Is it possible to re-link 'new' Marketo leads to existing SFDC records?

[Grace_Cheung1]

Hello,

I'm fairly new to Marketo and to this instance, and learning as I go... would really appreciate any insight you might have!

Context: 

We're trying to clean our database as we're running out of space in Marketo, but want to keep the records that we have in Salesforce. In a mentor session, we figured out that the solution was to stop syncing certain leads from SFDC to Marketo--people who have unsubscribed (as we can't email them currently), certain industries and job titles, etc. We created a checkbox field in the lead and contact objects in SFDC, to indicate to the integration that SFDC should stop pushing those records to Marketo. We then built a smart list + flow to delete those leads from Marketo, thus freeing up space in the Marketo database.

Problem:

We test-deleted a few leads from Marketo, but we found out that if any of the people we delete try to re-subscribe (ie, fill out a form), Marketo will make a new record, but SFDC will reject the new data as a duplicate entry based on email address.

This is great for our normal processes, but my team is very worried that our Marketo deleted contacts might sign up with us again and won't be able to sync to Salesforce. Based on our chats with Salesforce support, on that end we can only control whether or not email address is used as the unique identifier. I'm thinking that because we've deleted the Marketo record, the Salesforce record is no longer linked to the Marketo record, thus any new submission from the same email address is (logically) seen as a duplicate. 

Is there any way to work around this? IE, is there a way to manually re-link the 'new' Marketo record to the existing Salesforce record? Or should be we looking at an entirely different method to free up space in our Marketo database? 

Thank you so much!! 

[Darshil_Shah1]

You could re-create the deleted record in marketo by making use of an Apex callout (you could use Push Lead endpoint) from SFDC to the Marketo (but you should be careful while using it as they will cost you your marketo API requests). Also for this you need to prevent the creation of lead in marketo upon form fill-outs and instead update the record first in sfdc and then make apex callout so the existing lead record gets synced in the marketo with all the fields as is. I am not sure if this is the most efficient and fail-safe approach or not.

We have a setup in our instance where-in we do not create the multiple records in marketo for the same lead showing multiple product interest but create seperate records in SFDC (so different products' sales rep can followup on separate records in crm) for each product interest of the same lead.