Moving Contacts Back to Leads in Salesforce Creating Duplicates in Marketo

[Leah_Hurt]

We are trying to move several thousand contacts in our Salesforce instance and reupload them back as leads while retaining their historical info. In doing this, it creates a duplicate record in Marketo only (the contact is deleted from Salesforce after the data is uploaded as a lead), and it seems we're having to merge the two records in Marketo in order to retain Marketo data for the lead. 

The only options we can think of is to manually merge duplicates in Marketo one-by-one, or pay extra for a service to do it, which or neither great options. Has anyone had this problem before and is there another way around it?

[Amit_Jain]

Hi Leah Hurt‌

Can you try following instead:

1. Take the back-up of all your contacts
2. Delete those from SFDC
3. Wait until the deleted information sync back in Marketo. i.e. all the deleted contacts will now have "Deleted from SFDC" Marketo flag as "True".
4. Re-upload those in Marketo and then sync in SFDC. Do not try to re-upload in SFDC as a lead directly. Otherwise it will create duplicate in Marketo.
5. If you follow the above, Marketo will have only single record and sync the contact as lead in SFDC. Moreover, it will retain all the history in Marketo.

I tested it at my end and it's seems to be working fine. One thing that I notice is that when it was a contact, there was a "Record Type ID" assigned to the contact record. You have to update the Record Type ID with Null before you sync those in SFDC, sync will fail otherwise i.e. no record will be created.

Regards,

Amit

[Courtney_King]

Amit,

What if there isn't the ability to delay/prevent salesforce from creating the lead? We are using a salesforce tool that moves the contact back to the lead in SFDC and keeps all the contact history created in salesforce with the lead that it creates. So step 4 may not be possible. any thoughts?

[Courtney_King]

Grégoire Michel

[Amit_Jain]

I am afraid there is any other option in this case. You can try disabling the tool and try to do it as I mentioned above. Since all activities have been retained, it should be ok.

[Lynn_Ray_Pardo]

Hi Amit,

Thank you for your very interesting idea. We, too, have SFDC Contacts that we'd like to turn back into Leads.

I have a Question - Re your - step 3:
"3. Wait until the deleted information sync back in Marketo. i.e. all the deleted contacts will not have "Deleted from SFDC" Marketo flag as "True".  
Why would the deleted Contacts not show as Marketo flag "True"? Is that because those records have Lead dupes?

Lynn 

[Amit_Jain]

Sorry I meant "Now" instead of "Not".. corrected now.

[Sally_Duda]

Hi Leah,

Check out this community post from Brian Law from Marketo Consulting. It is possible to set up a custom sync filter with SFDC to manage the syncing of the Contacts when a Lead already exists.

https://nation.marketo.com/community/product_and_support/blog/2017/05/14/instructions-for-creating-a... 

-Sally