Failed to Merge Leads

[Anonymous]

I have been trying to merge leads in Marketo. Sometimes I get the alert that it has failed to merge the leads with the ID number of one of the leads after it. Why is this occurring and how can I effectively merge the leads?

[Josh_Hill13]

it's likely because SFDC doesn't give Marketo the right permissions for those records. You are better off using RingLead or LeanData to automate this stuff.

[Anonymous]

Other times it can be because the data you want to 'win' isn't in the right format for SFDC. Merging leads in Marketo is best for a few items, but if you really want to streamline I'd suggest doing it with those tools, or leveraging a tool from SFDC; Marketo will automatically see the winning result and see the merge.

[Caryl_Mostacho]

Hi Laura Sparks​

Have you tried logging a case with Marketo Support to help troubleshoot your failed merges?

[Anonymous]

Hi Carly,

I got it figured out. It was an issue of duplicate records and it was trying to merge a lead and a contact.

[Ramon_Vawda]

Hi Laura,

Did you solve the issue, or work around it?

If I refer to this article, it notes that merging leads and contacts will cause an error if the Marketo sync user doesn't have the Convert Leads permission. To me that suggests that Leads and Contacts *can* be merged if that permission is set.

Understanding Merges in Marketo

Otherwise the article is incorrect. Trying to figure out the truth.

[Nina_Valtcheva5]

Hi Laura,

I've seen the same issue if we try to merge a Lead and Contact record, as you figured out. I believe the Lead would first have to be converted to a Contact in SFDC in order for the merge to work.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Laura,

Same discussion here : What does this merge leads error mean?

-Greg

[Alok_Ramsisaria]

Thanks Greg for sharing this.

[Andy_Varshneya1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Laura,

As a few people have mentioned already (and you seem to have figured this out), this is fairly common because of a few issues - the "winning" field data is not in the correct format as the field type, or the merge is across SFDC objects.

You would be best off using a tool like RingLead or my personal favorite, Demandtools, which allow you to set your own definitions for what is considered a duplicate so that you have the flexibility to work off more than just the email address field. We ended up cleaning up an additional 5% of our database by being able to come up with our own rules for how to identify dupes.