Duplication of leads - finding and stopping the cause before paying to dedupe

[Anonymous]

If you have this problem too, please vote our idea up:

Wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience and if you've found a solution. Please reach out if you have, we could really use the insight.

We recently received a message from Marketo about having overrun our database limit. We did some analysis and determined that the overage was due to duplication of leads. We have also determined that most of the duplication is caused by the interface between Salesforce and Marketo or processes within Marketo like list uploads. i.e. not something we're doing wrong but a Marketo platform flaw.

Discussions with the Marketo support team suggest our only way forward is to:

• Dedupe our 60k dupes manually by hand.
• Or build a deduplication application via an api and run this every week.
• Or send a note into the community to vote on a feature enhancement.
• Or pay Marketo $5k to dedupe and without resolving the problem, we could be paying this yearly.

None of these actually fix the problem, none are very palatable.

Is anyone aware of other alternatives?

It seems like Marketo should just be able to look up an email address prior to pushing/creating new records...

[Josh_Hill13]

Thom,

Yes, you should stop the duplicate sources first, then find a tool to block further dupes, and then merge the dupes.

• Sources are likely from SFDC because Marketo dedupes on email addresses for leads that enter Marketo first. Marketo trusts SFDC, so if you are uploading lists to SFDC instead of Marketo, you will end up with lots of dupes.
• Dupeblocker on the SFDC side can help with Salespeople.
• While Marketo Easy Merge is an option, you should also look into RingLead, LeanData, and other tools on launchpoint.marketo.com. You will have to pay and that's far better than any manual options, including interns or other countries.
• Take a hard look at your processes and any API connections to SFDC and Marketo.
• http://developers.marketo.com/blog/how-to-clean-your-marketo-database/

[Anonymous]

Thanks Josh, this is helpful information. I guess I was hoping there was a way that Marketo would stop generating the dupes from SF to begin with.

[Anonymous]

That is surprising to me too. I thought Marketo would be able to resolve the dupes via sync & program logic with the CRM system. We have not integrated our CRM system (NetSuite) and would want to avoid this in the future. Do you know if that can be a consideration in the design of the sync between Marketo and CRM?

Previously I used Eloqua and the out of the box functionality for the CRM sync usually followed a strict de-duping process/logic - I believe this happened on Eloqua's end. I thought Marketo would also have this feature but I guess not.

[Anonymous]

For duplication, I think you can try TIBCO Clarity. It has a really powerful and robust de-duplication function.

You can customize your match strategies by columns or by swappable columns or by columns against to a thesaurus table, and then use them to discover duplicate records from any incomplete or partially similar records, even from records in different languages.

In addition, It has deep integration with both Salesforce and Marketo. It can help you directly update and remove duplication data in your salesforce and Marketo account.

you can try TIBCO Clarity for free.   https://clarity.cloud.tibco.com/landing/index.html