Holding back leads from SFDC, but then creating duplicates

[Anonymous]

As a rule we don't push leads into SFDC from Marketo until MQL status. However, I am now realizing that if and when a sales person were to create a Lead in SFDC (one not existing in SFDC yet, but IN marketo), it will generate a duplicate automatically in Marketo. Are there any ways to avoid this? What are others doing?

[Matt_Stone2]

There's not a good way to avoid this, unfortunately. Your best bet is to have a deduping tool or process on the SFDC side.

[Anonymous]

Matt not sure this will work considering SFDC won't actually see a duplicate. All it knows is its creating a lead. Marketo is the one who gets the duplicate.

[John_Clark1]

Hi Naor,

Marketo will not deduplicate leads that come from SFDC, so there isn't really a good way to avoid this situation.  The best thing would be to input all of your leads on one side or the other, Marketo or SFDC.

John

[Anonymous]

Thanks John, not sure that's a viable option considering we have around 30k leads swimming in Marketo and are trying to keep the salesforce instance quite nice and clean. The sales people don't have access to marketo so they can't add leads there since they need instant visibiltiy in Salesforce.

[Jeff_Smith3]

Hi Naor,

How often is the sales team wanting to create a lead from scratch? This isn't the most automated solution, but one idea is to export your list of 30,000 or so records (not too terribly overbearing) and let your sales team perform a quick Excel search prior to creating the lead. If they can be shown the value of utilizing the existing Marketo record (and having all that history as a resource) as opposed to wasting their time creating a new record without history, then the extra 20 seconds that it takes to push Ctrl+F and type in the email address would be worth it. Granted, your instance will constantly be receiving new records, so the Excel list would need to be re-exported every so often, but it may be less of a headache than the one caused by having duplicates. And with subscriptions for smart lists coming out soon as a new Marketo feature (praise the Lord), then that may offer regular reminders to re-export. Just a thought...if it's that big of a nuisance for your team, and without a way for Marketo to naturally prevent this, you may have to get a little creative (and manual).

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Being both a Marketo and a SFDC partner, this is an issue we often have to tackle.

When we set up Marketo for customers in an SFDC context, in order to avoid the problem you are facing, we prefer to have the leads pushed from Marketo to SFDC as soon as possible (i.e. as soon as required fields are filled out. SFDC requires that at least a last name and a company name be provided). But we set up the system so that these early leads (Status nurtured, usually) be owned by lead queues in Marketing.

Then we set up SFDC to forbid duplicates, at least on email address.

The last step is to have a process, usually manually, for sales to claim for a lead when they need it, instead of creating a new contact.

The approach I describe above is relevant mostly for Enterprise business, when it is likely that Sales engage with customers early on, in parallel to marketing activities.

If you are more on an SMB business, where Sales mostly engage with leads provided by marketing, it might not be that important.

Hope this helps,

Greg

[Anonymous]

This makes a lot of sense. Our current MQL handover is similar - the leads get pushed into SFDC and there's a lead queue which is managed by the inside sales team who then will take ownership based on account territory etc.

I need to speak with our SFDC person here to see if adding all these people to either this queue or another queue first would hurt any of their reporting. Thanks for the suggestion

[Grégoire_Miche2]

I would recommend another queue. These leads you will be pushing are not MQL yet, therefore, they should not belong to the MQL queue.

It is likely that your SFDC admin will face another issue. I would not be surprised that leads are assigned in SFDC using assignment rules. Assignment rules are good to assign leads when they are created. But this is there limit : they assign only when the lead is created, not when the lead is updated.

If you push leads to salesforce earlier, you may set up the assignment rules to assign the leads to your "Nurtured Lead Queue". But then you will face an issue : how to reassign leads when they become MQL ? You will have to use salesforce workflows for this, or Marketo smart campaigns. I prefer SFDC workflow, because I think lead assignment has to be managed in salesforce, as these rules may change regularly, when sales arrive or leave, or the sales territories change, etc... and therefore it should remain an SFDC admin thing.

The simplest way is to have Marketo change the status of the lead and have a Salesforce workflow trigger on this change and perform the assignment.

-Greg

[Caryl_Mostacho]

Hi Naor Chazan​

Generally not best pratice to silo leads iin Marketo because of the duplicate issue.  Until the leads are merged, it's possible your Sales Team is missing out on insights into web activity, or interaction with the Marketing campaigns your are running.
Is there a way that you can assign these leads to a queue in SFDC until they do become MQL?