SFDC/Marketo Sync/Duplication Issue

[Alexandra_Ash]

Hi Community - Any help here would be greatly appreciated!

We have recently run into a SFDC/Marketo Sync issue that has resulted in almost 55k(!!) duplicate leads having imported to Marketo that weren't supposed to. Here's what we know:

• The sync seems to have happened over a two-day period (September 14th/15th)
• These are all new leads in Marketo, but old leads in SFDC
• All the leads are 'Contacts'
• ~31k have blank lead source
  • Of these, a majority are not 1-1, but 1-many email addresses
  • Additionally, some of the leads may have more records in Marketo than exist in Salesforce - for example, one record we looked up had 3 duplications in SFDC, yet 5 in Marketo. Email addresses were exactly the same.
• To our knowledge, there were no field mapping updates in Marketo and in SFDC, there were no updates to workflow or sharing rules; no lists imported and no campaign updates in Salesforce.

Thank you so much!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi alex,

1/ Please move this question to Products​ where it belongs. Marketing Central​ is for generic marketing questions, not Marketo product oriented ones.

2/ Let's look at your problem.

The first thing I would do is to raise a support ticket.

This might be the consequence of some data processing in SFDC, though. Over the years (7+ years working on Marketo, 50+ projects, with a large majority on SFDC), I have never seen such an issue, or even an similar one.

A key rule about the Marketo / SFDC connector is that it does not deduplicate records that come from the CRM.

There are some things I do not understand :

• Of these, a majority are not 1-1, but 1-many email addresses

This is not SFDC standard feature. in SFDC standard, contacts have only1 email address.

You need to look in details to the activity log of a couple of these persons in Marketo. On of the thing I would also look at is their SFDC ID in Marketo (you can display these in a view in a smart list). If the SFDC ID of 2 Marketo duplicates are different, it will really point the cause to Salesforce because this means that the duplicate persons in Marketo do correspond to different SFDC records. If there are the same, then it is likely to be a Marketo sync issue.

-Greg

[Venus_Wills]

We ran into the same issue where Marketo created mass duplicates in SFDC, and those duplicates in turn synced back to Marketo. Here's what we found:

• We had recently transitioned to ABM so had LeanData in place to convert leads to contacts on existing accounts
• We still had an old lead processing program that synced leads to a Suspect Lead Queue
• When a lead is created in Marketo, and it qualifies for the flow to sync it to the Suspect Lead Queue, but LeanData had already converted it to a contact, the Marketo workflow goes into a loop -- create lead in SFDC, sync to Suspect Lead Queue, sees new lead was created from SFDC, repeat.

To resolve the issue, we put a constraint to only sync to Suspect Lead Queue if SFDC Type is still Lead at the time the workflow kicks off.

It took us awhile to figure out because Marketo and SFDC always point fingers at each other, e.g., "created by Marketo API" and "New Person source: salesforce." Finding this article helped: Duplicate Lead Created in Salesforce When Contact Already Exists