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Unknown cause of lead merge (leaddb) - Expert knowledge required!

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Sean_Richards
Level 5

Unknown cause of lead merge (leaddb) - Expert knowledge required!

I just converted a lead to a contact in Salesforce, and then the record triggered a score update:

score-merge.png

This is despite having a criteria on our score triggers (which are global, not campaign specific) to exclude the "Lead merge" reason.

download.png

Funny enough as I write this I've noticed that the Reason value in this latest "Merge" has a different string to the existing exclude criteria, although I was sure that the exclude string I had in place was the correct one to exclude Merges.

Can anyone confirm that this new reason value "Merge (leaddb)" is the value for a conversion, rather than a merge?

I feel we're deep in the Marketo dark arts here, so please shed some light!!

Thanks to all in advance.

Sean

Sean Richards
1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions
Sean_Richards
Level 5

Re: Unknown cause of lead merge (leaddb) - Expert knowledge required!

Hi Matt,

I've been holding off bothering to reply to this thread. Yes, I found a solution. After my ticket spent months in Marketo's top tier support channels, they didn't have a solution. Well, not entirely true. They did, but it was not the actual solution. Here was there response.

-----------------------------------------------------

Hi Sean, 

Thank you for your patience with this one. Our Engineering team looked into this case and found logs for the affected records. One such is below: 

Logs show operations of data pull: 
Lead Pull conversion SOQL: 
Mar 28 17:42:31 

Contact Record created in sfdc at: 
sfdc_created_date: 2019-03-28 17:42:32 

Contact pull-updates SOQL: 
Mar 28 17:42:46 

During a Lead to Contact conversion. When the standard conversion process is performed in SFDC, a new contact is created in SFDC and the data mapped between lead and contact is used to populate the fields of the contact in SFDC. The lead in turn becomes a "shell" of a lead. This conversion is pulled during the Pull Conversion operation in the sync. New contact records or contact updates are both pulled in the Contact Pull-Updates operation in the sync. 

The lead was converted to a contact during the short window of time between the conversions were pulled and the start of the updates being pulled. The new contact was pulled over to Marketo by the pull-updates operation rather than the pull-conversions. Hence the creation of the new contact in Marketo - a duplicate. During the coming sync cycle after that, the pull-conversions operation merged the duplicates to complete the conversion. 

Our engineers have confirmed that when this scenario occurs (a conversion happened in that small time gap), this behavior is expected to occur. 

-----------------------------------------------------

See, I already knew this. That the API calls run in a specific order (there is a post on this somewhere) and that these got out of sync. But why? There is no answer to that, nor why my records caused this to occur dozens of times.

Well. I can now report that in our case, this was not due to RingLead. It was actually caused through the combination of having a lead validation rule in SF, plus a small setting enabled in SF.

In SF, navigate to Setup then search for "Lead Settings". Locate the "Require Validation for Converted Leads" checkbox and Disable this setting. This setting was causing field validation and workflows to execute on conversion, and this was the cause for breaking the sync API execution timing.


Prior to figuring this out, we also setup a great Marketo program that "captured" these irregular merge records. I highly recommend creating this as an operational program so that you stamp these errors as they occur so that you can clean them up.

Basically, the activity log registers two "Person is Created" records when this bug occurs. So you can capture that and add the record to a static list. My list currently has 18 people in it.

irregular-merge-1.png

irregular-merge-2.png

irregular-merge-3.png

I wanted to let support try and come up with this solution or at least tell us to check that setting in SF, but unfortunately they didn't have many cases of this error occurring and never once pointed to this SF setting as a possible cause of the issue. 

I feel pretty confident that if you disable that setting in SF, you two will see these issues cease to occur. 

Funny thing that having that program to stamp them in place, one person (like 1 week ago) triggered the issue to reoccur. But I guess that's acceptable and is what you would consider "regular" occurrence of this de-sync timing issue.

I hope that this information helps others now and in the future. I lost maybe 40 hours to this issue.

Finally, shout out to Veronica Holmes‌, it was an issue in Salesforce  Nice work haha.

Cheers,

Sean

Sean Richards

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29 REPLIES 29
Sant_Singh_Rath
Level 7

Re: Why does score increase when converting a lead to a Contact in SF

Try updating the Reason to Merge (leaddb) and then repeat the process.

Best regards,
Sant Singh Rathaur
Sean_Richards
Level 5

Re: Why does score increase when converting a lead to a Contact in SF

Hi Sant Singh Rathaur​, Thanks for taking the time to respond. Yes, I agree that is an obvious test to conduct, however I am looking for expert community knowledge of these "reason" values and what exact situation they occur in.

E.g. the reason "Merge lead" occurs when two people are merged. But questions remain.

Are there any other scenarios that "Merge lead" occurs?

Under what exact scenarios does the reason "Merge (leaddb)" occur?

What other reason values exist for other scenarios?

Is this documented ANYWHERE!

Like always, self implementation of Marketo is near impossible (despite our achievements) due to these kinds of challenges.

If anyone can help add to this thread, any and all knowledge related to this please chime in!!

Thanks again in advance.

Sean

Sean Richards
Steven_Vanderb3
Marketo Employee

Re: Why does score increase when converting a lead to a Contact in SF

Did the record's activity log record a Merge activity? When two records are merged in Salesforce Marketo will sum their scores together so this really looks like a merge rather than a conversion...

Sean_Richards
Level 5

Re: Why does score increase when converting a lead to a Contact in SF

Hi Steven,

That's what I'm trying to say. The activity logged a "Convert Person", AND through that conversion, it appears that it also Merged a two records. So you, this makes sense that it then added the scores together, and also re-triggered the score campaigns, as the exclude reason didn't match the string we had in place.

