Salesforce Leads vs. Contacts

[mk]

Hi,

My B2B company uses Salesforce for CRM and we have it set up so that there are leads and contacts. Almost all of our targeting is done on an account level rather than on an individual level, and we are working on our entrance into the ABM world so we would like to explore all options before getting too far into it.

We recall that there was an option to forego using the lead object at all in SFDC, and we didn't fully understand the difference when we implemented the integration. I've been doing some research and am finding more negatives to getting rid of leads and using only contacts, but I was wondering if anyone here has experience with this they could share and if so, what are the consequences you encountered on the Marketo side of the integration? 

Thanks in advance! 

[Sev_Loeuille]

Hi there,

As long as the SFDC fields related to the  Lead object are mapped in Marketo, you can use them to build your smart lists accordingly. My recommendation would be to clearly understand what your lead to contact conversion process is within your business. For instance, if you want to target prospects, do they remain as Leads in SFDC or have they all been converted into Contacts by your sales team already?

Here are some ressources that you might find useful:

- Fields mapping reminder

- Recent release from Marketo: Account smart lists - This feature is only available to those with both TAM and the Adobe Marketo Engage Next-Gen user experience enabled.

Hope that helps!

Thanks,

Sev