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I'm very confused by the recent behaviour I observed in my personal Marketing Cloud account. I recently connected my Marketing Cloud account to my Salesforce Dev accout via Marketing Cloud connect. The salesforce dev account is NOT a person account

My understanding of lead conversion from a Marketing Cloud persepctive is that when a lead converts it should:

  • Continue to sync to both the lead and contact synchronised des and that
  • That it should no longer be searchable in all contacts

I recently performed a test where I had 2 Leads and 1 contact. I converted both leads. As expected the converted leads continued to sync to the Lead sync de and also to the contact sync de.

However when I checked all contacts I could still see the old Lead IDs and they were still searchable?

Any idea what is happening here? I checked in another account and this is not the case. When the lead converts in that account, it immediately stops being searchable by Lead ID.

enter image description here

The image above shows all 5 records being visible in All contacts. The 2 leads (now converted) + 2 contacts (from converted leads) + the original 1 contact.

Any idea as to what is going on? Is this behaviour expected now? If not what could cause it?

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  • This is the expected behavior and I believe you already asked this before? salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/394485/…
    – zuzannamj
    Commented May 22, 2023 at 12:00
  • Yes I asked a similar question before. On a previous account when I converted a lead, it disappeared from All Contacts and stopped being searchable. I assumed that was the expected behaviour. In this account when I convert the lead it stays in all contacts and is searchable by its lead ID. I don't understand this discrepancy. The only difference I can see between the 2 accounts is that the previous one wasconnected to a person account
    – Peter Irving
    Commented May 22, 2023 at 12:53
  • Maybe they had a process implemented for deleting converted leads?
    – zuzannamj
    Commented May 22, 2023 at 13:20
  • Thanks for your help, Ive figured out what was going on now. Its pretty silly on my behalf actually, I'd forgotten that on that previous client I had implemented that process. I tried on a very new converted lead (ie one that hadnt been through the process) and got the same results as im getting now. :-)
    – Peter Irving
    Commented May 22, 2023 at 14:31

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That sounds like expected behaviour. Leads will keep on synching after conversion, and they will be a separate contact that is billable against your Marketing Cloud Contact Count.

https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.icx_b2c_crosscloudengagement_modeling_considerations.htm&type=5

Leads create a standalone Marketing Cloud Contact record.

In Marketing Cloud, a lead is an actual contact and not a transitional record. You manage profiles, preferences, consent, and compliance for each of them, independent of any converted contact record.

Merging and converting leads isn’t available in Marketing Cloud. A lead is a legitimate contact in Marketing Cloud even after a lead conversion in Sales Cloud or Service Cloud. It’s important to manage preferences and consent processes associated with the new contact in a cross-cloud sense to account for the legacy Marketing Cloud lead. Leads in Sales Cloud and Service Cloud help with contact record data quality, but they can damage the data quality in cross-cloud implementations.

The ramifications of this are huge.

The short answer is, I would try and avoid parallel usage of contacts and leads in SFMC altogether (see "...they can damage the data quality..."). Changing this can be a pretty large architectural undertaking though.

See also here:

MC Connector -Sync Lead and Contact Object using Email as Subscriberkey

or here:

What ContactKey in SFMC when sources of Contacts are Salesforce CRM and other external platforms?

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  • Thanks Jonas, I find some of the info available really contradictory. For example in the source you state it says: "You manage profiles, preferences, consent, and compliance for each of them, independent of any converted contact record." to me that implies that things like subscriber status and tracking could be different for the old lead and new contact (converted lead). However this article says the CAKS covers this: help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=000389954&type=1
    – Peter Irving
    Commented May 22, 2023 at 13:02
  • Your reference is consistent with the other material, insofar as it discusses how to delete the lead, meaning this is NOT done automatically. -> this is linked in your document: help.salesforce.com/s/… . so: the fact that the leads show up in All Contacts is expected behavior, you have to cover the deletion by custom processes.
    – Jonas Lamberty
    Commented May 22, 2023 at 13:21

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