Salesforce Merge not Syncing to Marketo

[Jamie_Rodger]

Hello all,

Our Salesforce instance recently had a hiccup where a new process created multiple duplicate records. In the end, we had over 75k dupes created that synced over to Marketo. An admin merged the records in Salesforce, using Demand Tools, but the merge has not ended up merging/removing the duplicates in Marketo.

Has anyone experienced a similar error? Was there a step the admin might have missed in merging that would prevent Marketo from merging the duplicate records as well? Are we up a creek and need to pay for a third party dedupe in Marketo?

Any help or experience would be appreciated!

[Kim_Allen]

Hi Jamie,

It sounds to me like the sync was still happening during this "hiccup"? Therefore all the new leads created (dupes) would have been synced over to MKTO before the merge in SFDC.

There's a big difference in merging vs. deleting - I would think you could have gotten away with deletion since they were new duplicates without historical value (sounds like). In the future, if you do need to delete leads in SFDC it's good to setup a campaign in MKTO that looks for that SFDC deletion and also deleted in MKTO. Once again, I don't know enough about how your instances are setup but this is a good practice in general for mirrored databases.

As for the predicament you are currently in, the solution depends if you need the duplicate leads data (if so, a third party merge tool may be the best bet) or if you can delete the duplicates. If you can just delete them and you have a list, you could possibly do this quickly and not need to work with a third party.

Good luck!

Kim

[Jamie_Rodger]

Thanks Kim,

We do have a Lead Deletion smart campaign running. I suppose it would have been better to delete rather than merge, but I believe the SFDC team must have had a good reason to merge.

I would be fine with deleting the duplicates, but I am struggling with creating a smart list with all the duplicates but not the original. I suppose I will have to rely on created date.

[Anonymous]

If the dupe records were truly merged in SFDC, then you should see one record with a SFDC ID, and one without (with the same email address shared between the two).

You can't filter on whether or not the SFDC ID exists in Marketo, but you can export WITH the SFDC ID, and then in excel you can identify the leads in Marketo that you'd like to delete (those that don't have an ID). Then you can import that list into Marketo, and simply delete the records on that list.

If the sync is still happening between the two systems, you might be running into a situation where Marketo is still creating these duplicate records in SFDC. If I would look into that as well.

Good luck!

[Anonymous]

Was never of a fan that I couldn't filter off a field that I knew was in the system, SFDC ID.

As a workaround to this we built a "CaseSafe ID" in Salesforce which is exactly the same thing as the 18 character SFDC ID.  I've found it helpful from time to time.

[Jamie_Rodger]

Excellent idea, I will try this tomorrow.