How can I avoid Lead Owner change when Marketo lead auto-syncs with existing SFDC lead?

[Anonymous]

I understand that leads can only compete with leads when merging, but is there a way to not have Marketo Sync merge a new Marketo lead with a lead that already exists in SFDC? 

We had an issue with the following lead.

1. on 11/6/14 he was uploaded straight into a SFDC campaign. 
2. on 11/13/14 the lead owner was changed to a sales rep, but never converted into a contact. 
3. on 11/17 the lead filled out a website form and a new lead record was created in Marketo. We have a smart campaign set up that pushes form fill out leads into a SFDC Queue for our Lead Development Department to look at and vet before distributing to a sales rep. 
4. What actually happened was that Marketo saw the existing lead in SFDC and merged both leads into one and pulled the ownership from the sales rep back to the Lead Development team. 

We do not want Marketo to merge any leads with existing leads in SFDC. We simply want it to create a new lead record everytime someone fills out a form. Then we manually look at the new lead record and determine if it exists already and merge it in SFDC. 

We are now beginning to leave leads unconverted in SFDC as part of a new process we are trying to implement, but we do not want the sync to take the leads away from the sales reps ownership. 

Please help. 

Thanks!

[Josh_Hill13]

Is the issue that you do want duplicate leads, or is that you do not want to change owner.

If you just use Sync Lead to SFDC: Auto Assignment Rules, then Marketo will NOT Change Owner on an existing SFDC Lead.

It sounds like you had it move to a Queue directly, which is what will happen. Instead, you can try

• only have SFDC use Auto Assignment, do not have Marketo move someone. Let SFDC do it.
• check for Queue ownership before attempting to sync.
• send an alert to Lead Owner when the person is already owned, instead of moving the lead.

[Anonymous]

Hi Josh - The issue is we do want both lead records to exist in SFDC. Then we manually go through the lead records and determine if it already exists. If it does already exist in SFDC then we manually merge the lead with the original lead. And yes, we also do not want to change lead owner. 

Currently we have: 
Smart list:
1. Lead is created -> source type is web form fill out; Form name: XXX

Flow:
1. Change data value -> attribute lead status -> new value = open
2. Sync Lead to SFDC -> Assign to;LDD Queue

Thanks Josh!