List Upload de-duped against Lead Database

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This actually just happened to me again today. I uploaded a list to Salesforce first, gave it time to sync to Marketo, then loaded the list to Marketo. It created 27 duplicates in Marketo, so now I have to go through and delete/merge all of those.

I'm also our SFDC admin, so that doesn't help with ours. And we must export and then reimport because our sales people cannot seem to understand adding contacts to their opportunities (every marketing person's nightmare!) so we have to export to cross-reference to ensure promotional emails are not hitting their current pipeline.

The one item that I did do is when my items sync to the Salesforce campaign, we have now included a filter for "SFDC type is not blank" to ensure that it isn't adding them if they are not already in there. We only do this with our lists that we know have everyone in the system and it seems to have helped the problem a lot.

I am the SFDC admin, so I know that isn't the issue. I did successfully not have any duplicates created (that I'm aware of) by building a report in Salesforce, exporting to excel, then popping it in to Marketo. I'll be more watchful of what happens and see if I run into duplicates when there shouldn't be again.

I would still encourage a call with support to run through this one - I'd even encourage having your SFDC admin on the line to rull out any misconfigurations or permissions issues. If the unique email is already in Marketo and you do an upload and have everything mapped then it should update, not create new.

I would also be very careful about taking the data externally, modifying, then reimporting. If you can define the scrub criteria, do that as a smartlist, then you can repurpose and you don't risk errors or data corruption. If you do have to go external then internal, I'd recommend only using the email address on import to a static list so that you don't step on records, you are only using the function for grouping.

Carissa and Amber, 

There is a solution.

The RingLead Marketo webhook is triggered by "New Lead Created" so it will dedupe against Salesforce using RingLead's advanced duplicates logic whether is is a web form, list import, or even a manual entry in Marketo.

Natively, Marketo relies only on exact match emails, so greg@ringlead.com, gregg@ringlead.com and gthaler@ringlead.com are three different people.

RingLead will also search cross object,  and will update an existing Contact, even if the emails are different.  

RingLead will also identify existing Accounts that match Company on a Lead and create a new Contact in a matching Account, rather than a new Lead.

Or, RingLead can be configured to allow a Lead to be created so it can be counted for reporting and then automatically be converted to a new Contact in a matching Account.

Another challenge with gregg@ringlead.com, greg@ringlead.com and gthaler@ringlead.com is that Lead scores for actions taken by each of these emails will be distributed amongst the records, not concentrated on a single record.

Say gregg@ringlead.com dowloads a white paper on Tuesday, and then gthaler@ringlead.com registers for a webinar on Thursday.  Those scores do not get added together, they are attributed to different records, so an MQL that should become an SQL either gets delayed, or never gets referred to sales.

Ideally, your Marketo org would be synced 1:1 with Salesforce for this to work in the optimal fashion.

This is a link to the Launchpoint listing.

We have also put into production a new RingLead webhook called Data Shield that will normalize data upon submission, rather then having to use the Multiple Values Chooser.  It is essentially a data standards firewall around Marketo. The app is in production, but the collateral is still in beta...you can see a preview of the Salesforce version here.

Amber or Carissa, if you'd like a demo of the RingLead Marketo webhooks, or just want to talk data quality and your Data Plan, you have have my email.  All three of them.

I hope you don't mind that I commented...I'm sensitive to not being that vendor.

Amber, that sounds like a better articulation of the issue. Thanks for contributing/clarifying. At any rate, it's an issue for data management to have unexplained duplicates.

We've had this issue as well. It seems that if they are a Salesforce contact, it will create a new record, but I've never had the problem when they are a lead. It also seems to be random, because I've uploaded lists with 90% of the list being already a contact within Salesforce (and in our Marketo database), and then a few (5% or so) will end up getting new leads created instead of automatically attaching to the existing contact. It's frustrating because we quite often pull lists out of Salesforce, scrub them to remove contacts we do not want to receive an email, and then upload it to Marketo only to have it create duplicates when we know that Marketo had to have had that contact to begin with.

I don't have any specific examples right now, but the next time it comes up, I can let you know.

I'm not sure which situation that your consultant was referring to, List Imports will deduplicate against existing email addresses in your Marketo database.  It's possible that duplicates were created in SFDC because the corresponding records did not exist in Marketo, but deduplication against Email is applied during list import.