MKTO and SFDC leads vs. contacts

[Anonymous]

We currently have it set up that when a lead is imported into MKTO it is synched to SFDC. If it already exists in SFDC either as a lead or a contact, the record is updated. If it does not exist, it will be created as a lead and assigned appropriately. The issue with this is

1) old contacts are being updated and are therefor not being accounted for when we pull lead and MQL metric counts (ie- we are not getting "credit" as a marketing team for a new lead because it instead updated an old, un worked contact from 2005... so some campaigns look as though they haven't generated anything new)

and 2) when opportunities are created off of these updated contacts, the campaign does not follow through to the opportunity because they are not being converted. sales or marketing has to manually add the campaign to any opportunity generated by a marketing driven contact.

Our proposal is to have all new records created as leads in SFDC, rather than having the contact records updated, and have the sales organization work the lead, not the contact, then upon creating an opportunity they convert the lead to a contact, and the two contacts (old and new) will merge and the campaign will follow as will the activity history.

The question/concern however is how this will affect duplicates in MKTO since it does not recognize leads and contacts as different entities. If we want a lead created in SFDC even though the same individual is already a contact, will it just then create and exist as 2 leads in Marketo?

How has everyone else dealt with this issue- is there a best practice to follow?

Thanks in advance!

[Anonymous]

I and many others would strongly advise you not to take this approach.  Duplicate Lead and Contact records create all sorts of problems and about the only way to have email duplicates in Marketo is to create them in SFDC first and let them synch to Marketo.

We have a "Marketing Recycled" checkbox field on the Contact and Opportunity record.  We also added a required "Initial Contact" field to the Opportunity record and if the Contact's "Marketing Recycled" field value is "true", then the Opportunitiy's "Marketing Recycled" field value is set to "true".  This allows us to show which Opportunities are a result of a Contact that Marketing has "woken up" regardless of its initial source.

[Anonymous]

Valerie,

I would advise against the process of uploading everything as a lead and creating tons of duplicates in the system.

To address your concerns:

1) It sounds like you are only giving marketing credit for "net new" leads. I would reconsider that practice, and instead measure the marketing impact: in terms of both net new and influence on existing. For example, some companies actively keep track of their "new vs existing rate" on all marketing campaigns to see if the campaign was a lead generating campaign vs moving people already in the funnel to the next stage. As long as you are making folks members of a SFDC campaign, it shouldn't matter if they are new or existing to give marketing appropriate credit.

2) If an exisiting contact is associated with a new opportunity SFDC will give the opp credit to the campaign that the contact was part of. You don't need to have a lead convert to a contact for this to happen. The only caveat here is that the contact must be associated with the Opp, otherwise the connection is lost. This is where Account based attribution would be nice to have, and I know that's something Marketo is working on providing.

I think that you'll make your and everyone's else life infinitely more complex if you start adding emails as new leads to the system everytime - and creating double, triple and potentially quaruple duplicates.

Don't do it! Let's find another way!

Make sense?

[Anonymous]

Lead gen quotas like this are well suited to a company that doesn't have a tool like Marketo and its ultimately a vanity metric anyway.  Better metric the number of successful outcomes from a program.