Removal of Account Market Segment field in Salesforce

[Anonymous]

My Salesforce admin team has removed the Market Segment field from the Account object.

Their advice is for us to use the Market Segment field from the Opportunity (for prospect Accounts) or Program (for client Accounts) objects.

That sounds illogical to me and I just can't think of how I can update my segment rules in Marketo. Am I or is my Salesforce team going crazy? Has anyone else experienced something similar?

[Josh_Hill13]

Well, what reasons did they have for doing this?

Marketo will keep the original field, but it won't be able to receive updates. Thus, you will have to update any smart lists or Segmentations.

Since Market Segment is a field that is special to your instance, I can't offer any other advice except to go to them and find out
-Why did this change happen?
-Why weren't you consulted?
-Can they turn it back on for a few days while everyone decides on a fix?
-Can we setup a governance model to ensure that changes on either side are properly handled? I'm sure they'd hate it if you decided to start using new picklist values in Marketo.

[Amber_Hobson]

The one thing that I would suggest since we have a similar field is to house it at the contact level, not the account or opportunity level. Our sales reps seem to care a bit less over what fields are on the contact than they do for the account and then you should be able to run a few campaigns to pre-populate your existing account data back to the new contact field. And then for your segments, you should be able to swap the field that it looks at.