Salesforce / Marketo Duplicate Lead Challenges

[Anonymous]

I've read a few of the other discussions around the topic of duplicate leads but I wanted to share a specific example for feedback.

When forms are completed on our website, we send all of the lead information into Marketo but withhold certain leads from syncing with Salesforce. There are certain forms that are great to go directly to the sales team in Salesforce right away and others that we'd rather keep in Marketo, nurture and score them, and then send them into Salesforce once their score hits a certain number.

The challenge we have is that we get a lot of phone calls as part of our sales process. We sell custom-designed closet systems via EasyClosets.com and many leads end up calling to ask specific design related questions as they design their closet using our online design tool. In many situations, the lead is sitting in Marketo but hasn't reached a high enough score to be sent to Salesforce. The lead then picks up the phone, calls our sales team, and the sales person doesn't see them in Salesforce and manually created a lead record. That Salesforce lead then pushes back into Marketo, creating a duplicate in Marketo. To make matters worse, the existing lead in Marketo then ultimately reaches the lead score to pass them into Salesforce and sends them into Salesforce, duplicating the lead there too and assigning them to a completely different sales person. We end up with 2 records in Marketo and 2 in Salesforce, each assigned to a different owner. Lots of confusion and manual merging going on as we address these on the fly.

Any way we could prevent this from happening? The only thing we can think of on our end would be to pass 100% of our leads from Marketo into Salesforce, preventing those with lead scores below a certain number from being assigned and assigning those that are above our score threshold. We'd have to build some logic into Salesforce to make the scoring assignment happen there instead of in Marketo but at least the leads would be in Salesforce for the sales team to find when someone calls in. Is that our best option or has anyone used a different workaround?

Thanks,

Mike

[John_Clark1]

Hi Mike,

One solution I could think of would be to have a form your sales people could enter the email address and other lead information into, and have that trigger the lead record to be sent from Marketo to SFDC.  If you remove munchkin from a landing page, then it's not able to track activity on that page.  This would allow your sales people to fill out the form with the lead information without getting cookied as that lead.  The form submission would take the email address and check it against your database for existing records with the same address.

You could then have a trigger campaign in Marketo that would react to the form fill out.  This campaign would push the record to SFDC and your salespeople could access it as soon as it synced.  Does that make sense?

John

[John_Clark1]

Whoops, I meant to give you this link as well.

How to remove Munchkin from landing pages

[Anonymous]

Thanks John. Makes sense. Never thought of that but could be a perfect workaround. We'll investigate further. I appreciate the comment!

[SanfordWhiteman]

John, remember that an existing Munchkin cookie will still be sent with the form even if the page hosting the form does not itself initialize Munchkin.  There are different ways to solve this problem, one that Kenny prefers and one that I use, but either way the final outcome needs to be that the form does not include the _mkt_trk field.

[Kenny_Elkington]

I typically default to recommending synching all Marketo leads as it is simple and maintainable.  For your situation it sounds like this would be the best case relying on Queues owning certain sets of leads.  For example you might structure your auto-assignment rules like this, so that leads that are newly created go through this:

Lead Score > x goes to Above Threshold Leads Queue

Lead Score <= x goes to Below Threshold Queue

For your fast track leads, then I would send them directly to the correct Queue/Owner from Marketo in the Sync Lead to SFDC flow step itself, based on your set of conditions.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Kenny. Validates what we were thinking too. I appreciate the comment.

[Anonymous]

Hello Mike,

Other users may have a more specific solution, but I do see many clients utilizing some third party integration similar to RingLead.  It uses a webhook to call out to an endpoint, it then checks SFDC for a duplicate and if it exists it runs a merge operation in Marketo.  There are a few others out there that provide this similar service and can be found in launchpoint.marketo.com.

You can also set up your own REST service and accomplish the same utilizing our API (SOAP/REST) as well if you have the knowhow.

[Anonymous]

Thanks James. Will investigate those options.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Mike, I also want to endorse Kenny's suggestion.  This is basically a case study of why you should have all legitimate leads (i.e. non-spam leads) in SFDC.  Any dedupe/merge system is going to have at least some latency.  Even if it's "just" 30 seconds and an SFDC refresh, that's not putting the most up-to-date information in front of Sales at the moment they take a call.