How to create a task in SFDC Lead and Contact with Marketo?

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I would like to know how I can add an activity in SFDC for Lead and contact with the same email.

It means my email is at the same time lead and contact.

For the moment it go only on 1 place.

Thank you

Said

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

Do the lead and contact have different names?

[Anonymous]

No, same name

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

What is the reason for having the same person as both a lead and a contact? We have this same situation in our own organization for several reasons, but it does pose a number of problems and would be preferred they were merged for tracking purposes.

[Dan_Stevens_]

I don't mean to hijack the conversation, but when contacts are added to CRM (MS Dynamics) and synced to Marketo, we intentionally create a duplicate: we place the CRM contact in a "Duplicate Contacts" lead partition (hidden from all other country partitions) and a new lead is created in the country lead partition.  This is so the lead can properly (and/or, once again) qualify for our lead lifecycle campaigns/workflows and eventually become an MQL once again and convert to an opportunity (you can't do that with CRM contacts in Dynamics).  When the lead is qualified by Sales (converted to a new contact), we receive a notification that a duplicate contact exists and then we merge the two contacts.  The lead (contact) remains a contact until closed-won/lost status - at which time, another duplicate is created in Marketo.  Rinse and repeat.

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

Interesting. So do you have any problems with maintaining the history then? I don't see why that would be an issue, but you never know. As it stands with our current instance in SFDC, we have duplicate leads and contacts for a variety of not-very-good reasons, and their activity will often get split between the two IDs, which makes me insane(r).

That process makes sense, but I'm not sure I want to get into the whole database partition nightmare with our admins

[Dan_Stevens_]

Yes, this approach does have its issues.  The biggest issues is when both a lead in the country partition and a lead in the "duplicate contacts" partition exist, and sales updates the contact record, Marketo now considers the lead in the duplicates partition as the current/active record.  This causes all sorts of issues.  For example,

• if we import a list of leads into a program, there are always a handful of list import fails (e.g., "lead exists in another partition").  So we have to manually make a minor update on the country lead record (e.g., add a period to the "person notes" field) so Marketo will reconsider this as the active record.
  
  
• If a lead registers for an event (and they're already in Marketo as a duplicate; and they're not cookied to their country lead record), they won't show up as a program member ("registered") since Marketo doesn't consider the country lead as the active one - even though the duplicates partition is completely hidden from all of the country workspaces.

Also, when that duplicate lead is created, all prior activity is lost.  It's a new lead record.  Big issue for us - especially when triggering/filtering off of past activity.  We are able to retain key fields like lead scores and a handful of other attributes.  But it's that historical activity that's causes most pain for us.

And finally, this makes Sales Insight (MSI) not as valuable to Sales since their contacts are not the active records in Marketo - the active record is the purposeful duplicate which hasn't synced to CRM yet.  Basically there's no central insight to their leads/contacts.  This has led to us potentially cancelling our MSI licenses - primarily due to this as well as this issue: HTML is being stripped from our emails sent to Sales Insight (MSI)

We're currently discussing using the new custom sync filter and change how we deal with this in the future.

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

Ah, yes, I saw that thread about HTML getting stripped out of MSI. And that was my next question: how MSI functions when you have someone in the system as both a Lead and a Contact. I know we've had several problems with this when it comes to duplicates, as our sales team will use it to see what the Lead has been sent, only to later discover they missed several activities because they were placed on the Contact instead.

That said, if I remember our SFDC implementation correctly, there was something about a best practice being having Contacts on an Account, but then having a duplicate for a Lead. I can't remember why, but there was a conversation about it and I can't imagine how or why that would work for tracking (or be easier on a sales rep).

[Carrie_Chandle1]

We're currently dealing with this. Our SFDC instance automatically creates a duplicate contact record when a lead is converted to a contact, but since the initial web tracking and Marketo activity started on the lead, the contact ends up with no information in MSI; we also lose the acquisition data on the contact level.

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

So, does this mean that the last lead 'touched' on either side (CRM or MKTO) will be the one updated upon further changes?

With an SFDC integration the MKTO lead and the SFDC contact/lead are tied by the SFDC ID to my understanding.  This is what identifies which CRM record gets updated, or am I wrong here?