How to manage Contacts in Marketo

[Yun_Bai1]

Hello all,

I got confused that how to deal with Leads or Contact in Marketo.

We generate and create leads in Marketo, it will sync to SFDC based on leads call-to-action behavior. Leads also go through lead life cycle process. I am ok with leads part. However, our contacts are created in SFDC directly by sales. After contact created in SFDC, it will sync back to Marketo. Then issues begins:

1. Contact won't able to sync back from Marketo to SFDC, such as there was no "Lead Source" by creation.

2. Duplicate lead/contact with the same email address. One could be lead, the other one is contact. Lead may or may not already synced to SFDC depends on SC and/or if the lead has all necessary and valid information such as Country, Lead source.

If you had the similar experience, can you share with me:

1. How would you manage contacts? or what is the common way to manage them?

2. Do you update contacts and sync contacts update back to SFDC?

3. How did you handle the duplicate lead/contact?

Thank you in advance,

Becky

[Rob_Cummerson]

Hi Becky,

There are a couple of different options available, but you will need create some mandatory fields in SFDC and also ask you team imputing contacts to change the way they work. Hopefully the below is helpful: 

1) Managing contacts can be done by creating mandatory fields in SFDC that match the lead creation rules. Therefore any contacts added directly into SFDC will have the same fields needed to sync to Marketo and then back in SFDC.

2) Duplicate leads have a couple of different options you could use a tool called DupeCatcher which is a plug in for Salesforce or you will have to ask your team to check your database before they add a new contact.

Thanks

Rob

[Josh_Hill13]

What you really want to do in Question 1 is build workflows in Marketo to catch SFDC Contacts, check for missing fields, and then stamp them. Yes, you can build Validation Rules or Required fields in SFDC as well. Just go through your Notifications tab to see a list of some of the issues.

[Keith_Nyberg2]

Hey Becky,

You could make leads source a required field on contact creation or set a default value at a minimum.

Also, regarding the duplicate records issue, I always am reminding my sales team to check for existing records before simply creating a new contact. Additionally, SFDC should flag a record as a possible duplicate on creation. So really a reminder to the sales team to not create duplicates and pay attention to notifications is really the best way to combat the duplicates being created issue.

Good luck!