Merging Issue - Need To Exclude Merged Leads From Lead Life Cycle Campaigns

[Helen_Abramova1]

Hello,

We have a big issue with merging leads. Merging is going smoothly in Salesforce, but in Marketo it causes a big problem. The reason is Marketo can't query merged leads in any way, so we can't exclude them from Lead Life Cycle campaigns. Thus a newly merged lead is added to certain campaigns, some fields are changed to new values, and it triggers alerts, status changes etc.

For now I see two options:
- manually deactivate all lead Life Cycle campaigns, run deduping, then switching them on (very manually, no deduping in real time)

- no overriding when merging (in this case we lose some lead history)

We already talked to Marketo support, deduping tool support - there is no solution so far.

Any ideas or suggestions on that?

Thanks you!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Elena,

You can create a mart list with the following filter :

Lead was created - Min number of times = 2

This will give you the list of merged leads.

Best regards,

Gregoire

[Helen_Abramova1]

Hi Michel,
Thank you for the suggestion. Unfortunately it didn't work for us. Hard to say why, but when testing, there was neither consistency nor reliability on what we got.
Helen

[Loren_Posendek]

Hi Elena - We're having the same experience. We're trying to determine the best way to filter out these leads who have already been through the program (prior to being merged). Have you found any workarounds?

[Anonymous]

Hi Elena and Loren,

At Grazitti we have developed de-dupe solution in MKTO, which is real time and save huge cost. Here is post written by our MKTO experts,

https://www.grazitti.com/blog/how-can-you-cleanse-de-dupe-existing-records-in-marketo/

Please let me know, if we can connect on a call to showcase live demo and answer your queries.

Thanks,

Shailendra Pratap

​Marketo Consultant | Grazitti Interactive

M +1-650 417 9738 | E: shailendrap@grazitti.com

[Helen_Abramova1]

Hi Loren,

Actually we found a nice and quite elegant solution. BTW I brought this problem to our Washington DC Marketo User Group, and after overall brainstorming, Todd Sprinkel​ gave me perfectly outlined directions on what to do.

In a long run, we set up a trigger in Salesforce, so once a record is merged, a special field (we call it "Marketo Ignore") is getting checked for 60 min. During this period, the record is getting properly synced, and then the field is getting unchecked. In Marketo, we exclude triggering Lead Life Cycle campaigns by that field (Marketo Ignore=False).

The only issue here is mass record update, when we have too many records queued for syncing, when it takes more than 1 hour. But it is another discussion - on syncing bandwidth, not on deduping

Hope all that is helpful!

[Loren_Posendek]

Thanks for sharing Elena! This is great. I'll definitely share this with our team to determine if it makes sense for us to implement. Appreciate you sharing it!

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

Are you performing merges manually? If so, you could add something to their Person Notes saying, "Merged on DATE" and suppress that from each campaign.

[Loren_Posendek]

That's a great idea, Jenn! Right now, our SFDC team is performing the merges, but we may be able to add a unique identifier on merged leads. Thanks!

[Helen_Abramova1]

Hi Jenn,
Thank you for the idea.

Loren,

Did it work for you? Just curious