Do you have an org that uses "Contact Roles" NOT just in opportunities?

[Anonymous]

Hey everyone -

I was curious how Marketo users are dealing with SFDC "contacts roles", and their impacts into Marketo.  We had wanted to do list work within Marketo instead of SFDC, but our org uses contact roles on accounts (a la - this contact at a singular health system manages PR/Marketing for 5 other hospitals).  In SFDC, that contact resides at the parent account, with contact roles being added for that contact under the specific accounts below them. This is so we don't get 5 duplicate contacts

Is this data manageable in Marketo? I don't think I've been able to hunt down if/where Marketo sees this info...I'd like to be able to create smart lists in Marketo that can see the contacts assigned to an account AND the contact roles. 

Any ideas/insights?

[Edward_Masson]

Are you talking about contact roles with an opportunity? as opportunities has a selection based on your business of values to select for that contact you're adding to the opportunity.

Marketo can see contacts belonging to an account.

[Anonymous]

The sales team does use them for opportunities, but they also use them for accounts.

Our business' clients are health systems and hospitals. They use the "contact role" by adding a contact to the health system's account (the parent account), and then using contact roles for this same contact on each of the hospitals (the children accounts) to define who does what at each hospital.  So if Adam Smith covers PR and Marketing for Hospital A, B and C, there aren't 3 duplicate contacts...it's 1 contact with 3 PR/Marketing roles.

[Josh_Hill13]

Are you saying you have 5 Contacts with the same email address in SFDC?

Marketo would see all 5. But if the lead comes back through a marketo form, it will update only 1 of the records (newest one usually).

[Anonymous]

No, I'm saying we have 1 contact with the same email in SFDC at the health system's account, but it's used as a "contact role" multiple times at various hospitals that are children of the health system account. So it's not actually 5 contacts.

I'm pretty sure this structure makes it harder to segment in Marketo...I think I need to do it in SFDC and add members to a campaign.  Marketo is only seeing the original contact at the health system, thus making segmentation via smart list difficult.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi Ryan,

We're actually working with the same issues with the Contact Roles on the Account in SFDC and the Account Team member object. Currently our next steps are tentatively seeming like we'll ask the Salesforce admins to create a lookup field on the contact that populates if they are either the Exec Sponsor or Program Manager on the account. It's frustrating to have to create these additional fields on the contact since you can't use these objects in segmentations in Marketo but at this point we've just had to come up with work arounds like you mentioned on the SFDC side instead.