Merging Multiple Companies for One Contact

[Anonymous]

I am trying to figure out if there is a way to merge all of the previous companies one contact has worked at and make it up to date so that they have one lead with their current company, instead of three leads that are two from their previous place of employment and also their current position.

We tested merging a lead where we had her current and previous place of employment, when we merged the two, Marketo at first had the current, up to date information for her current company but the next day it changed her company name back to the previous place of employment but kept the rest of the information from her current company.

Example:

Currently: John Smith works at ABC Company

In Marketo they are listed:

John Smith - ABC Company

John Smith - XYZ Company (previous company)

John Smith - 123 Company (previous company)

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Sam,

Are your leads synchronized with a CRM ?

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Greg,

Yes they are synchronized with Salesforce!

-Sam

[Grégoire_Miche2]

i again Sam,

Do first thing, check your leads are not in fact contacts, attached to separate accounts. If so, merging them is just impossible.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Greg,

Yes that is a challenge we are trying to work through. A record leaves one company and goes to another, creating another record. We are trying to just keep it to one record.

We are just reaching out to see if anyone else has encountered this problem!

- Sam

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Sam,

This is totally forbidden in SFDC, so Marketo will not be able to do this. If you want to be abel to do this, you will first have o move the person in her new company in SFDC, the merge it.

Some deduplication tools such as ringlead might be able to do this.

Now, one step back : usually, moving a contact from one account to another when the person change company is not a recommended action in SFDC. The reason is that interactions with someone in B2B is very contextual. When people change companies, they also change environment, responsibilities, decisions processes, ... I would rather recommend to setup a "non longer with company" checkbox field on the contact, and if you really need to, to create a link between the new contact and the old one with a lookup field.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Greg,

Thank you for your help, that clears up a lot of questions!

I've heard about Ringlead but I need to do some research on it.

We do have a left company checkbox that we have been using, we just wanted to reach out to the community to see how we could possibly clean it up and consolidate it.

- Sam

[Alok_Ramsisaria]

Hi Sam,

You may also want to check the De-dupe solution by Grazitti Interactive. Its a real time de-dupe solution that can be implemented on your Marketo instance.