SFDC leads with no email address syncing to Marketo

[Nina_Valtcheva5]

I have been finding many cases where our sales reps create new leads via Leadspace or similar and then they get automatically synced to Marketo. The issue is that these leads have no email address so no point for them to be in Marketo that I can think of. Anybody have any advice for what to do? I don't want them taking up space and slowing down our large Marketo instance even more (it's getting close to 500K leads at this point). Is there a way to block leads with no email address from getting from SFDC to Marketo? And would it be advisable to do so - since I know best practice is to sync everything over between the two systems.

[Josh_Hill13]

Other than to enforce email address at the SFDC lead creation level, you could tell the Marketo User to not "see" any record w/o email address. Your CRM admin can help there.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Nina,

A few thoughts :

1/ Enforcing email address at SFDC level is not that a good idea : it will push people (especially sales) to enter data with bad values. Keep in mind a simple metrics :

• if avoiding a bad value costs $1
• then cleansing a bad value costs $10
• and leaving with a bad value on the long term will cost $100 (bad decisions, acting on that bad data, ...)

2/ As Josh suggests, your SFDC admin may be able to hide contacts or leads without an email address. Nevertheless, it may require very significant changes in the salesforce security model and your SFDC admin may not be that happy with the idea. But if they agree, that's a simple way to go.

3/ Another way to go is to start making sales aware of the importance of email in leads or contacts :

• If they want you to target their prospects, they have to provide an email address. I often use the following moto: "no email, no marketing".
• Email is the basics for you to recognize existing contacts (as it is the unique ID in Marketo to reconcile leads). Meaning that if you have a contact without an email address and if this contacts visits your web site and fills out a form, you will not be able to match it, and you will end up with a duplicate, which will in turn lead to :
  • process errors, such as assiging that new lead to another sales rep (they hate this :-))
  • Scattered information on multiple leads, typically one on the duplicate will get the behavior scoring points, while the other will get the demographic scoring points.

Hope this helps,

Greg

[Nina_Valtcheva5]

Thank you Greg - these are all very good points and definitely something that I need to address with the sales team.

[Anonymous]

Is there a way for us to block the leads with no email addresses in Marketo without having to do this in SFDC. I would just like to add an exclusion in the Marketo tool to not create these leads as new leads? i always thought that the email address was the one required field, so if a lead did not have an email they could not be added to the database? Thank you

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Nicole Scibelli,

There is a way through SFDC :

• You can either modify what leads/contact marketo sees from SFDC, using SFDC sharing rules so that Marketo only sees the ones that have an email
• You also can create a field on SFDC called "sync'ed to Marketo". Make it a check box and have it checked / uncheck with wokflows so that only the leads / contacts with an email will have this field checked. Then ask Marketo support to filter the sync based on this field.

But at the end of the day, there is no harm with having these leads/contacts in the DB, as they cannot be targeted by a campaign and they won't count on you license (only Marketo leads with an email do).

Also, as you have 2 profiles in the Community, please update your photo and avantar and mark your job title with the word "(primary)" so that we know to whom we should write.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

This is very helpful. Thank you. For some reason i thought these were counted toward our database count/license.

Greg, are anonymous leads counted towards our license?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi agin Nicole,

No, anonymous are not counted.

-Greg

[Veronica_Holme4]

Hi - there is a point here that's incorrect I'm afraid. There is a huge difference between an "anonymous" lead and a lead without an email address. The absence of an email address does not make something an anonymous lead. An anonymous lead is a lead running around on your website where no information on it has been inserted into your database through any means other than cookie and inferred data. If a lead comes through into Marketo with any field values through a form, a list, the SFDC sync or through an API it is a known lead and absolutely will count against your database limit, whether it has an email address or not.

[SanfordWhiteman]

AFAIR, Anonymous leads can have other field values set besides the Inferred fields -- so that alone doesn't make them known -- though populated custom fields are blanked upon the automatic merge from Anonymous, making this method of dubious usefulness unless you have other means of repopulating the fields.

(h/t Elliott Lowe (FigureOne)​)​