How does Marketo deal with Salesforce.com Partner Community Contacts?

[Anonymous]

Hi Marketo People,

I have a question re Contacts in Salesforce.com who are partner community users. When I upload a list with their email addresses, Marketo doesn't seem to pick on the fact that the Contact already exists.

Is it because they are a Partner Community user - and therefore not a "real" contact somehow?

Anyone else run into this issue?

How do you deal with it? Since Marketo's not picking up these existing Contacts, I'm aftraid it will create new leads in the system when I push the list to salesforce.com.

I don't have too much experience setting up partner communities, so any ideas would be appreciated.


Thanks!

Grant

[Anonymous]

Hi Grant, we don't have communities set up yet, but have been told the setup of partner uses remains the same when we switch from portal.

I haven't run into this personally, but do the users exist as Contacts or just as Partner Users? For our portal we have to set up a Contact for every Partner User. Marketo picks up on our partner contacts but not the actual user record, which helps us reduce duplicates. 

Also, do you have any constraints with your Marketo SFDC role that prevent it from seeing partner contacts?

Emily

[Anonymous]

Yes - that's it exactly. I see all the partners as Contacts - but they are not really Contacts - since they are partners. That's why I am wondering if Marketo treats them any differently, or it can't even distinguish between partner contacts vs customer contacts.

Based on my experience so far, it doesn't treat them the same - butI can't find any documentation explaining how it's working.

[Anonymous]

We have to set up smart campaigns and smart lists to exclude all those contacts from scoring. We also have a checkbox on the account to help us remove them from various campaigns - but for importing it would treat them the same as any other lead/contact from what I can see. We also run into issues with the partners creating themselves as leads by filling out forms with a different email address. 

It's difficult to get documentation on partners at a SFDC level as well.