Keeping purchased leads out of Marketo until they opt in

[Matt_Stone2]

I'm working through a scenario dealing with preventing purchased leads from flowing down into Marketo UNTIL they opt-in naturally. Our sales team acquires leads and imports them directly into Salesforce, I believe as contacts, and in order to maintain compliance, we mark them in a way that prevents them from syncing down into Marketo. However, we want it to be set in a way so that if John Doe was originally purchased, then converts naturally on our website, he will flow up from Marketo into Salesforce and merge with the original purchased profile (thereby maintaining both any sales-related activity as well as the Marketo activity).

In my head, the only way to possibly do this, without manual effort, would be via an apex trigger on the Salesforce side -- essentially a de-dupper. When John Doe's new lead comes into Salesforce, the trigger would query his email against all contacts with Purchased = True. If there's a match, the trigger would merge the records on the spot and change Purchased = False. This way they would be merged and could now sync freely between the two.

Has anyone else dealt with this -- and if so, did you find a different solution?

[Josh_Hill13]

You could use RingLead or a tool like that as well.

A better way may be to either:

1. import these into Marketo with Opt In=F and Purchased List=T (or whatever field/channel makes sense). Then marketo-sfdc assign the leads. This way you aren't in a deduping quandry.
2. Continue to let Sales upload leads in SFDC. Use a trigger or other field to mark them as Opt In=F and Purchased List=T. Let them sync to Marketo and use a Program to collect them in one place for Attribution: if Lead is Created from SFDC AND other filters=XYZ, then set Acquisition Program=Purchased Sales List. Since they are already opted out, you shouldn't have a problem with bad email sends. Then, the lead can later opt in without much hassle on your end.

[Matt_Stone2]

You're absolutely correct that this would be ideal, but I neglected to mention we're also battling database limits with Marketo at the moment. Keeping all the purchased leads in Marketo would put us way over our limit. It might be worth upgrading to the next tier rather than mess with the alternatives, though.

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

It might be worth upgrading to the next tier rather than mess with the alternatives, though.

This. I ran into a similar issue when renewing our subscription, and the alternatives would have caused a bigger headache in the long-run than just shooting for the upgrade.

If you're not afraid of something a bit more manual, though, you could set up an alert to send when a duplicate is created in this manner. You'd have to merge them yourself, but at least it would be timely. I do this with our own instance due to importing many buying group lists.

[Anonymous]

I have the same problem, with a SFDC database of over a million and a marketo limit with 500k.

I have been using a custom sync field filter on a field named "Hide From Marketo," and when its values are false it cuts the sync between Marketo and Salesforce. It works great when I want to remove blacklisted or dead leads from our Marketo, but Sales wants to keep them in Salesforce.

My current issue is that I am having trouble re-syncing individuals if they have new activity. Changing 'Hide From Marketo' to FALSE should technically re-sync them back, but I think my API issues are causing that to not work. Anyways, good luck!