Contextualizing Marketo Activities when Contacts to Multiple Accounts is Enabled in SFDC

[Leslie_Gloria]

Hello! My org is implementing SFDC's Account-Contact Relationship object (Contacts to Multiple Accounts) and we ran into a challenge: How do you report on activities in the context of the relevant account when a Contact is associated with many Accounts? 

So for example - Contact Joe Mamah belongs to 10+ accounts. Marketing is running an email campaign that is targeting 1) Accounts that belong to a specific business unit OR 2) a subset of customer accounts, which they identify by customer #. Let's say 3 of Joe's accounts fit these criteria. None of these accounts have a direct relationship in the Account-Contact object.

Marketing has a performance metrics dashboard where they roll up campaign results at the Account level. Before the Acct-Contact Relationship object, this was pretty straightforward, as there was a direct relationship between SFDC Account => SFDC Contact => Marketo Lead => Marketo Activity. (There was a duplicate Contact for every Account.) Now that a single Contact is shared amongst accounts, the path from SFDC Account to Marketo Activity is forked.

Any ideas on how to contextualize Marketo activities to the account level? So reporting for the example email campaign shows up on only the three relevant accounts vs all 10 or the direct relationship?

One partial solution would be to use naming convention to pull in business unit context to a program => asset/smart campaign => activity. However, this doesn't give us account-level granularity. We're exploring pulling out account #'s from either smart campaign smart list filters or qualifying members and creating an intermediary lookup table to make associations, but are curious how other folks in the community have tackled this scenario!

(We're taking the data out of Marketo and SFDC to display our reports in Tableau, so there's no need to solution for reporting on SFDC.)

[Chris_Willis1]

One thing that you will need to note is that the Account-Contact Relationship object in Salesforce isn't recognized within Marketo... only the primary Parent Account relationship to the contact, if you are using the native integration.  

Before answering the question further, what is the use case in your organization for having a contact associated with multiple accounts?  This would be helpful in answering your question. 

- The contact consults with multiple accounts?  (common in Healthcare with admitting privileges)

- Department relationships are managed via child accounts? 

- Or another?  

[Leslie_Gloria]

That second option resonates the most. In broad terms, our relationship with an org can be split among different business arms, which in Salesforce translates to separate accounts for each split. It has to be this way because of how account data is fed from SAP. We often see the same person duplicated across the different Accounts to make this model work, but that has its own drawbacks.

There has been a push org-wide to clean-up the data in Salesforce, and part of this was to minimize duplicates by using the Account Contact Relationship object. That's where we are now! Trying to transition our reporting (and other processes) to accommodate the ACR object!

[Katja_Keesom · Accepted solution]

I guess the answer is not an easy one. The whole point of the Marketo architecture is that the person was included in a campaign, regardless of which account was the reason to include them. With the newly announced AJO, it might be easier to report on this, but in Marketo I do not see it as something that is too easy to do.

[Katja_Keesom]

I have seen this requirement several times now, so thought it time to raise incorporating the concept in Marketo's data model and native SFDC sync as an idea: https://nation.marketo.com/t5/ideas/recognizing-the-account-contact-relationship-object-in/idi-p/343...

[Chris_Willis1]

HI Katja - this idea is great.  I'm going to vote it up.  

However, this connection issue is related to Salesforce's architecture and how it exposes objects to the API, so I'm not sure how much Adobe can do here.  I would recommend creating an idea on Salesforce's site, as I believe other tools are impacted by the lack of object visibility and could benefit by a development effort.  

[Katja_Keesom]

Good point.