Intentional Duplicate Lead Question

[Steve_Schimmel]

My company's sales department is split up by product line. Team A, for example, sells Cameras. Team B sells media equipment. Typically, there is not much overlap in customer for these 2 groups.

My company is thinking of rolling out a "Lead Referral Program", where when an Account Manager speaking to a lead about cameras finds out that same lead is also interested in media equipment. The process that is being discussed would entail the Account Manager from team A intentionally creating a duplicate lead, and assigning that lead to an AM from Team B. This would create a duplicate lead.

Obviously, duplicate leads are not ideal in Marketo. I'm curios to learn if anyone has any suggestions for dealing with this. How can I ensure a lead can have 2 different owners from different teams. Is there a way to do this without creating a duplicate lead?

Thanks!

Steve

[SanfordWhiteman]

This is pretty much the definition of an Opportunity Owner.

If you start creating multiple leads with the same email address now, you have a disaster on your hands.

[Ankit_Dua]

Sanford Whiteman​: How about creating status for both the products?

Say, different product status for "Camera" and different product status for "Media Equipment" on the lead layout and adding Multiple account Manager for such kind of leads on layout?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yep, that might work if you needed to keep it to flat fields and had a small set of possible interests. But sounds more like Oppties to me.

[Kenzie_Caldwell]

Having a flat structure to house this info (i.e.via fields) would make it easier to market based on product line- having to reference product interest via opportunities gets messy really quick.

Having fields housing this info on one record vs.intentional duplicates allows for all sales reps involved to see all interactions with that record - has that record been called three times in the same day by three different reps? Is the rep from Media Equipment days away from closing a deal and the rep from Cameras sent an intro email, explaining everything the company offers (which the record already recieved from the Media Equipment rep months ago)? If that activity is spread across multiple records, it's not a true indication of everything happening with that record.

[Elliott_Lowe1]

I see a lot of companies wanting to create purposeful duplicates for the similar reasons (e.g. referring partners). If these records are in SFDC, I recommend they consider using its ability to associate a Contact with multiple Accounts. The Accounts could have the Account Name of and be owned by the referring salesperson. There would still be a single owner on the Marketo record however, but I believe there is a Lookup Relationship field value that Marketo can see, so you might be able to build a custom object for this in order to easily segment by the various referring Account owners.

[Steve_Schimmel]

Thanks Elliot. This is a great idea. Instead of assigning to an account named after the referring person, would it make more sense for the account be named after the person receiving the referral?

For instance, if Account Manager Bob Smith refers a contact to another account manager named John Jones, should the contact be added to the account named John Jones Referrals? That way, any opportunity on the John Jones account for a contact who is owned by Bob Smith can be tracked.

Without much knowledge of the SFDC technical steps needed to make this happen and its ramifications, that to me seems like the easiest way to track this. Any insights into if this makes sense, or if the way you originally suggested would be better?

[Elliott_Lowe1]

Hi Steve! Your idea is better as you'd be able to easily identify who the recipients of the referrals are. If you wanted to identify all of the referrals by Bob Smith, you'd select every other salespersons' Accounts for the Contacts owned by Bob Smith. The downside to using the multiple Account method is that the Contact record can be owned only by a single person. So if you want to send email alerts for activities related to the product covered by John Jones, you'd have to do something else such as using a Send Alert flow action with 'Send To: Account Owner'. As Kenzie's post points out duplicate records are really not a good idea especially when it comes to getting a consolidated view of activities / and behavioral scores.

[Sonali_Jadeja3]

Hi Steve,

My company adopted the 'duplicate leads for different businesses' model (long before I joined btw ). And from all the issues we have right now - I can guarantee that it's the most inefficient use of your Marketing automation - CRM framework.

Using 'multiple opportunities' is your answer to this!

Best,

Sonali

[Vlada_Prasolova]

we have an "Intentional Duplicate Lead" model in my company, and it have been adopted long before we've started using marketo. This was a critical issue for us to continue with it after starting to use marketo, so Marketo engineers have created a custom deduplication criteria for us.

Marketo's original deduplication criteria is "emails address", where as we use "email address + customder code"

So we do have multiple leads with the same email address and diffrent codes (or no code if the lead is not yet a customer), this complicates matters a bit where possible duplication might be wanted, but it allows us to keep their tracks and records apart and i might say it works pretty well

We've been running this model for 5 years now and quite happy with it