However, I am unsure as to why the Convert person, triggered a merge. The two records had different emails (even though they were the same person), so surely Marketo would not have auto-merged them. The Lead should simply have become a Contact under the Account and no merge should have been triggered.

download (2).png

Here is the detail from the Activity from the Convert:

Assign To:

Sean Richards

SFDC Type:

Contact

Person ID:

1167198

Here is the detail from the Activity from the merge (I've remove some of the details):

Merge IDs:

1117921

Merge Fields:

Account Owner Email Address: sean.richards@alaress.com.au
Account Owner First Name: Sean
Account Owner Last Name: Richards
Accounts: 1
Billing Country: Australia
Billing Country Code: AU
Billing State: Queensland
Billing State/Province Code: QLD
Global Region (A): Australia and New Zealand
Main Phone: (07) 5508 2929
Open New Business Opportunities: 0
Organisation Type: Organisation
Record Type ID: 01290000001IbuEAAS
SFDC Account Type: Partner
SFDC Campaigns: Lead Lifecycle Processing; WE - [18.09] Schoolbox + Digistorm - An Integrated Mobile Experience; NSE:MU [19.02] [Meetup]: SBMu19
Anonymous IP: 61.69.104.170
Behavior Score: 122
Unsubscribed Cause: System flow action for 'Change Data Value' triggered Mon, 27 Aug 2018 17:28:33 -0500
Lead Score: 268
Id: 1167198

Master Updated:

true

Merged in Sales:

false

Merge Source:

leaddb

Person ID:

1167198

OK, so as I understand it, the scoring campaigns didn't get triggered, and that the score's were added together through the merge.

But why would a merge have occurred through the convert?

Sean Richards
Veronica_Holme4
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

Re: Why does score increase when converting a lead to a Contact in SF

You're 100% sure that when you converted the lead in Salesforce you didn't convert INTO an existing Contact in the Account? That's a merge.

Sean_Richards
Level 5

Re: Why does score increase when converting a lead to a Contact in SF

Hi Veronica.

As far as I can tell. I only did a Convert. However there is another factor at play. The convert was not done in SF manually.

I performed the Convert through RingLead, which is configured to "Convert Lead to Contact at Matched Account". Which (as far as I know) doesn't do a merge, even if there was a dupe.

But I'm sure there are no dupe emails at all in the instance. There was an existing Contact with the same name etc, but I have to assume that RingLead would not have done a merge on this action, that task is not configured at all to merge on dupe, just to perform the convert.

I can't figure out what triggered the merge. Marketo would only merge on a dupe email. But the Lead was already in Marketo, so there is no de-dupe trigger I can think of occurring from Marketo.

On the Contact in SF, under the Contact History, there is only one record which says "Created by lead convert".

When I did the Convert, Marketo has logged an Activity against the existing Lead as "New Person" which also has reprocessed the lead through our Lead Lifecycle (as we must need to also add the exclude reason to that trigger to stop them reflowing through after Merges). It's also recalled our global scoring triggers as it's re-added the new contact to the campaigns, triggering these score events to fire again.

The "Change Score" activity details are as follows:

Score ID:

146

Score Name:

Person Score

Change Value:

+124

Old Value:

144

New Value:

268

Reason:

Merge (leaddb)

Urgency:

144

Relative Urgency:

3

Relative Score:

2

Priority:

140

Person ID:

1167198

Which is obviously triggered from this mysterious merge trigger.

I did another test and converted another Lead to an Account through RingLead and this did not cause any Merge, even when there was a contact on the matched account with a dupe email.

This proves that a convert does not trigger the "New Person" activity? The Merge triggers it. But why did the merge occur.

There must be some edge case here. I just can't see it.

Sean Richards
Sean_Richards
Level 5

Re: Why does score increase when converting a lead to a Contact in SF

Can anyone explain this

Merge IDs:

1117921

Merge Fields:

Account Owner Email Address: sean.richards@alaress.com.au
Account Owner First Name: Sean
Account Owner Last Name: Richards
Accounts: 1
Billing Country: Australia
Billing Country Code: AU
Billing State: Queensland
Billing State/Province Code: QLD
Global Region (A): Australia and New Zealand
Main Phone: (07) 5508 2929
Open New Business Opportunities: 0
Organisation Type: Organisation
Record Type ID: 01290000001IbuEAAS
SFDC Account Type: Partner
SFDC Campaigns: Lead Lifecycle Processing; WE - [18.09] Schoolbox + Digistorm - An Integrated Mobile Experience; NSE:MU [19.02] [Meetup]: SBMu19
Anonymous IP: 61.69.104.170
Behavior Score: 122
Unsubscribed Cause: System flow action for 'Change Data Value' triggered Mon, 27 Aug 2018 17:28:33 -0500
Lead Score: 268
Id: 1167198

Master Updated:

true

Merged in Sales:

false

Merge Source:

leaddb

Person ID:

1167198

Sean Richards
Sean_Richards
Level 5

Re: Why does score increase when converting a lead to a Contact in SF

I think that this is an edge case and for some unknown reason, Marketo has performed a Merge. There is literally one mention online of this "leaddb" merge reason here: How to identify leads manually merged in SFDC

This is completely undocumented of course.

I'll log a support ticket and struggle to find someone expert enough to tell me what this is. Wish me luck.

Sean Richards
Sean_Richards
Level 5

Re: Unknown cause of lead merge (leaddb) - Expert knowledge required!

Grégoire Michel​ you might be my only hope to answer this?

Sean Richards