SFDC Leads incorrectly converted to contacts. What do I do now?

[Anonymous]

We had an issue with a Salesforce process our SFDC team built. It incorrectly converted leads to contacts and assigned those contacts to the wrong account - about 2600 leads to be accurate. Now we are faced with the task of trying to get these contacts back to leads. The SFDC Team here has suggested they delete the contacts in salesforce and re-import them as leads. They would be able to re-import the SFDC Activities, so our sales reps won't lose their history. But, what can I do in Marketo?

In my understanding, that process will either a) require that we delete the contact records in Marketo as well or B) collect a new duplicate lead to the existing contact. Either way, we lose the historical data in Marketo regarding programs and successes.

Is there any solution to this? If the contacts are deleted in SFDC, can we break the records connection between Marketo and Salesforce so these leads can be re-synced to salesforce and create a new lead? Any help/advice would be appreciated.

[Grant_Booth · Accepted solution]

Hi Jace,

You can't import activities into Marketo, so I recommend using the "Delete Lead From SFDC" flow step from the Marketo side. That way it will delete the records in SFDC, but leave them in Marketo so their activity log remains intact. Then you can just sync them back to SFDC from Marketo using another smart campaign with the "Sync Lead to SFDC" flow step, and your SFDC team can update their activities there once they've synced over.

Grant

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the answer Grant, and I think that's something we may do. Will Marketo still sync over the existing records as contacts or as Leads? We need these to be Leads in SFDC, and that is the reason we are deleting the contacts.

Grant Booth​

[Josh_Hill13]

Marketo always posts records as SFDC Leads. You need to explicitly use Convert Lead to Contact (not recommended in Marketo).

I would be careful that you do not delete the leads in SFDC during this process. Use Marketo do so as Grant suggests.

It may be harder for the SFDC Admin to match SFDC Tasks back to Leads that get pushed over from Marketo again because they will have new SFDC IDs. Check if they can match by email address.

If they have Demand Tools they may be able to fix this in SFDC itself.