Marketo/SFDC migration - ok to delete everyone from Marketo? | Community
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Nina_Valtcheva5
Nina_Valtcheva5
New Participant
May 27, 2016
Solved

Marketo/SFDC migration - ok to delete everyone from Marketo?

  • May 27, 2016
  • 3 replies
  • 3108 views

We are going through a Marketo/SFDC migration and recently populated our new Marketo instance with records from our new SFDC instance; however, there were thousands of records who should have been hidden from Marketo sync (that we had deleted) that flowed back in. These will be impossible to identify because the field "Hide from Marketo" that had been checked got unchecked on Contact records during the SFDC migration. Trying to figure out if the best way to resolve this is to delete everyone out of Marketo and do some kind of sync from SFDC again to re-populate our Marketo instance. OR, could we just unconnect Marketo & SFDC and connect them again?

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Best answer by Grégoire_Miche2

Hi Nina,

If all this just happened and you do not have marketing history on all these leads you want to delete from Marketo, then you can delete them from Marketo, it will cause no harm. If this concerns only contacts, not leads, then you may delete only SFDC leads in Marketo, using the "SFDC Type IS Contact" filter. in any case, MAKE VERY SURE THAT YOU KEEP "DELETE FROM CRM = FALSE" IN THE DELETION PROCESS.

The difficulty is that the leads and contacts you want to sync will not sync again from SFDC until they are updated in SFDC. So you will have to

  • Make sure that now, the contacts and leads in SFDC that should not sync again are correctly flagged as "Not To Sync" in SFDC.
  • Create a "force update" field on leads and contacts in SFDC.
  • with a data loader in SFDC, load a value on this field for all leads and contacts. This will create an update on all contacts and they will become eligible for sync with Marketo on next sync.

-Greg

3 replies

Grégoire_Miche2
Grégoire_Miche2Accepted solution
New Participant
May 27, 2016

Hi Nina,

If all this just happened and you do not have marketing history on all these leads you want to delete from Marketo, then you can delete them from Marketo, it will cause no harm. If this concerns only contacts, not leads, then you may delete only SFDC leads in Marketo, using the "SFDC Type IS Contact" filter. in any case, MAKE VERY SURE THAT YOU KEEP "DELETE FROM CRM = FALSE" IN THE DELETION PROCESS.

The difficulty is that the leads and contacts you want to sync will not sync again from SFDC until they are updated in SFDC. So you will have to

  • Make sure that now, the contacts and leads in SFDC that should not sync again are correctly flagged as "Not To Sync" in SFDC.
  • Create a "force update" field on leads and contacts in SFDC.
  • with a data loader in SFDC, load a value on this field for all leads and contacts. This will create an update on all contacts and they will become eligible for sync with Marketo on next sync.

-Greg

Nina_Valtcheva5
Nina_Valtcheva5Author
New Participant
May 27, 2016

Thanks Greg! There were some additional fields that were hidden from the Marketo sync user so I'd rather just delete everyone and sync them over again now that the fields are unhidden. Nobody has activity history anyways as you said. Great advice on the "force update" field - we'll try that.

pavel_plachky
pavel_plachky
New Participant
May 27, 2016

Hello Nina,

I guess you will have to figure out whom to block from Marketo in SFDC, maybe by using a backup from time before migration. Otherwise deleting and re-importing your records will not help. After you have figured it out in SFDC, the steps I outlined should work.

Best,

Pavel

pavel_plachky
pavel_plachky
New Participant
May 27, 2016

You can do this:

  1. Export all known Marketo records, with Lead ID, Email Address and SFDC ID fields only
  2. Export a list of SFDC contacts that you want to delete from Marketo, with Contact ID.
  3. Make an operation in Excel to select only those Marketo records that are in SFDC export and save in a new CSV file.
  4. Import the CSV file into a static list in Marketo using "Skip New Leads and Updates" import mode
  5. Review the static list - these should be the records you want to delete. Make sure you check the number of records in the list and confirm they look right.
  6. Delete the records in static list, making sure you do NOT delete from CRM

If you have records with duplicate email addresses, this may not work 100%. You could end up with a record in the static list that has the same email address as a record you want to hide, but is in fact a different record. Given that you want to delete these records it may be ok to remove all the duplicates from Marketo. In this case you may need to repeat the steps 4-6 multiple times.

I hope this helps.

Pavel

Nina_Valtcheva5
Nina_Valtcheva5Author
New Participant
May 27, 2016

Hi Pavel,

Great outline, but the main issue is that I don't have a way to identify who to delete out of Marketo. They all had a field called "Hide from Marketo" checked but it got unchecked during the SFDC migration. That is why I'm looking to see if it's possible to delete everyone out of Marketo.

Thanks,
Nina

Josh_Hill13
Josh_Hill13
New Participant
May 27, 2016

There must be a way to identify such leads if you knew whom to block in the first place.

In SFDC (or Marketo) you can look at the field history and identify that group by Data Value Was Changed.

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