How to identify leads manually merged in SFDC

[Anonymous]

Hey Everyone,

     I have been working on a solution to an issue that we've been having when leads are manually merged by SFDC and I think I've come up with a solution that might be able to help here in the community. See below:

The issue that we have been running into is related to lead scoring and sales alerts when leads are manually merged in SFDC. What we have been seeing is:

1) when leads are manually merged, all SFDC campaign activity is re-added as "new activity" under the merged lead

2) the new activity triggers both our lead scoring model and sales alert rules causing alerts to go out incorrectly after a manual merge was completed

3) our alerts go out to an entire team of sales from that region so sometimes these alerts have caused issues resulting in sales contacting customers based on old, outdated information

What we wanted to accomplish is to avoid having our scoring rules trigger off and to prevent our sales alerts from going out after a manual merge was completed in SFDC.

Initial Option: There were several suggestions in the community to base it off of the number of times that a lead was created. This created issues for us because we just implemented DupBlocker to automatically merge leads when they came in through SFDC, and by implementing the solution based off of multiple creations, it would block leads that were merged by DupBlocker but actually needed to be scored because they filled out a specific SFDC form. We tried using a time frame around the creation dates, but this also created issues because sometimes Sales would merge two old leads or contacts and it would fall out of our specified time frame.

Solution:

The solution that we have found so far appears to be working and it is actually based on lead score change. When a lead is manually merged in SFDC, Marketo automatically combines the two lead scores and sums them up. When it does this, I noticed in Sales Insights that it creates a line item for the change in lead score that resulted from the merge and the "campaign" that triggered the score change is called "Merge (leaddb)." So, I created the following filter:

Filter Type: Data Value Changed

Attribute: [Is] Lead Score

Reason: [Contains] Merge (leaddb)

Date of Activity: [In Past] 24 Hours

By creating this filter, I can now see all leads that were manually merged in the past 24 hours by SFDC but were not automatically merged by our DupBlocker tool. Also, creation date no longer has a negative affect on the filter. Now that we have this filter, I can remove leads from getting re-scored in our scoring model and prevent sales alerts from going out after a manual merge is completed in SDFC.

Hope this helps someone who is experiencing something similar!

Jason

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Jason,

A simple way to detect leads that were merged it to use a lead was created filter with a minimum of times = 2.

Merged leads have been created twice or more

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Greg,

    Thanks for your reply. We tried this but unfortunately, it didn't work for what we are looking for due to the following reasons:

1) We are using SFDC web-to-lead forms that create a lot of duplicates and are merged by DupBlocker. If we create a filter of created with a minimum number of times = 2, than anything that was ever merged in the past would no longer go through our scoring rules in the future. This would cause qualified leads to not get scored or sent to sales.

2) We tried putting a date parameter around this activity but it only pulled those with a create date that falls within the date parameter we set. This also didn't end up working as we would have Sales manually merge two older leads that fell outside of the dates specified and scoring would then apply and trigger off the false alert.

What we were trying to get to is identifying the manual merge activity and not the multiple creations. The solution we ended up with seems to be able to identify this.

Jason

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi again Jason,

You should really consider getting rid of web-to-lead. As you point out, it's creating dupes and, besides, it's a 15 years old inflexible and limited technology.

From replacement strategy is a key success factor of marketing automation implementation projects. As a seasoned Marketo consultant, I do know that it is sometimes quite complicated, takes some significant change management efforts, as well as some imagination and work to set up the alternative processes, but it is really worth it.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Greg,

    Thanks for the input. Yeah, that is our plan for the future. Unfortunately, the company has hundreds of legacy forms scattered across multiple countries that have not all transitioned to MA yet. Once we complete the transition, the plan is to completely remove web-to-lead forms across all sites.

Jason

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Jason Martin,

I gave a second though to your issue and did some research.

I might have found a way to tackle your issue with 100% accuracy. You can ask a salesforce developper to create for you 2 triggers in SFDC:

• a "before delete" trigger in SFDC that will fire for the record that will disappear during the merge. This trigger will log in a session-wide set of variables the IDs of the winning records
• a Before update record, that will fire for the winning records. If these records are updated from a merge, their ID will be in the list of winning records you have stored in the previous one. This before update record will update 2 fields on the winning record : 1 checkbox field called "Manual SFDC Merge" and another one called "Manual merge date". The trigger will check the box and fill in the date field just before the merge. The resulting merge lead will have the box checked and the date filled in. Both infos will be passed to Marketo during the following sync and you will be able to use it. The trigger will have to exclude some users or some profiles to fire only on merges done by a human user.

More doc here: Salesforce Developers

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

and also: vote here :