How can I identify leads coming into Marketo that belong to existing (incl. client) accounts?

[Carly_Stevens2]

I am trying to find the least manual way to be able to identify when someone comes in with a domain that matches an existing account in Salesforce, without having to sync that person to Salesforce. We have thousands of accounts (prospects and clients).

We like to send emails from the account owner, because they're more personalised and get better results. The issue we have though, is that when a lead isn't synched with Salesforce we obviously don't have that matching to an account. We want to start to relationship off on the right foot and keep communication consistent (i.e. from the same person), so... Aside from create billions of rules looking for specific domains and giving them a 'Marketo Owner' (custom field), what else can I do?

Does anyone else do anything similar to this? 

[Jay_Jiang]

lots of ways to automate this, but all will require technical resources.

I'd actually let Salesforce do the work here, keeping in mind marketo cannot dynamically change the system fields for sales owner. Instead, you would have to use a proxy field and build a smart campaign with choices for every possible owner.

If you must keep it in Marketo you can:

1. create a custom field that saves the email domain and populate it with the email domains of your entire database

2. when a new lead is created, call a webhook to service that a) extracts the new lead's email domain and b) makes an api call to Marketo to GET leads with a filter for the email domain you just extracted

3. if the api call returns results, there are existing records, update a proxy field with the owner's name on the record found. The change in the proxy field triggers a smart campaign that runs through choices to assign the respective sales owner

[SanfordWhiteman]

No need for the loopback API call though, the webhook-enabled service itself can keep track of the assigned owners, since it's doing/honoring the assignments. This is how we do round-robin-if-new/maintain-if-existing-account assignment for lots of clients.

[Jay_Jiang]

But owners can change down the track. I'm not following how the webhook service can check for the latest owner on a separate record without making an api call to Marketo to filter for those records.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yep, when an owner changes the webhook keeps track of that, too.

The webhook itself keeping track of available owner(s) -- since there may be more than one owner per domain, because exceptions can happen as long as they're flagged via another "override" field -- is IME the sane way to do this. The Get Leads By Filter Type endpoint is incredibly hobbled on large instances, I don't trust it to finish in webhook-time.

[Carly_Stevens2]

Thanks both, would this still work where we have multiple account owners per domain? IE global companies? Because we'd need some 'IF' scenarios like, if domain is X and country is UK, Owner is X, vs the same for US, etc...

[Jay_Jiang]

provided country data is available for the newly created lead, you can match on multiple criterias to select the appropriate owner to assign