Marketo creates duplicates and removes SFDC ID in the old record

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I'm getting very confused here. I'm trying to clean my Marketo/Salesforce marking as invalid the old contacts with hard bounces, etc.

I created a smart campaign with those people and, in the flow, I did 3 things: create a task explaining that, change a checkbox to false and change the status of the lead/contact to invalid.

Now that I've run the campaign, Marketo has created duplicates for some of the leads and I have no idea why. It looks like Marketo:

- Duplicate the record in Marketo (only the info in the fields, not tasks, etc.)

- Delete the SFDC ID of the old record

- When it syncs with SFDC it creates a new lead there.

Consequences:

- I end up with 3 versions of the same lead:

     - One in Marketo with no SFDC ID so it's not linked to anything

     - The same one in SFDC but not linked to Marketo as Marketo doesn't have the SFDC ID

     - The new one in both SFDC and Marketo and synced, but without the old info, just as a new created record.

So:

- I have to merge the 2 duplicates in Salesforce keeping the info of the old one.
- I can't merge the 2 duplicates in Marketo because one of them doesn't exist in SFDC (I guess that's the reason, I just get an error when I try), so the only way to get rid of duplicates is by removing the old one (with old information) and leave the new one that is the one linked to Salesforce.

I have to add that Marketo did not change any of the 3 steps in the flow in the Salesforce leads, only in the one that doesn't have the SFDC ID in Marketo.

It's not the first time that happens to me so I'm trying to find the reason to avoid doing the same in the future?

Does anyone have any idea why Marketo is creating that duplicate and removing the SFID in the old one?  That lead was in Salesforce and Marketo before I run the campaign.

Thanks.

[Steven_Vanderb3]

I would say make a support ticket so someone can log in and see the configuration of the Smart Campaign and the history of the leads.  That sounds weird; Marketo can't create leads or clear SFDC IDs via Smart Campaigns so it's not specifically your clean-up campaign that would have created dupes.  Maybe the campaign updating the status to Invalid triggered something in SFDC to do a deletion, which synced down to Marketo and cleared the SFDC ID that way?  Although that wouldn't explain the dupes.

[Josh_Hill13]

What is this checkbox that you are setting? Is it saying DO Not Sync?

It sounds like this process caused leads to be removed in SFDC.

One of the issues with that is Marketo retains the SFDC ID info and Record Type ID. When it tries to resync, it creates problems.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Josh.

No, I have a checkbox called Marketo that is the one that allows the sync. I unticked another one called active that has nothing to do with the sync.
The strange thing is that this only happened to a few leads in the campaign.

[Anonymous]

Something similar with duplicates heppened as well when I first started using Marketo but support didn't know why the duplicates were being created. I'll probably try again. The most strange thing is that it only happened to some of the leads in the campaign. The rest were fine.