I am trying to optimize our lead handoff process, and am wondering how other people in this community manage lead handoff for named accounts/already owned accounts. Here is the scenario I am challenged by: A lead at "Company A" becomes qualified and it's time to hand off to sales. Company A is already an owned account in Salesforce -- the account owner is "John". The territory is owned by "Tom" but since that particular company is already owned by John, the lead should go to John. Becuase the lead has not yet been converted, it is not yet associated with that account, so the challenge here is automating lead handoff to the correct named account owner (rather than the territory owner). I could create a smart campaign with all the named accounts and direct leads at those companies to be assigned to specific account owners. The challenge here is that the territories have changed (and change somewhat frequently), so there are many accounts owned by someone different than what the territory rules might suggest. I believe there are also tools (such as RingLead) that can help this process. How are other people managing this? Thanks! Steve

Stephen,Full disclosure before I put in my 2 cents. Our company is a LaunchPoint solution partner, but we use Marketo ourselves as well. Our solution is a data automation platform offered as SaaS.As you point out, you can do this with Marketo but managing frequent changes and all the exceptions is a pain and difficult to scale. Lead-to-account correlation and lead routing is a popular use case a number of customers are using our solution for. The way we approach it is to allow your sales ops team manage a territory spreadsheet where they can manage all the territory and named account mappings with priorities to resolve conflicts. We continuously monitor updates to the account mapping spreadsheet stored in Google Drive and use the latest mapping to route the Marketo leads to the right SF Account. You can set up sequence of routing logic to check for name account first, then default to territory owner, or any other logic your sales team is using. If spreadsheet doesn't work in your environment, we can pull account ownership from SFDC in real-time as well.If you're interested in seeing how this is done, I'm happy to show you a demo. Happy New Year!Ed