Managing different types of contacts in one instance

[Anonymous]

We have been been using Marketo for just over a year now and are looking for best practices on how to manage a diverse contact base.

We currently use Marketo to manage our communications with a variety of different contacts including;

- leads

- current clients (b2b)

- members (individuals using our services, these are employees of our clients)

- partners (that we work with to sell our services)

- prospective employees

- additional business segments operating as separate brands

Up until recently we have been using the account type filed as a primary identifier for our contact types, however that is no longer possible (as a single contact to can be more than one type of contact in a single record). We are looking for best practices or recommendations on how to solve this issue. Any suggestions or resources would be appreciated. Thanks!

[Grant_Booth]

Have you considered using a multi-select field in your CRM? If you're using SFDC, it should sync down multiple values into the corresponding Marketo field as a semi-colon separated list (Value1;Value2;Value3) Then you could use a filter for that field in Marketo and use "contains" instead of "is" for the logic.

Alternatively you could make boolean (true/false) fields for each type, so a contact could have 'true' for some of them and 'false' for others.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for these suggestions! We currently use Microsoft Dynamics, however not all of our contacts sync from Dynamics. We are in the process of integrating an in house database with our Marketo instance as well, which is where things are getting complicated.