Merge Leads but don't merge Score

I'm seeing this happen in our instance as well. However, it's happening with new leads that are created; Marketo is automatically merging their anonymous visitor tracking activity it collected via Munchkin. In this case, it appears I have no control over the lead scores being merged. In this case, I think I actually want the Person Score to increase, but the Behavior Score should increase as well, since it's primarily a score created because of web page visits. Is there a way we could trigger a workflow to increase the Behavior Score by the same amount when this merge occurs? If not, our Behavior + Demographic scores won't always = our Person Score. I don't think this is critical but it's a little messy.

I am using DemandTools for the same function. The only solution I have found was for lead-to-contact deduping. If you log a task and then use the subject as a filter in your Marketo MQL report (i.e. add a filter for "not activity was logged", subject = [whatever you put in DemandTools task subject]) This will keep the leads that push back to Marketo from MQL-ing at the time of deduplication. Any future action would push them to MQL since their score would still be over the threshold.

Agreed that this is super frustrating - both to me and our sales team! Would be great to have Marketo only merge behavior score, or give us options to customize based on needs.

Hi! We're dealing with the same problem -- tons of "fake" MQLs getting sent to Sales because of this Marketo behavior.

I'm in the process of merging duplicate Leads and Contacts (so a Lead-to-Contact merge) with Ringlead (which doesn't let you export any of the duplicates that it identifies in its data cleanse reports). The Contact is naturally always the master, and we are fine with having the Contact's lead score be the score that carries over to the final, merged record.

The workaround I devised was to generate this smart list in Marketo to isolate the duplicate Leads. In Ringlead, we're only merging records that have an exact match on email address -- so I assumed that this smart list in Marketo would be 90-95% the same as what we're seeing there:

From here, I ran a single flow action to change lead score for all Leads to "0". Thus, when the Leads and Contacts get merged and their scores get added, there's no change.

So far it's working exactly as it should! Now, I'm not sure how to effect this workaround for Lead-Lead merges -- the fact that we're merging different object types allowed me to isolate 1/2 of each duplicate pair.

Hi again Hoi.

Marketo score fields cannot be set from SFDC. But you can have them set from inside Marketo with a smart campaign. The best way is :

1. create a number field in SFDC and copy the score to it before merge,
2. set Demandtools to keep one the the values (the highest for instance)
3. after merge, have all the score changed back to the previous value with a smart campaign in Marketo. Just use a change datavalue flow step to do this, not a change score flow step. There will be no trigger available to detect the merge, so you would better add the leads to a list or and SFDC campaign before or just after merging them, so that you will be able to know which one you just merged.

-Greg

Thanks for the insight, Greg.

We used DemandTools via Salesforce to do all of our merging. It sounds like this will make it virtually impossible to control how Marketo merges Score fields. We will have to think of some other way to prevent Marketo from merging these scores.

Do you have any suggestions on how to undo historical score merges?

Hi Hoi,

If you merge leads in Marketo, you have the possibility, on merge, to set manually a value for fields, rather that letting Marketo setting it. Just use the "Custom" column in the merge assistant.

-Greg