Extended SFDC Account Team - Personalization Options

[Ryan_Miller1]

Hello Marketo Community.

I would like to get feedback from others who may have a similar situation related to Account structure. Our Marketo instance is sync’d with SFDC.  The Account object has an owner that is visible in Marketo and can be used as a token for personalization.  The Account Owner is responsible for the account relationship.  However, each account has a team of 8 individuals who specialize in sales for various products.  These team members come across in Marketo as the user id from SFDC(not good for personalization).  Since our marketers want to send personalized messages from these sales specialists, we have a problem to solve.

One attempt to resolve, we built custom text fields on the Account object to hold what amounts to signature information (name, email, etc). We had a workflow rule and field update in place to keep the text fields current.  This worked well until we exceeded the limit of object references on the Account(SFDC limitation).  It also did not account for changes to the User object, only changes on the Account.

A second attempt was to create a custom ‘Marketo Account Team’ object in SFDC.  This proved successful, however there is a good deal of code to keep the object current.  Not to mention a great deal of data replication since every account would need at least 8 records on the custom object that already appear on the Account.

Another attempt was to utilize email scripting to convert the user id to a name.  However, this seems risky as it puts a good deal of administrative work in Marketo and has a risk of personnel updates not being communicated.

Have others ran into this issue?  What other creative solutions exist?  I’m curious what is in place within the integration that converts the account owner to a name value, while the sales specialists fields come across as ID’s? Can this be replicated?

Thanks!

Ryan

[Kristen_Malkov1]

Hey Ryan,

Definitely have encountered this situation before. Best solution I came up with: creating segmentations by lead owner in Marketo. In no way is this the best/most scalable solution, but it is the one that works best with Marketo from an SFDC perspective in my experience. I had a program that would convert the owner ID into a name that was specific to Marketo, which would then add them to that lead's segmentation. This could also be a static list they are added to, just depends on the use case/situation/company requirements.

Nuances:

1) when lead owners change, you have to re-run/change that field

2) Troubleshooting when leads don't receive an owner: use program statuses. I used an operational program channel type that would tag those who never made it through one of the assignment campaigns

3) don't use request campaign for this!! It breaks.

Good luck! And sorry this isn't a better answer.