Re: How to prevent merges and converts from triggering "Program Status Changed" triggers for events

Chris_Saporito · ‎06-20-2018

Our organization uses campaign status as a means of triggering event MQLs. For example, if the campaign name contains "Event" and the status is changed to "Visited Booth" we will trigger and MQL to go to our SDR or inside sales team. The problem that I can't seem to fix is from old leads either merging with another lead record or converting to a contact. Both the merging and converting are causing the campaign history to re-sync with Marketo and qualifying them for the trigger. As you can see in the screenshots I have a constraint for "Reason" not contains "merge" or "convert" and a filter for "Not person was converted" but I get complaints for old leads becoming MQLs. A few of the records I looked at have the campaign history syncing before the merge is actually stamped in the activity. Any suggestions on how to fix this or even new ways to send event MQLs to our sales team?

Thanks!

Chris

Amanda_Thomas6 · ‎06-20-2018

Do you have can only flow through once? You can also add another filter that they're not a member of this smart campaign. If it's the same email address, Marketo will see that it is already part of the smart campaign.

Chris_Saporito · ‎06-20-2018

I have it restricted to once per 11 months because we would want them to be able to come back through for annual conferences/events. Same thought process for not suppressing anyone already a member of the smart campaign. We've seen some weird things happening in our instance that is allowing the same person to qualify for smart campaigns multiple times even when restricted to running through one time, I have a case open with Marketo about that.

Amanda_Thomas6 · ‎06-20-2018

Yeah, I think in this case it does seem that they'd be most helpful. Maybe there is someone else on here that has another idea though.

Dan_Stevens_ · ‎06-20-2018

Thanks for raising this issue, Chris. We too use a similar process to progress leads and send out alerts. We also have the same constraints in place. We’re very close so doing some major cleanup work in CRM - which of course will be reflected in Marketo (especially the merging of multiple records). I sure hope Support can identify the issue here and not just attribute it to a race condition. Otherwise, these constraints are useless.

Sean_Richards · ‎03-27-2019

Hi Dan, we're doing major merge/converting cleanup and we're triggering this scenario. I can confirm there is a race condition where if the converted Lead to Contact sync's to Marketo before the Converted (ghost) Lead does, then Marketo creates the new Contact as a new person, then later realises that the Lead was a conversion, then it performs a Merge on the new contact to the old Lead, which causes triggers to fire again. Some trigger can be excluded by adding the reason contains "Merge (leaddb)" criteria, but others can't be avoided like our single global trigger for "Person is Created" which re-triggers our lead lifecycle.

From what I have learned, it's caused by a setting on the instance. Read the last comment on this thread from Denise Greenberg : Marketo / Salesforce Sync Limits & Priority Info

This is a pretty serious flaw in the sync logic. I have an open support ticket. I'll let you know if we solve it.

It seems that even though the "Lead: pull conversions" sync call should fire before "Contact updates" when this setting is enabled on the instance, that linear run time dependency is not being respected.

It's completely random as well. We have a program setup to "catch" these records in the act.