Way to Prevent Lead Duplication and Add History?

[Kwid]

I'm not sure this is the right place to post this so please feel free to direct me otherwise.

We expect to have leads with long life-lines before they become prospects. We intend to nurture or drip market them with various means, oftentimes driving them back to the website to download a whitepaper or some other new info. We want to record this in a single lead record rather than getting multiples for the same suspect.

Is there a way to do this using the SOAP interface? I believe we are using that to create the leads from the web page forms but is there a way to check for duplicate and update rather than create new?

I would imagine that others have discussed this before and I find it curious that SCRM and SFDC don't appear to support duplication checking while other CRMs do. Is there some philosophy or technical reason for why SCRM does not support this?

Thanks in advance for any guidance...

Kwid

[dpatech]

From the SOAP API you can use the query functionality to lookup the Lead before creating it. This assumes you have some unique key (such as e-mail address) that you can use. If your query returns a record, then you can add a note to that Lead instead of creating a duplicate lead.

[Kwid]

Thanks for your reply... I'm really curious why I have never seen any other discussion on this subject? Has this ever been identified as a needed feature?

Even lowly GoldMine had built-in checking for duplicates and history updates from webform input 12 years ago. Is SCRM that far behind or has the rest of the world decided that this is not a priority need?

Maybe I"m just missing something here but how do others do nurture marketing?

[ApexTwo]

We couldn't find a solution for this either so we ended up building one: http://apextwo.com/solutions/website...ture-solution/