Re-entries After Marketo Purge Creating SFDC Duplicates: Matching Existing Leads

[Pruthvi459]

Due to Marketo database limits, we need to purge inactive people in Marketo (we will not purge in Salesforce). Because Marketo deletions do not sync to Salesforce, after a purge when the same person re-enters Marketo and is recreated—the native sync creates a new Salesforce Lead instead of linking to the existing record. This is causing a lot of duplicates in SFDC.

Does Marketo have the capability to correlate to an existing Salesforce record and only create a new Lead if one doesn’t already exist? Is this a common issue other companies face, and how do you handle it?

[SanfordWhiteman]

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the native sync creates a new Salesforce Lead instead of linking to the existing record. This is causing a lot of duplicates in SFDC.

This is expected behavior. Marketo has no choice if there’s no existing record in Marketo and you choose to sync the person to SFDC.

I also assume you’re stopping Marketo’s SFDC User from being able to see the people you “purged” from Marketo. Otherwise they’ll sync back over to Marketo in the normal course of business, since they’ll eventually be modified on the SFDC side.

We sometimes implement a flow where we don’t sync new Marketo people to SFDC unless we’ve first fired a webhook to a service that calls the SFDC API to determine there’s no matching Contact or Lead. If we find a matching Contact or Lead that isn’t in Marketo due to sharing rules or not being updated, we flip whatever field we need to to get it back into Marketo. Then when it re-enters Marketo we merge the Marketo people together automatically. That person that originates from the SFDC side is always the merge winner. Works quite well, obviously needs savvy to set up.

[derelict_wombat · Accepted solution]

Unless the record is shared with Marketo already then this is the standard functionality.  These records would need to be merged within SFDC when this happens.  

Unfortunately SFDC doesn't have a good automatic dedupe method OOTB, but there are a number of applications that solve for this (Validity, CloudDingo, etc).