Best practice - managing B2B client contacts?

[Anonymous]

Just looking for some best practice ideas on how to manage buyers and users in client accounts?

We have different comms plans for buyers and for users, so both groups are in Marketo/SFDC.

Buyers are in SFDC as contacts. But we don't want to have users as contacts because 1) Sales isn't interested in them, and 2) they get annoyed at having a really long list of contacts in the account page.

So I could leave users as leads, or not sync them to SFDC at all. But the issue with that is that they won't be linked to an account. Therefore making it really hard to determine whether they are current clients or not.

What's everyone else doing?

[Anonymous]

I would just leave the users as leads and just use a lead status to differentiate between them. That way you can easily filter them out of your reports. - Jeff

[Josh_Hill13]

I like Jeff's idea. you could take that in a few ways:

Lead Status = Customer-User or Former Customer-User

Flag of Active Customer = T/F

And you would do this by importing that list somehow - API or CSV file. API would be better if you aren't already using that.

Either way you could choose to sync to SFDC or not bother, because you would clearly know them as a user.

[Anonymous]

Great idea, thanks guys.

How would you automate the updating of these fields, ie if the company is no longer a client how can I change lead status from say customer-user to former customer-user if they are not technically linked to an account?