Keeping SFDC Contact Owner Updated - Assignment Rules?

[Anonymous]

Preface: This is more of a general data/Salesforce.com issue, but my SFDC admin has exhausted their community and all of his other SFDC resources, so I thought I'd take this to the brilliant minds of the Marketo Community - I hope that's ok!

I'd like to use the Lead Owner token more often, but my data on that field is less than perfect. This imperfection usually occurs for Contacts (so it's actually Contact Owner) in one of these scenarios: (A) an intern/support person/anyone other than sales adds a new Contact into an Account, and that non-sales person becomes the person's "Contact Owner" or (B) a sales person leaves the company, and they were listed as the Contact Owner. 

I proposed to my SFDC admin that we create a script to run that auto-updates the Contact Owner field based on a set of defined “Contact Assignment Rules” – a similar function to Lead Assignment Rules - but creating them is making the script pretty complicated.

How do you guys handle the challenge of keeping “Contact Owner” updated, and if you have a similar script running, how were you able to create your Contact Assignment Rules?

[Anonymous]

HAve you looked at workflow rules in SFDC?
You should be able to do a field update that can change the owner based on a Criteria of your choice.
This could be country or state or whatever criteria you generally use for assignment.

It's not going to be possible to entirely automate the scenario you described where an employee leaves the company. The system somehow needs to be told that person has left the company, so maybe you could do something when the sfdc user is deactivated.