Account Contact Relationship Object

[Sam_Graim]

Hey Everyone,

I'm looking into junction tables and custom objects to relate contacts to multiple accounts in Marketo. I've found a few posts around the community (thanks @Grégoire_Miche2 and @SanfordWhiteman), but want to ask a few clarifying questions.

1. It looks like Marketo stores all account records in the database, even if no leads/contacts are associated to that account. I pulled a report in Salesforce of accounts without contacts AND without related contacts. I am able to see those company names in smart lists pre-population when I try to filter for them, it's just the list returns no records in Marketo (since no people records are tied to them). Does this mean that the account table, even for accounts without contacts or related contacts is already built? Including all of the fields on that record in Salesforce?
2. If the answer to 1 is "yes", then wouldn't it mean I just need a junction table that ties Salesforce ContactId and AccountId to add the relationship? Would that allow me to then segment contacts based on those account relationships based on all the data Marketo has on each account record?
3. If the answer to 1 or 2 is "no", do I then need to create a junction object and a related accounts custom object with all of the fields I need (probably don't need every field from SFDC)? Or would it be best to just use a single custom object and skip the many-to-many concept in Marketo?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

-Sam

[SanfordWhiteman]

If you're thinking about junction tables in Marketo only that ain't going to happen. You can't relate Marketo objects to SFDC objects like this. The relationships need to exist in SFDC.

[Sam_Graim]

@SanfordWhiteman, so the Account Contact Relationship object exists in Salesforce by default, but Marketo doesn't support the object with the basic Salesforce integration, hence each contact is only tied to 1 account. The Salesforce object is pretty basic (which I'm sure you're familiar with), basically a lookup based on ContactId and AccountId, along with a few other fields. My assumption is that if you replicate that functionality in Marketo, the only thing you're going to be able to see are the field directly on that object, correct? Whereas in Salesforce the lookup to the Account allows you to filter based on the account behind the lookup.

Sorry, I'm just not seeing a clear direction to go with this.