We have purposeful duplicate contacts in our database as this one person that has one email could be a contact at a company (branch facility) and also a contact for the main coproration. However the title and job decsription at each of the companies might differ. Which is why we want to retain both contact records. Does anyone else have purposeful duplicate contacts?
Have you checked with Marketo if they can set up a custom de-dupe on a unique mix of fields that would allow you to keep the duplicate contacts? We had Marketo customize our de-duplication so it checks on a combinations of first name, last name and email vs. only de-duping on email
We do at my company but I generally wouldn't recommend it unless there is no other choice. It makes things a lot messier.
(In our case it is a by-product of integrating our software app with our Salesforce DB. If someone has multiple accounts in our app, they will have multiple Salesforce contacts as well. I think there's a better solution to this problem though that wouldn't involve contact duplication.)
In your situation, is this a single contact working at multiple companies at the same time? Are they related or completely separate accounts? Why does the person have one email but different job titles simultaneously?
Hi Karishma, I have a custom de-dupe logic set up in Marketo. However in this case, we want to keep the duplicate record (contact) as the contact has a different role in each case.
Hi Justin, Yes, its the same contact. So case in point, he's the board of director at the parent company and the CEO of the child company, so I want to retain him at two different accounts (parent and child). We don't have account hierarchy.
I agree with Justin. It's definitely messy and not recommended but at my company we didn't really have a choice. If your contact is part of two accounts/companies, then adding company to your custom de-dupe would allow you to keep the duplicates. What fields are part of your custom de-dupe?
Are you using Salesforce? There is currently a Salesforce pilot program for having multiple account relationships with a single contact. I think this will be your answer.
You can contact your Salesforce rep if applicable to request to be in the pilot.
You could add company name to the de-dupe criteria so you can have separate marketo leads for the same contact in different organizations.
The challenge with doing that is company names can be spelled differently so you might face issues when you try importing leads from a tradeshow etc. and the company names don' t match exactly.
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