SFDC Leads vs Contacts Dilemma

[Anonymous]

Anyone doing anything simple to solve this Contact conversion issue either at a process or technical level?

Use Case: Company A uses a Contact model where reps works names as Contacts (Joe Smith) and Accounts (ACME). These two objects are related in Salesforce. Marketo treats new names coming into the system as Leads which are not tied to Accounts.

The Question: How can Company A convert Leads over to Contacts so they fall under the proper Account (Using Marketo's Convert feature creates a new Account)? The main concern is with lists right now but this situation obviously applies to new form leads also.

Possible Solutions?

1. Marketo Import. Import Leads into Marketo and let them sync over to Salesforce as Leads. Then convert manually in Salesforce. This might do the trick for smaller lists but seems unmanageable for larger lists.

.

2. Salesforce Import directly into Salesforce.  Take the data file and import directly into Salesforce which would then autosync it to Marketo. There are two considerations here.

a. Deduplication.  Deduping is not done unless a solution like Demand Tools or Ringlead is used.  (or some other SF process?)

b. Loss of Processing Rules. Additionally, any lead processing rules (scoring, segmentation, nurturing, data updates, etc) that rely on a Marketo creating the lead would need adjusting.

3. Use of a 3rd Party like Lean Data for Account routing?

4. Anything Else?

[Justin_Norris1]

Jeff Coveney​, what are the criteria you need to match on for Account routing?

For simple use cases, I have had some Apex built in the past that does the trick very nicely - convert the lead (with no Oppty) and assign to a matching account. But this is where you have a reliable key to match with between leads and accounts.

If you want to do complex fuzzy matching then a third party app like Lean Data is probably your best bet. I believe ReachForce and Ringlead may also each have some solution aimed at this problem.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Justin. One of the issues in most cases is there is no matching key which is why some fuzzy logic is most likely needed from a 3rd party.

In some cases, the Accounts are known and have a unique #. I'll run that APEX idea by the SF admin.

[Josh_Hill13]

Jeff Coveney​, I'd go with Lean Data or something similar. I think you'll find this works better than Apex code.

[Anonymous]

That's what I'm thinking Josh Hill​. A third party app is another budget item so trying to look at alternatives.

[Anonymous]

Depends how well the Apex code can be written and how much time that takes,

right?

It can work, I've just encountered situations where the Admins weren't

happy with the load on the system.

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 7:31 PM, Jeff Coveney <marketingnation@marketo.com>

[Justin_Norris1]

Josh Hill​ Jeff Coveney​

To clarify my point, I wouldn't consider using Apex to recreate the functionality of a tool like Lean Data.

But in cases where you have a single reliable key between leads and accounts, you could get a simple trigger built in a few hours that would do the job.

Of course Jeff's use case is not that simple. So a third-party tool is the way to go. However...considering Lean Data could end up being a larger line item than Marketo itself, it's worth considering all your options! 

[Anonymous]

When auto-converting with an APEX-trigger, has anyone had an issue with data loss because the conversion happened in the middle of a Marketo sync to sfdc?

[Megan_Reed1]

Jeff Coveney​ Were you able to solve this problem without using a 3rd party and adding a budget item?

We are experiencing this issue right now. We just integrated SFDC into a 3-year old Marketo database. My original understanding was that the initial sync would create a duplicate of every lead. The 3rd party that helped with our integration hit a snag in the inital sync and we did not have a duplicate issue after our first sync. Success was my inital reaction! Until last Thursday and Friday....

Now I need to convert all existing current clients from leads to contacts - in our tests it shows this exact scenrio - we'll have duplicate accounts created in SFDC if we use a Marketo campaign to convert. Then those duplicates in SFDC will create duplicates in Marketo and both databases will be a mess! I may be left out to dry with our 3rd party so I'm trying to understand alternatives too.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Anonymous]

Megan, feeling your dup pain the more I read your note. Have you looked at Ringlead to help with that dup process? Ringlead also does some account mapping.