reducing the number of leads

[Colby_Dix]

so you know how it goes... we all want a nice robust pipeline with as many leads as possible, but when MKTO comes calling to let you know (nicely) that you are well beyond your 'tier' cap for leads, you start thinking about some proper pruning. I'd like to get the discussion going here by saying what I'm thinking of doing for clean-up, and I welcome any comments or criticism of them.as well, if you have your own best practices to share, please feel free, I'd appreciate any and all input.

Unsubscribes - well they don't count against our lead total, so that's no biggie

Inactive for over a year - I say we jettison

2 hard bounces in the past 90 days - this is sort of a random and not a huge amount, but too many hard bounces and really, why are we bothering?

invalid emails - this is the one where I want some real input. how are you all handing invalid emails? i was thinking of at least quantifying it a bit based on lead status, which i know not everyone is using consistently, but in our case we have a excellent lead status and flow going, so i can just delete suspects and unqialifieds as opposed to prospects and any qualified leads. this could help me significantly.

duplicate emails - how are you all de-duping? manually? it's a pretty big pile but seems worth attacking in our case.

what else are you doing? thanks so much!

[Dan_Stevens_]

Actually, Unsubscribes DO COUNT against your total.

Here are some other good tips from our friend, Josh: http://developers.marketo.com/blog/how-to-clean-your-marketo-database/

[Josh_Hill13]

Thanks Dan. I vaguely recall Marketo now saying that unsubscribes do count against you...or maybe that was Invalids who were not unsubbed.

@Colby, anyway, you have the right idea. But consider what I say in the post too:

• focus on non Customers and non SFDC Contacts to avoid removing legally required information.
• try removing 180day inactives or have a plan to reactivate and then remove non respondents.'
• anyone who hard bounced twice.
• Anyone who is email invalid=true
• anyone marked Invalid or Junk
• inactive unsubscribes - I guess I'd be a bit careful about these.
• archive these with all columns someplace safe. There are particular laws for the storage of such information, so ask IT to help you find an encrypted location to store this data.

[Colby_Dix]

Side note as to processing this all.  Should I delete in MKTO and then also in SFDC? Which should happen first so as to avoid re-syncing? With that, do I perhaps run a campaign that sets all of the 'to-be' deleted leads to not sync to SFDC, delete in SFDC, and then delete in MKTO?

Thanks!

[John_Clark1]

Hi Colby,

If you choose to delete leads you'll want to do it in Marketo with the Delete Lead flow action, and the Delete From CRM/Salesforce option set to true.  If you delete them in Marketo only, and they still exist in SFDC, then they will be synced back down as soon as any update is made to them in SFDC.

John

[Liliana_Cheng1]

Hey John,

Let's say the records are only deleted in Marketo and kept in SFDC. What you're saying is, as soon as an update is made in SFDC to those SFDC-only records, it would be synced back to Marketo, correct? What constitutes as an update? Like visited webpage? Fills out form?

If that is the case, then wouldn't that be acceptable? Because that means that previously inactive/unsubscribed lead has engaged again, so what would be the problem with being synced back to Marketo again? I realize the Marketo record would not have the majority of the history in the activity log (except for the activity that's in Sales Insight, right?) so it would still look like a new lead to Marketo.

Also, what happens if a previously deleted lead DOES become engaged again and they still have an existing SFDC record? Would the newly created Marketo record be attached to the existing SFDC record based on email address/cookie? OR would the "new" Marketo record create a duplicate SFDC record? Is there a workflow you can suggest to keep "new" Marketo records with existing SFDC records as clean as possible? Ie, lead is created + sfdc id is not empty or sfdc created date is not empty, then... merge? I know there's no "merge" action, but is there a comparable action?

Thanks!

Liliana

[Anonymous]

For duplication, I think you can try TIBCO Clarity. It has a really powerful and robust de-duplication function.

You can customize your match strategies by columns or by swappable columns or by columns against to a thesaurus table, and then use them to discover duplicate records from any incomplete or partially similar records, even from records in different languages.

In addition, It has deep integration with both Salesforce and Marketo. It can help you directly update and remove duplication data in your salesforce and Marketo account.

you can try TIBCO Clarity for free.   https://clarity.cloud.tibco.com/landing/index.html

[Colby_Dix]

says the principal engineer of TIBCO...