Emailing Related Contacts in Salesforce.com from Marketo?

[Anonymous]

I'd like to email a group of people that are connected in salesforce.com through a related list area called 'relationships' (used in the not for profit starter pack). Short of exporting the list from salesforce and importing list to marketo, has anyone figured out a way to query for related contacts (or related anything for that matter) through a Marketo Smart List?

Please share if you have ideas or workarounds!

[Kristen_Malkov1]

Can Marketo not see this field or these contacts in your instance?

[Anonymous]

I haven't used the not-for-profit starter pack, but just looked up the Relationships add-on. 

This appears to create many-to-many relationship between contacts, which would require a junction object, similar to the relationship between contacts and opportunities. 

I would first try enabling sync for this custom object in your admin. This will enable some new triggers and filters -- I suspect something like 

HAS RELATIONSHIP
with a list of of available constraints. 

From there your options will depend on how these relationships are structured within the SFDC object.

What is your criteria for how you are targeting these contacts? Is it all a group of people who share a common relationship, or something else? Knowing this could also help determine the best way to tackle it. 

[Anonymous]

Kristen and Justin, thanks for the quick replies! Kristen, Marketo can see the contacts (like mother, sibling, etc.), but it's not currently able to see the relationship type or that there is a relationship at all. Justin, I'm trying to make sure to email the student/applicant record for most marketing emails, but certain emails should be directed to the parents. Right now, all of these records parent, student, sibling of applicant are coming down to marketo with little to distinguish who is what. I'm working with the Salesforce admin to get a field on contact. BUT! I will first try enabling the sync for the relationship custom object and see what new triggers and filters show up. If that works, that'd be amazing!

Thanks for the thoughts; I'll let you know how it goes.

[Anonymous]

Cool, let us know what you discover! 

It is an interesting challenge -- even if you can't do it by default with the available filters there could be some other ways in Salesforce to signal the relationship in a way that is more visible to Marketo. 

[Kristen_Malkov1]

I think there's a couple ways you could try to approach this:
1) If you have lists of who is who, you could create a separate field in Marketo (like a checkbox or something) and have a program run so that if anyone new is added to that list, they're marked specifically for those sends. This would at least make your life somewhat easier when you do sends.

2) Once they're indicated (via checkbox or whatnot) you could create a segementation which would help with tailoring dynamic content in sends.

(Like you mentioned) It's best for these relationships to be indicated on either the account or contact. If there's a way you can craft your SFDC instance to refect these relationships, Marketo can pull in the corresponding fields and make your life a bit easier. 🙂

[Anonymous]

I agree with Kristen that a reference on the contact level will make things a lot easier!

If all else fails, you may be able to create some automated workflows/processes that populate hidden data values on the contact level based on relationships added in the Salesforce object.

It's a bit duplicative but once you have it working you could use these hidden values to segment in Marketo while maintaining the Salesforce related lists that are working for you and without additional data entry.