Leads to Contacts- Managing Duplicates &Teleprospecting

[Anonymous]

Hi,
I wanted to get some feedback on how other have addressed this problem:

We have an integration with SFDC (Unlimited) and we had to build an exernal licensing system to support our products. That aside, the issue is the integration. We have to manually create leads for a number of business reasons outside of Marketo and push them directly to SFDC via code and then to Marketo. For existing contacts we also have code in place and when there is a match on the email address we then create a "Pre-qualification Opportunity" which essentially is an opportunity that looks like a lead record. These then go to Teleprospecting/Sales based on what it is for nurture. If the pre-qualification opportunity is valid, we update the record type to a "real opportunity" and Sales continues to work. 

The Marketo integration issue is that because we are pushing leads directly into SFDC, we are getting a large number of duplicates dude to the nature of our lead scoring rules. We have an advanced lead scoring metric in place and keep a large volume of the marketing records out of SFDC so the sync isn't bogged down.

Recently we assed that we need to open up our sync some to more Marketo records to stop the duplicates from being created but I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts or a different way of doing this? 

Thanks,

Kaitlyn

[Josh_Hill13]

Kaitlyn,

Interesting setup. The primary cause of dupes is that you are feeding data into SFDC, not Marketo. Marketo only dedupes when you push leads into Marketo.

If you can alter your system to do that first, then create pre-qual leads, you will solve that problem.

Special System > Marketo > SFDC

Alternatively, you could buy one of the deduper tools in SFDC to manage deduping and dupe blocking.

[Anonymous]

Like Josh suggests, we re-routed all of our data flow so that leads enter Marketo first, then SalesForce. Also, everyone who engages with us is immediately pushed to SalesForce. This way, the date stamping in SalesForce is accurate and sales sees everything we see. This won't "bog down the sync." Records only sync if there is a change worth syncing. We've had no issues with performance.

[Anonymous]

Hey guys,

Because we have an external licensing system that needs to have a key code generated ASAP we can't use Marketo. The lag time with the sync is too much for our businsess to be supported 100%. We ended up building it externally to route into SFDC because SFDC does support the licensing system. 

I have already done the duplication tools route, Ringlead, Dupeblocker etc. They are okay but not ideal. We use Demand Tools to clean and merge leads now.

I know that ideally we want the leads to come into Marketo first but unfortunetly that can't be supported. I was just curious if anyone else had run into a similar issue with licensing and fufillment requriements.