Change Owner when more than one user has the same name

[Anthony_Pica]

We're using the Change Owner flow step to assign ownership of a lead in Salesforce. The problem is that we have two users with the same name in our org which is causing Marketo to become confused. Here's the error we see in the Results tab:

Failed: more than one employee found with key 'John Smith'

Similarly, we have a Salesforce Customer Portal and so our sales reps have portal users in addition to their real user. This means Marketo sees their user and also their portal user -- both with the same exact name.

It seems like Marketo is looking at the name instead of the Salesforce ID as the key.

Any suggestions or recommendations?

[Anonymous]

Hey Anthony,

I have not come across the difficulty with the portal access, but we had two ladies with the same name in SFDC and we simply added the middle initial to one's name in SFDC and that syncs over. So we have a Joyce Taylor and a Joyce M Taylor. Works pretty well for us.