Enabling Person Accounts after Initial Marketo-SFDC Integration

[Katarina_Su]

Does anyone know of any implications/considerations of enabling Person Accounts after the initial sync of Marketo-SFDC using contacts? For example, we start off with syncing Leads/Contacts but if we then switch to enable Person Accounts, what are the implications on the Marketo end? Will it create duplicate fields and will Marketo support be able to merge the fields for us? Any other considerations when making this switch from business to Person Accounts in Marketo would be helpful as well. Thank you so much!

[Beth_Massura]

Hi Katarina,

For a little context, Marketo has a few objects in its back-end database including People (corresponding to SFDC Leads and Contacts as well as records not syncing to SFDC) and Companies (corresponding to SFDC Accounts). When a Person Account syncs to Marketo, it will create both a Person and a Company in Marketo. Even if the team is working primarily with the Person Accounts rather than Leads/Contacts in SFDC you will still need to allow Marketo to have access to the Contact object.

Person Accounts have a combination of Contact fields and Account fields, so any fields you already made visible to the Marketo sync user on either object would already appear in Marketo and not create duplicate fields. Any new custom fields you need to create for the Person Accounts should actually be created on the Contact object (and made visible to the Marketo sync user) if you want Marketo to update the values, since Marketo can't write to Account fields. A corresponding field will be created on the Account object as well but you wouldn't use that one in Marketo and might need to set up a Flow on the SFDC side to copy the value to it.

Here are some references:

• Using Person Accounts documentation
• Person Accounts Best Practices community thread
• Person Accounts community thread
• Setting Up Person Accounts SFDC documentation

Cheers,

Beth Massura

2022 Adobe Marketo Champion