Ibrahim asked Justin Norris, Senior Director of Solutions Architecture at MERGE, and Adam Hodgden, Director of Services at MERGE, about the best practices for lead management when syncing contacts between SFDC and Marketo during MERGE's weekly Office Hours conference call.
Lead Management
When responding to the question, Adam and Justin quickly reviewed the points covered in this blog post and video on managing duplicates.
Another recommendation they made in response to this question was to hide users with no email address from Marketo because they won’t be participating in your email campaigns. SFDC can contain prospects that don’t have email addresses, or prospects that have multiple email addresses – Marketo handles this differently, as discussed in the other post linked to above.
Be careful with explicit flow steps that will use one API call for everything that you do because it’s very inefficient.
Dealing with Duplicates
In the video from the call, Justin points out that duplicate entries may be produced when the user who is already a SFDC contact opts into the email list, especially when they use an email address that SFDC has in the “alternate email” section. Marketo doesn’t pull “alternate emails” from SFDC, only primary email addresses.
So when you sync from SFDC to Marketo, everyone without a primary email address will need to be removed and when you sync from Marketo to SFDC, duplicate entries will be created when new email addresses are used.
SFDC has more robust, built-in native assignment functions, so it’s best to leave that responsibility within SFDC rather than having Marketo complete that function.
Adam recommends for users to run sync programs in a batch on a regular basis, to keep records clean and up-to-date, so subscribers can be sorted into SFDC quicker. Otherwise they’ll sit in the campaign queue for too long, and nobody wants cold leads. Regularly monitoring the Sales Sync will keep contacts fresh and make it easier for your sales team to do their job.