Possible Duplicates

[Anonymous]

I am trying to clean up my Marketo instance by deleting duplicate leads.

To do this, I created a campaign that will ‘Delete Lead” if the following smart list criteria is met: (1) Lead was deleted from SFDC and (2) Email Address is Empty or (3) First Name is Empty or (4) Company Name is Empty. After I run this campaign, I look in my lead database at the “possible duplicates” system smart list and see that these leads still exist.

Is there a way to permanently delete these leads from Marketo?

[Anonymous]

Are you also setting the "Remove from SFDC = TRUE" like it says to do here:
https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000L3kA&src=comm

[Anonymous]

Yes, I am.

[Anonymous]

Are you sure that the duplicate leads that were deleted in SFDC also have either of the #2, #3 or #4 criteria? ie why are you insisting that one of the fields be empty? It sounds like you already know that they are duplicates, and need to be deleted regardless.

[Anonymous]

Unfortunately we have a massive amount of duplicates. I was looking for a way to streamline the deletion process by starting with a subset of this amount.

For example, If we already deleted them in SFDC (because they were duplicates in SF as well), then we should delete them in Marketo as a way to reduce the number of duplicate leads. I was doing a campaign to help manage this process, and chose to start with leads that have some kind of NULL criteria. I was hoping this would bring the duplicate count down significantly, but these leads still exist in Marketo.

Do you have any suggestions or than manually selecting a lead and deleting that lead?

[Anonymous]

That's a good idea - you should play with the Delete function on a lead by lead basis first to get a feel for how it works.

Literally select a lead, and the go to "Lead Actions" -> Flow Actions -> Delete Lead...

Like this:

[Anonymous]

Thanks, that is how I have been deleting leads so far.

Do you know of a way I can tweak my campaign process so that it mirrors the manual process you mentioned above?

[Anonymous]

It sounds like you're already doing everything right!

I would experiment with the additional criteria if you want to limit the number of leads you're getting. Maybe start small by actually putting the email addresses of people in your smarlist criteria - and then once you're comfortable that it's working, begin expanding the criteria.

Sorry I could help more! Maybe someone else with chime in who's ran into a similar issue. I've never had trouble deleting.

[Anonymous]

I'd also like to throw it out there that duplicate leads (in my experience) generally don't have much blank info in the lead detail. So based on that,  many wouldn't be deleted from your campaign.

Unless you know for sure that all the information is exactly the same on two leads that  are duplicates, the best way to de-dupe them is the merge the most relevant data between the two, otherwise you risk deleting important information from one of the duplicates. Often, with two lead profiles exisiting, there's going to be different data on both and you have to pick which is most relevant to your sales team's needs.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Grant!

Caleb - These leads (with blank information) I am trying to delete were from a prevous list import that accidentially created duplicates when synced to SalesForce. They were then mass deleted from SalesForce by an admin and now appear twice in Marketo. The list import had some blank fields (like email, oddly enough), so there is no information attached to this lead since we currently use Marketo for email campaigns only. I completely agree that it is best to merge leads rather than delete them when there is a chance that valuable information might be lost. Fortunately that is not our case.

Has anyone had an issue with streamlining the manual delete process before? If not, then can anyone tell me what I might be doing wrong? Truly appreciate it!