC?  that would be great, but we have to automate this.

This affects about 15% of our sales pipeline, and right now it is not being captured.

😞

[Jep_Castelein2]

Duplicates in SFDC will also be duplicates in Marketo. That means that the lead score and activity history is incomplete because it's spread out over multiple records. Essentially you lose the single view of the customer. 

An alternative to creating duplicate leads is to create tasks for existing lead/contacts. You can assign these tasks to the lead/contact owners. 

Alternatively, if you still would like to create duplicate Leads, maybe you can ensure that all of them get converted to Contacts, so that they are merged into a single record over time (Marketo will merge records if they are merged/converted in SFDC). 

In addition to using SFDC web-to-lead, you can also use Marketo Webhooks to create duplicates. For example, you can use a Webhook to submit a web-to-lead form in SFDC: this will create a new lead in SFDC, which will then sync back into Marketo via the regular SFDC sync. 

[Anonymous]

Without knowing more it is hard to provide an ideal solution so I apologize if any of this is irrelevant.  

I have to agree with Jep about dupes vs a single view of a customer.  It is usually best to be able to associate records in your database as much as possible to a person so that you can maintain the history in your system for that person.  If you still want to maintain individual sales cycles can these be a form of an Opportunity? Maybe a custom object called "Deals" or something might help and it may be a combination of a sales rep, account, and contact so that you can have various instances of these? You can still track all the activity and information about a person as an individual but have them interacting with your company many times simultaneously.

Depending on volume the web2lead queue can become time consuming to keep cleaned out.  Taking action on the lead in the queue and then converting/merging those leads to contacts once you are finished working on them allows you to then place a new instance of a lead into the queue to be worked.  Merging/creating contacts becomes a tedious operation and will most likely lead to a more automated way of working through those leads faster as they start to stack up.  

It would be better to use a flag (value to initiate a trigger in SFDC) which is synced to the Contact and Lead record so you can indicate from Marketo for a process to initiate just by syncing a value of "true" in that field.  This lets you reuse the same Marketo record and have campaigns that just manage those flags.  This essentially allowed is to initiate the process in SFDC creating all the essential supporting data objects and tasks and just giving the client a dashboard to work through.  Something like a field that says "Create New Sales Cycle" and a trigger in SFDC that reads the update to that field.

I hope this helps.  Let me know if you have any additional questions.