Marketo creating leads in sfdc

[Anonymous]

If a person enters into Marketo let's say from a form fill on our website and Marketo syncs that person to sfdc, does sfdc look to see if that person already exists in the sfdc database - maybe by email address? Or does it just automatically create a new record and you could potentially end up with duplicates as a result?

[SydneyMulligan · Accepted solution]

Hi Candace!

Good question. When Marketo creates the new lead (in this example, via form fill) it will look in the Marketo database to see if that lead already exists before creating a new one. Marketo only de-dupes on email address, so if Marketo sees another lead with that email address, it will associate the form fill activity to the existing lead.

There are some instances where you might not have a 1:1 relationship between your Marketo and SFDC databases. In that case, if a lead exists in SFDC but not in Marketo, the form completion will create a new lead in Marketo, then a duplicate will be synced to SFDC.

I hope that answers your question!

Sydney

[Dan_Stevens_]

Didn't mean to double-post here, Sydney.  I must have been writing my reply when you submitted yours.  At least our answers are aligned!

[SydneyMulligan]

Ha, no worries Dan! Happens all the time

[Dan_Stevens_]

Here are the various scenarios:

• If there's not a synced record in Marketo (from a lead/contact record in CRM), then this sync will not dedupe against any records in CRM - it will create a duplicate. 
• If a synced CONTACT from CRM is in Marketo and becomes a qualified lead that you now want to sync to CRM, the sync will fail since you cannot sync to a CRM lead entity if there's already a contact entity associated with it (at least that's how it is on the MS Dynamics side)
• If a synced LEAD from CRM is in Marketo and becomes a qualified lead that you now want to sync to CRM, the sync will fail since it already exists as a LEAD in CRM.  But that's fine - the alerts can still be sent out and Sales can still action the lead record in CRM accordingly.  Ideally, leads in CRM should be short-lived since ultimately would be actioned somehow by Sales in a timely manner (disqualified, recycled, qualified, etc.) and therefore, won't experience this issue very often.  Again, on the MS Dynamics side, when a lead is qualified, it's converted/merged into a CONTACT; when it's disqualified, it's no longer active.