Wipe and start over?

[jmirwin77]

Has anybody made the decision to wipe contacts from Marketo and start over (effectively reimplementing the platform)?  We are in the process of launching a significant cleanup/overhaul of contact data in both Salesforce and Marketo.  We currently have the connector turned off, and are concerned about the risk of creating a mass of duplicates when we reconfigure and turn back on.  Wondering if it would be cleaner/easier to pull everything out of Marketo and start over... but not sure we understand the full implications of doing so.  Has anyone gone through this?  Would value any insight you can share or resources you can point me to.

[Darshil_Shah1]

CRM-synced records aren't de-duplicated, so if you have duplicates in SFDC/records that aren't connected with the corresponding records in Marketo, you'll see the duplicate records syncing in Marketo. I'd caution you with your plan of deleting all person records from Marketo, as by doing so you'd lose all the membership, reporting, and activity data in Marketo, and there's really no way to actually tie the previous activity data to the new person records that'd be created once you enable the SFDC sync. Before going through this destructive process, have you considered sifting your existing database to find and get rid of unengaged, dormant, Email Invalid, etc. records instead of purging everyone in the first place?

[Katja_Keesom]

I agree with @Darshil_Shah1 here. This sounds like the least attractive way to achieve your end goal. The two options that seem the most effective in the situation:

• Clean up the SFDC database with the sync on. Any clean up in SFDC will be mirrorred in Marketo, merging historical data as you go along and only deleting records that you really don't want anymore.
• Do your full overhaul of SFDC, but spin up a new Marketo instance where you have the opportunity to configure that from scratch and load the SFDC database first before you can transfer data from your old Marketo instance to the new one for Marketo-only fields.

In any case it's going to be a serious project and without any further information the first scenario would be one that I would investigate for feasibility first.