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

[SanfordWhiteman]

Actually Denise Greenberg​ is also deep inside such things.

[Sean_Richards]

This article (Understanding Merges in Marketo ) makes reference to the reason "Lead merge" which we added to our score programs which as far as I am aware, catches the manually performed lead merges . But it's unclear what causes the "leaddb" reason.

[Denise_Greenb12]

Hi Sean,

I can't help you with the "reason" but I can shed some insight on the activity log screenshot you provided. Sometimes when you convert a lead to a contact in SFDC, Marketo sees the contact before it sees the conversion and, as a result, it creates a new person (the contact). Then later it realizes it wasn't a new contact but a conversion, so it merges the records and adds a "convert person" event. This is super frustrating, I know from painful experience. Marketo has told me that their engineering is aware of this and working on coming up with a way to fix it. Depending upon how your sync is configured, Marketo may be able to make some adjustments for you to lessen the probability that it will occur. There's a post somewhere in which I participated and gave lots of detail on this. I'm going to look for it and add a link for you here.

Denise

[Sean_Richards]

This sounds exactly like what happened!!!! Thanks so much for taking the time to respond. I'll look into it more.

[Denise_Greenb12]

Hi Sean,

Found it! Have a read through this thread: Marketo / Salesforce Sync Limits & Priority Info

Hope it helps!

Denise

[Sean_Richards]

This was so helpful. Thanks again Denise. I've updated my support ticket with this information and requested someone senior calls me to explain what multi-batch queue does on an instance, the pros and cons and what is required to have this feature disabled on our instance.

Do you have any idea of any caveats to disabling this feature?

If I had to guess, this is probably enabled on shared instances by default as it saves on bandwidth/CPU resources and most basic customers don't ever notice the issues it can cause.

[Denise_Greenb12]

Hi Sean,

Sorry for the delayed response. The only reason we had multi-batch queuing enabled was to increase the sync speed to clear a backlog (Marketo Support had turned off our sync while troubleshooting a problem and had forgotten to turn it back on!). Last time I checked Marketo engineering had not produced a fix for conversions coming in out of order with multi-batch queuing enabled so I would not recommend using it. It's not turned on my default.

The out of order conversions can occur with the regular sync but are rarer and Marketo has some ability so adjust the sync order to minimize the odds when you are NOT using multibatch queuing.

One other thing to mention since you said you were using LeanData - when I was working in another client's Marketo instance a year or so ago they did an initial mass lead to account mapping (70K records) and conversion process with LeanData and it caused huge problems - including the out of order conversions - because the sync was overwhelmed. If memory serves, Marketo Support advised us to limit the size of those batch conversions to 5K records at a time and put an hour in between. I think we got Marketo to temporarily raise the number of records that can be processed in a single cycle to 10K for this project. But don't hold me to the exact numbers.

Denise

[Sean_Richards]

Just a correction, we are using RingLead, however I don't feel that disabling the sync is a solution, as I tested the conversion being done from RingLead in batch, Ringlead, single records one by one, and Manual conversion within SF one by one, and was able to trigger the issue in all three scenarios.

I hope like you said that "Marketo has some ability so adjust the sync order to minimize the odds when you are NOT using multibatch queuing" might be able to help reduce/fix the issue.

[Denise_Greenb12]

Hey Sean -

Just to clarify (and maybe you mistyped) - I was NOT suggesting disabling the sync. Marketo disabled our sync while troubleshooting - unbeknownst to us and it was supposed to be for a few minutes - and forgot to turn it back on. This built up a backlog because it was days before we figured out what was going on - and they enabled multi-batch queuing to fix it - and then they forgot to turn THAT off.

If multibatch queuing is in use it doesn't matter whether you do the conversions one at a time or in bulk. The conversions can come in out of order because there is no control over the order in which things sync when.

(The LeanData issue had nothing to do with multi-batch queuing vs regular queuing).

Denise

[Sean_Richards]

Yeah I wrote that out of context, I did understand what you were saying.

There is more information Justin Norris added here, which also confirms the issue: https://nation.marketo.com/message/200295-re-converting-lead-to-a-contact#comment-200295

In his comment, he said Marketo support said to disable the sync when doing bulk conversions. But why I said that this won't work as a solution for us is that I have confirmed the issue is occurring (randomal) even on a single conversion done manually in SF.