Leads inadvertently getting updated in Marketo

[Anonymous]

Hello,

We are having an issue where people are encouraged to fill out a form to be part of campaign and also to encourage others to join the campaign. We have found that people are using the same email address but entering different friends' and family members' names. This has caused the first and last names of about 3,000 people in our database to inadvertently get updated. We have put a notice on the form saying that they can only use one email address per person; yet, this still doesn't stop the potential for people to still use the same email address to sign up multiple different people.

Are there any suggestions to solve this? Is there a way to force a lead record from being updated even if someone tries to enter a different name for an email address already in the system?

Thanks,

Laura
 

[Anonymous]

Hi Laura -

Are you having the forms pre-populated?  If so, I would disable the forms to be pre-populated and thus hopefully getting them to enter a new email address.  

[SanfordWhiteman]

@Laura K It sounds like it isn't so much inadvertent as by design! (Maybe not your ideal design, but Marketo Forms 2.0 are designed as self-service personal info forms.)

If you want leads to recommend others, there should be a different fieldset for that ("Invite a friend - Enter their info here") and you don't necessarily need to create leads for those friends; you can instead use a Send Alert flow step including the Most Recent Invited Friend data and let salespeople do the entry/dupe detection.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your help...Quick question, I have thought about those two options, but my question is if a person decides they still want to use the same email address (one that's already in the Marketo database) and enter a new person's name in, does Marketo keep overriding the previous name with the new name?

Laura

[Josh_Hill13]

Both suggestions should be done to prevent this situation.
 

You can also block field updates on existing data by going to Admin > Field Management and choosing the field and block updates from FORM. I do this for all key data because a lead could overwrite their own valid data with junk data, ruining a sales person's day.

[SanfordWhiteman]

@Laura, unless you follow @Josh's instructions then the name is self-service-updateable, yes.

A caveat is that if you block field updates then you are (again, this is by definition) saying that a user cannot clarify or extend their record in a good way or a bad way.  In other words, if you have an existing lead which just an email address you'll be saying that the user can't legitimately give you more complete info, because you are more concerned about polluting the data (nothing wrong with that).  However a good compromise is to create new self-service fields that mirror the key fields.  Let those fields be updateable by the user, but require a salesperson to copy that data into the key fields if it looks "better" (whatever that means!).  For known leads, show only the mirror fields.  Lots of ways to examine this...