Contact to opportunity in Salesforce

[Jonathan_Ng2]

We are working with a vendor to connect Marketo to a new implementation of Salesforce.  When the topic of contact to opportunity came up, they stated that they create a new lead in SFDC, then use a preference center of some sort to ensure that email subscription details are preserved between the two, ie unsubscribe the newly created lead, do not sync, etc, to prevent Marketo from pulling it.  Is this the new best practice between Marketo and SF?  I was under the impression that if we did that, Marketo Sales Insight information will not show the same info between the two records.  Doesn't this also prevent Marketo from seeing that a contact and those efforts behind the contact are ever associated as being part of that opportunity creation?

In previous lift we had always used Opportunity Contact Roles to associate and be able to see a Contact's lifecycle from when they come in as a new follow-up to opportunity to won/loss.  What's the best practice to track this?

[Chris_Johnston]

That doesn't sound like any best practice I have ever heard, but there are always different reasons people come up with unique approaches. I am assuming they are a LaunchPoint Partners Vendor and so I would guess that they have a reason for the approach but based on this limited information I have, I would suggest your concerns are valid. I am curious how they would handle an opportunity that ended up being too early or not enough budget and getting that data synced into Marketo for a Recycle Program etc as well. I'd definitely look to use Contact Roles and Opportunity Stages to keep things on the success path for a typical installation. 

A subscription/preference center is typically only used for a client facing way to unsubscribe and if we are being honest, is really only to comply with laws most of the time. (Yes, some do effectively use it to make sure they deliver the right content to the right person).

I work with a Gold Digital Services Partner of Marketo and we do this everyday for clients, I'd be happy to have you on a complimentary 30 minute or 1 hour call to go over what they are telling you and provide a 2nd opinion to hopefully remove your fears that you are going down the wrong path.

Feel free to reach out to me chris@salytics.com.

[Jonathan_Ng2]

Hi Chris, thanks for the feedback.  I believe they are using this method so they can use more simplistic reports out of SF to view lead to opportunity.  I thought you could easily create a contact to opportunity report instead though?  They had said they would be connecting the leads to the contacts, though I'm not sure how you would connect multiple leads to a contact if the contact is expected to rotate through multiple times.

Thanks again for your feedback

[Chris_Johnston]

Hi Jonathan, assuming there isn't a piece that we are missing for some custom needs of yours that you haven't mentioned, I have sat with members of our team here (multiple Marketo Certified Solutions Architects) and we can't see how this is anywhere close to a best practice or even the correct approach to take on this. I would definitely have concerns about what they are proposing for you. Happy to hop on a call with you and we can talk through it if you would like. We can ask some more questions and have a back and forth to figure out what is going on, but SFDC reporting is simplistic and works well without cutting off the sync.