Best practices for Opportunities attached to Accounts in Salesforce

[Anonymous]

We are a B2B company and generally do not attach Opportunities to Contacts and understand that Marketo does not have the ability to associate Opportunities at the Account level to the Contacts within the Account. We are currently assigning lifecycle statuses to our Contacts and Leads in Salesforce and are having difficulty assigning a status to Accounts that have Opportunities. We will be using these statuses as segments for our email nurturing program. Does anyone have any advice on how we can best assign these lifecycle status or best practices on how to nurture these Contacts (ie, do you put all Contacts under those Accounts into a nurture program or do you only nurture to the contact you're selling to and unsubscribe the others from marketing/nurture campaigns)?

Thanks in advance for help/advice!

[Anonymous]

Hey Lindsay,

The way I have tackled this is as follows.

For my opportunities, I ask my Sales team to put all relevant contacts in that account under the contact roles of that opportunity. In Marketo, you have a contact status of 'Opportunity' and make a marketing activity that says if a contact is added to an opportunity then make the contact status 'Opportunity'.

From there you can trigger your lead nurture programs at the appropriate time.

Hope that helps.

[Anonymous]

Our reality is that sales reps are not likely to assign contact roles on opportunities. We've created an "Account Stage" field that is populated based on opportunity status:

• 0 open opportunities = suspect
• 1 open new business opportunity = prospect
• 1 closed/won new business opportunity = client
• 1 closed/lost new business opportunity and no other open opportunities = former prospect

Our lead/contact stages break down even further, but I'll spare you that detail. Basically, once you have an "Account Stage" field visible at the account level, you can use that to build your nurturing segments. Use Account Stage = "prospect" instead of "Has opportunity is True." This will capture all contacts at the account whether or not they have an opportunity role.

We've chosen to nurture all leads and contacts who have engaged with Marketing regardless of their buying power. If a sales rep adds a contact of their own, they can also choose to manually enroll them in nurturing.

[Anonymous]

Pierce is right...even though the Opportunity is with an Account, there are real people (Contacts) that are associated with that. Since Marketo only operates on that lead/contact level, they must be associated with the Opportunity to have any visibility in RCA/Opp Analyzer, etc. (We went so far as to remove the Create Opportunity button from the Account screen!)

The Marketo trigger/filter "Was Added to Opportunity" or "Has Opportunity" will allow you to nurture just those contacts that are associated with the Opportunity.

[Anonymous]

Interesting way of approaching it Delinda. Never thought of it that way, but I can see how it would work. I am in a lucky position right now where my Sales team is fairly small and they are awesome with working with Marketing and SFDC. Definitely have been places where your solution would be better though 😉

[Anonymous]

Thank you, those are very helpful suggestions. I have a couple follow up questions:

• Pierce - would I need to create the contact status field in both Salesforce and Marketo? Then create a trigger in Salesforce to fill in that field?
• Delinda - do you nurture all Contacts under those Accounts the same way?

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

The leads/contacts can be in customized tracks, but we do group them together in the same sales stage (see picture below). Once an account flips to prospect, all of the contacts flip to prospects and jump to a new track with differently focused content. It may be three different prospect tracks customized by, for example - title, but they are all at the prospect stage.




Credit to Eric Hollebone. The chart above is adapted from one of his.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Delinda, that's makes a lot of sense. Appreciate your help!

[Anonymous]

Hi Lindsay,

If you are looking to group Contacts by the lifecycle of the Account as determined by Opportunity Stage, then Delinda's approach is sound.

The only time that Account Stage (and any other triggers that are updating a custom Contact Stage field) might require further thought > if you have different business units sharing a single Account, and Contacts may be a customer of one brand and prospect of another, but there's plenty of solutions to this scenario.

Pierce and Jason have also touched on a relevant point. Even if you don't currently, you're almost definitely going to want to report on the influence of your campaigns on Opps at some point. For this reason it's imperative that at a minimum you always have a Primary Contact associated to each Opp. Reason being, that you'll never be able to report on how an individual's engagement with a campaign influnced a sale if there is never a link made between the individual and the Opportunity. 

Jason's approach to remove New Opportunity button from Account layout is the way to go, and also have your SFDC Admin create a rule to ensure no Opp can be created without Primary Contact role - that way Sales are forced to create an Opportunity from the Contact that they're dealing with, and by association, the Opp is still linked to the Account.

[Anonymous]

Lindsay,

Opportunity should be a contact status field and should only be in SFDC. Here is an example of how your fields could be setup and where they would apply to SFDC and Marketo: