When you merge leads, does it create a new record?

[Jessica_Kao3]

We've been using Ringlead to do a batch merge and found that when we ran the merge, all the records are now showing as the create date both on the SFDC and Marketo record as being on the day of the merge?  Is there any way around this?  When you merge a record in Marketo manually does this also happen?

[Emmanuelle_Biss]

Hi Jessica,

Unfortunately, Marketo decides on which value to keep, and it will keep the most recent one. I've actually created an idea so that this can be fixed in Marketo, so that we can define if we want to keep the most recent or the oldest value for some cases (i.e. creation date of the lead).

In the meantime, I created a new field (Mkto Created on) and a smart list to push the first Created date to this field (using a token). I made sure to block field updates for any source, so that once set, it cannot be modified, even inadvertently. When I merge two leads together, it asks me which value in this specific field I want to keep. That's my way to go around this in the meantime.

Here's my flow:

Hope this helps

Emma

[ChristinaZuniga]

Emmanuelle Bissuel​, I have Salesforce and no mass merge / dedupe 3rd party like RingLead. Based on this information, do you recommend that I merge records in SFDC so that I have more control over what fields remain?

[Emmanuelle_Biss]

Hey Christina Zuniga,

We do not have a mass merge tool either - we're just using Marketo and Microsoft Dynamics CRM for our lead database. If you have duplicate records in SFDC, I do not see why you would not want to merge them together. The cleaner the data in both your CRM and Marketo, the better it is

Emma

[ChristinaZuniga]

Emmanuelle Bissuel​, thanks for the quick response! My company's database structure is...unique. We have contacts at many different accounts and frankly it's hard to determine which account to put people at. I did a deduplicate project last year to try to clean it up but some contacts cannot be placed at just one account based on how we sell .

[Emmanuelle_Biss]

Hi Christina,

We also have some contacts that have two or more accounts with the same email address. We addressed this issue by creating a field in Marketo that can be checked or unchecked "Not a Duplicate". This means that, although two contacts have the same email address, these two contacts are not duplicates and do not need to be merged as they are in two different accounts in our CRM.

Here's our list for the Duplicates Leads:

Hope that helps you

[ChristinaZuniga]

Great idea! Thank you

[Emmanuelle_Biss]

Great You're welcome!

[Iryna_Zhuravel4]

The best practice is to keep your CRM database as the master source of your data, therefore it is usually advisable to merge records in the CRM.

[Dan_Stevens_]

If the leads exist in both CRM and Marketo, you have no choice but to do the merge in CRM (for MS Dynamics).  And then the merge is automatically reflected in Marketo.