Handling syncs with shared email addresses - strategies?

[Anonymous]

I'm looking for some strategies to solve a conundrum we have. Many contacts in SFDC share email addresses (for example, generic email addresses used by a department), particularly for customer support contacts.  I cannot change this, so please don't recommend this as the proposed strategy!  The issue is that if one of these contacts takes part in a marketing activity in Marketo and updates some data to be synced back to SFDC, the activity can be attached to the wrong record in Marketo (e.g. via a list load picking up a different contact with that email address).  Then when it syncs back to SFDC, it overwrites data on the wrong contact.

To stop this happening, the SFDC admin has put in a validation rule that stops Marketo updating the contact's name or email address.  However, if this validation rule fires once for a sync batch, the whole batch fails to sync.

This is causing data to diverge between the two systems and is interrupting the pipeline by not allowing updates to the contacts, so that Sales can't follow up on MQLs as they don't know they have happened.  It is a bit more complicated than that, but that is the gist of what is happening.  We can also lose field data if any of the affected contacts sync back from SFDC.

I have suggested blocking the visibility of these contacts from Marketo using a sharing rule in SFDC and then creating purposeful duplicates if the contacts then participate in marketing activities.  However, this is not ideal and we'd have to train the sales users (and support users) to be sure that they are using the correct version of the contact in SFDC for opportunities / support cases.  Plus, we'd lose the history of marketing activities on the contacts that become invisible.

How have other organisations solved this?  I'm sure we are not alone in having this issue.  I have seen other people having issues with shared email addresses, but not specifically with the sync.  I'd appreciate the insights of anyone who has a strategy to tackle this.

[Kenny_Elkington · Accepted solution]

Support can enable complex dedupe rules for you.  For example Email Address + Last Name may be a suitable compound key for you.  If you're able to determine an additional field along with Email Address which forms a suitably unique compound key for your case, then this would be a good solution for you.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Erica,

One point if you go in the direction suggested by Kenny: remember to make the second field mandatory in your forms as well.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Kenny, Greg,

I am following it up with support, thanks for the suggestion.  And thanks for the potential gotcha!  That is important.  Actually we already have required fields on our forms, but I'll check that everyone knows this once we get to a solution.

Many thanks. When I get this resolved with support I'll put an update here.

- Erica

[Anonymous]

This is exactly the case for our industry as well. I want to know the resolution asap. We are connecting SF and MKTO in a few days.

If Salesforce uses a unique ID number, and Marketo uses the email address, then why hasn't Marketo made it clear how to set up the sync with Salesforce that cross-references and uses both identifiers?

[Anonymous]

Hi Marilyn,

Connecting up SFDC and Marketo will not be a problem for you.  For each lead and contact in your SFDC database, Marketo will create a lead/contact.  The issue appears when you are matching the records in Marketo, for example, if one of your existing leads fills in a Marketo form, or if you are loading lists.  These match by email address and if you have different records sharing email addresses, it will not necessarily attach to the correct record.  In that case, I would recommend that you have Marketo key on both Email address and Last Name, but as mentioned above, you will need those two fields to be required whenever a new lead is created and whenever you are matching to existing leads.

Regards,

Erica

[Anonymous]

We have activated the compound index but now have another issue. I had asked support whether forcing a sync from SFDC by modifying a trivial field (a checkbox created for this purpose) would sync all of the lead details through to Marketo, as it is vital that SFDC names and email addresses are considered the master when syncing for contact records.  The reason is that the divergence of records caused by the validation rule mentioned in the original post and the updating of the wrong record (because of generic email addresses) meant that we had wrong names attached to some of these records.  So, for a test set of 20 records, we have set this checkbox in SFDC and this has synced through to Marketo but it has NOT updated the name, only the checkbox field.

Do you guys Grégoire Michel, Kenny Elkington know how I can push these names through easily without having to delete the Marketo record (which has a marketing activity history attached)? As far as I know, I can't do it via a list upload for the precise reason that we have a problem in the first place - the Last Name is wrong and we are now matching on email address and Last Name, and the email addresses are generic and used on multiple contacts..

All I can think of is to apply updates to the names using the data loader at the SFDC end but without changing the name. Not sure whether that would be recognised as a change by SFDC and so push through to Marketo.