Custom Object Quandary: B2C Leads as "Members" of B2B Clients (Credit Unions)

[Jeremy_Caverly]

Greetings to the awesome Nation community! This is my first post and hoping it gets us on the right trajectory with our Database.

Summary: We service B2B Clients that are Credit Unions. Leads/Contacts/People (the CU employees that our sales team targets) will obviously associate with Credit Unions as Companies. At the same time, we run a B2C program on behalf of those Credit Unions where we communicate directly with their Members (the Credit Union's customers rather than employees) in a B2C relationship. It doesn't make sense for those Members (B2C) to use the normal Lead/Company relationship but we still want to associate those B2C contacts as "Members of" said Credit Unions (Companies) instead of "Employees of".

• All Credit Unions have a constant Charter Number which is our keyed data value in all other data sources (SugarCRM, etc). There's also a RNT (Routing Number like on your checks) that is constant that we associate to those Charter Numbers.
• B2C Members sign up for our program usually leveraging that RNT/Routing Number. Either way, we always capture their "Member of" credit union and associate that in the database via Charter Number and/or Routing Number
• We know a lot of other public data about these Credit Unions like their total number of reported members, number of branches and their assets size ... we'd like to do reporting and dynamic/segment content with their Members we're communicating with in B2C emails based on this data (again, w/o those Members being associated in the database as traditional Lead-to-Company link).

My plan right now is to configure a many-to-many Custom Object for the Charter Number. Every Company would have the Charter Number as the ID field that connects them to this data table. Then, I'd only need to keep the asset size, total member count, etc data updated in that Custom Object table vs having to update it on every Company profile field as well. Then every B2C Lead would also have a "Member of" field that would connect them via the Charter Number as well. (it's a RARE case in our data where a Lead would need to be considered a "Member of" two different Charter Numbers (credit unions).

Is there a better way to create a "Member off .." association to Company record types for these B2C Leads/Contacts that lets me report on the Company-based data that those people are "Members of" vs "Employees of"?

[SanfordWhiteman]

First of all, let's look at your intended use of these objects.

2nd-level COs not connected directly to Leads or Companies are not available in Velocity tokens. That is: you cannot include information from these CO entries in email content. So consider that first w/r/t to your design. I try to stay as far away from 2nd-level COs as possible because they're not first-class members of the Marketo ecosystem (debatably, COs in general aren't first-class enough, but 2nd-level COs even more so).

[Jeremy_Caverly]

I was certainly hoping this post would catch your wisdom-laden eyes! So, I can understand your counseling against this. But, do you have a better idea for how to associate these B2C Contacts as "Member of" a given Credit Union (Company)?

1. Can I do a one-to-many where B2C contacts are simply "Members of" a Company record and then have them "inherit" Custom Field data from that Company profile like asset size, total # of branches, is/is not a B2B client? That would allow me to leverage the more direct/native data association to a Company without them being viewed as "Employees of" like usual.
2. I'm honestly not certain how/when we'll get to the point of leveraging Velocity. I'm mostly concerned about reporting analytics and/or segmenting lists for send/nurturing campaigns but that's all venturing outside of my understanding a bit at that point.