Mapping Account Fields to Leads

[Anonymous]

Hi Marketo Community!

In our SFDC instance, we have several accounts with both contacts and leads. In our messaging that we send to these accounts we'd like to segment via account object fields (IE: account owner, revenue tier, etc.) and incorporate the leads on these accounts as well. Do any of you have experience mapping account object fields to leads when they've been added to an account or have any best practices in doing this with Marketo?

Thank you in advance!

[Anonymous]

Hi Christopher! There are some terminology "things" going on in your question, so let's back up to the beginning to make sure you understand the relationship between leads, contacts and accounts.

1. In SFDC, contacts are related to accounts. Leads are not.
2. In Marketo, People (leads and contacts) are related to their own company record. There is no concept of the grouped account as we have in SFDC.

At LeadMD, we use LeanData to create fuzzy matching rules to automatically convert leads to contacts if the account already exists in SFDC. For example, if Jamie@leadmd.com comes in as a lead, LeanData knows that Jamie belongs at the LeadMD account, so it converts me to a contact at that account. Then we use the fields on the contact to message people in Marketo.

Is there a reason you are prohibiting leads from becoming contacts if the account already exists?

[Andy_Varshneya1]

In addition to the strategic suggestions made by Jamie Maynard​, here's how you should approach this problem technologically.

The first thing you'll need is a Lead to Account Matching tool. Some options to consider are LeanData, RingLead, Engagio, amongst others. Carefully consider what you need and what you do so that you purchase a tool that get you everything you need and you're not paying for anything you don't need.

At a high level, all of these tools leverage company name, email domain, website, and geographical data to best match leads with the existing accounts in your database. The cleaner and more accurate the information in your database, the better the match results will be. Once matched, a lead will have an Account ID field updated in Marketo. This field will be a Lookup field, linking to the account, and the key for what you're trying to accomplish.

You'll need to create more such Lookup fields on the lead object, one for every field you want pulled down from the account and map it to the corresponding account field. I would not recommend overwriting the existing fields as the matching won't always be accurate so you don't want to lose that data, and there will also be situations where you want to leverage the individual data instead of the account data (for example, inviting people to a tradeshow by their personal location rather than office location).

[Jesse_Richard]

I have the same question as OP. Unfortunately our sales team doesn't want all leads converted to contacts, and they want full control of who is converted to a contact. But now I'm running into a problem that I cannot segment and target specific accounts, because some of them are "leads" in SFDC, therefore not linked to the account in Marketo.

Any thoughts on having Marketo pull in the account information for "leads" in SFDC? We already have a field "Linked Account" that populates via RingLead, so we have that data in Marketo, but more looking for a way to default to the account information, instead of having to reference that field. For example, "Company Name = SFDC Account" versus "Company Name = SFDC Account OR Linked Account = SFDC Account".