Hi Sean (and others who read this),
I have read all of the related nation posts that I can on this. The fact is that this issue is occurring on most of my client's Marketo instances. It doesn't matter whether the SFDC instance has the Lead Setting set or not. It still happens. It doesn't matter whether there is a bulk of records being converted or one. It still happens.
What is really, really bad about this is that the duplicate Contact and merge are causing data loss in our systems. I first discovered this as I watched GDPR audit history get erased on the merge. It got erased because when the duplicate Contact was created, Marketo logic saw it as just another new Contact from SFDC and tagged and processed it as it would any other record. Then I started looking further. Pretty much any new Contact processing (field data) you have in Marketo is likely to cause original data from the Lead to be lost when the Contact is merged. This is simply unacceptable.
I have gotten to the point where I am now identifying when these duplicates happen and repressing as much of the Marketo processing as I can on the duplicate Contact so that I don't lose data on the merge. But it gets worse. Say you have custom object records on your original Lead. Since it will always be the losing record on the SFDC lead conversion merge, those custom object records get lost. There isn't anything I can think of to fix that.
And quite frankly, the whole repression solution I've worked up can be a really difficult solution to implement if you haven't been fastidious about centralizing most of what you do in Marketo.
I am going to give a try to see if Marketo support will start to see how large an issue this is now and finally find a way to fix this for all of us.
Thanks to all that have worked so hard to get insight, find work-arounds, document their journey with this issue here.
Best,
Pam Hudadoff
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