Multiple contacts in SFDC managing Marketo sync and duplicates

[Anonymous]

Hello,
Our sales team are creating a new lead/record in SFDC for every interaction they have have with a lead/contact. This means that when the MKTO/SFDC sync happens I end up with multiple duplicates. I am wondering if anyone has any good ideas about how to manage this, at the moment I am getting large numbers of duplicates in MKTO and am not able to give Sales information in a way that works with their processes.

In SFDC Sales want to be able to have Lead A interested in Product A - Only receives info about MKTO activity relating to this interest. 
Lead A interested in Product B - Only receives info about MKTO activity relating to this interest.
etc..

Then when that Lead is closed/converted in SFDC Sales wants MKTO to stop updating it. So if that "Lead" were to become qualified again in MKTO and need to have new activity/opportunity pushed to SFDC sales would like us to create a new Lead (SFDC Id).

Any ideas on how to make this work.

Thank you
Kate   

[Anonymous]

Kate, WHY!? This seems like a terrible thing to do, to create a new record for every touch point. Why is it in your sales staff's best interest to work this way? This seems like a nightmare to me that's best solved by standardizing your business practices.

[Anonymous]

I agree with Adam, this appears to be a problem on the Salesforce side and not something that the Marketo tool can solve. The sales team should be looking for the existing Lead/Contact and adding an activity to it regarding the touchpoint. If they cannot or will not look for duplicates prior to entering the lead then I would suggest looking into de-dupe tools for Salesforce that do the searching as the new lead is being typed in. As Adam said, there is no business benefit to entering duplicate data into Salesforce.

[Anonymous]

Agree as well - this defeats the purpose of watching all of the interaction. I'd encourage a site down with the SFDC team and model out your flows. This is a business process issue.

You could use tasks and associate them to product preferences or your can route leads according to interest, but maintain a centralized holistic view of the individual. All of the actions relate to the digital body language and disposition of the lead, not just the slice they are interested in.

We are doing some custom work that mimics the new lead - but I'll tell you it is complicated and has downstream implications - if interested we can connect offline and I'll frame up our implementation.

[Anonymous]

Hello All,
Thank you for taking the time to reply.

I agree with you all and am really struggling to see the Sales argument for working this way which had be worrying that I wasn't finding a solution because I didn't want there to be one.

We are just starting to work out the best solution and I wanted to confirm that I wasn't missing an easy workaround for this.

Kate