Setting Up Workspaces and Partitions - Nested Company Structure

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I am trying to set up workspaces for a nested company structure. For example, consider I have 3 products each being sold in 3 different countries. How do I structure the workspaces and partitions to make sure that the respective  marketing teams can only see assets and leads associated with their country and product?

Thanks! 

[Jep_Castelein2]

I would recommend not using multiple partitions, unless you absolutely have to. There are lots of caveats. Using multiple Workspaces is fine, but ideally they all link to the same Lead Partition. 

[Eric_Nguyen2]

Sorry to bring this thread back from the dead, but I haven't been able to find much in my searches (links to the old Marketo Community articles are broken and documentation seems to be sparse). This thread seemed to hit my pain point head on...

Here's a simplified scenario for this thought exercise:

Enterprise Business

NA/ EMEA / APAC / Rest of World

My immediate need is to build a workspace for our EMEA team so we can run campaigns independently. However, there will be instances where we'll want to run global email campaigns from the default workspace (I assume).

My confusion revolves around the approach to building WS and LP out which supports globally run campaigns as well as local campaigns. I would prefer to keep the EMEA team from accidentally emailing the NA / APAC / ROW segments.

Based on Josh's recommendation, I should build a corresponding LP for my EMEA WS. But Jep recommends keeping all the leads in one LP and only building out WS.

Help?

[Jep_Castelein2]

The reason why I discourage the use of Lead Partitions is that a Lead always needs to be in exactly 1 Lead Partition. This makes it hard to deal with situations where a Lead could potentially have to be in 2 Partitions at the same time.

Let's assume you implement a US and an EU partition, each linked to their own Workspace. Example: Janice lives in the UK, so she's in the EU partition but she registers for a conference that you are organizing in New York. The Program for the New York conference is in the US Workspace and therefore only has access to the US Lead partition. When Janice fills out the registration form, her registration will be lost (as if it never happened). This is because her email address is in the database, but not accessible to the Program.

Also, if Janice's Lead record is in a list that you upload into the US partition, it will not successfully upload. Luckily, you get an error message about this and you can download the failed records. It may still be a hassle though.

Some customers have then created a "Shared Lead Partition" for Leads who responded to Programs in both Workspaces/Partitions. For 2 Partitions this may still be manageable, but as you add more Partitions, it starts getting harder to maintain (the number of 'shared' partitions starts to increase exponentially).

So these caveats are behind my recommendation to avoid Lead Partitions if you can.

[Amy_Lepre]

Hi Jep,

Hoping you can give some insight on our scenario.

We have a parent company and then child companies that we are beginning to set up and manage in Marketo. We want to prevent the child company's leads from going into SFDC or getting caught up in the parent company's scoring programs. How would you recommend handling this in Marketo if not by using lead partitions?

Thanks,

Amy

[Jep_Castelein2]

Amy, if the child companies are completely independent and would like to keep their Leads separate from the parent company, then I would create a new Lead Partition with a "dupe rule by Partition ID". That way you allow for duplicates across Partitions (but not within Partitions). This means you lose the 360-degree view of the Customer because the same Lead can be in both Partitions, but it sounds like that is fine in your case. You then set up a Partition Assignment rule (Admin > Workspaces > partitions tab) so that all SFDC leads flow into the Parent company's Partition.

To prevent accidental syncing of Leads to SFDC in the child company's Workspace you can set up a validation rule in SFDC that will reject new Leads, unless they have a particular field value (which could be as simple as a check box "okay to sync"). In your parent company Partition you will have to set that check box to true before you call "Sync Lead to SFDC". It is no possible to remove the "Sync to SFDC" flow step in the child company's workspace.

[Steven_Vanderb3]

Amy,

If you have a method of distinguishing leads of the parent company from leads of the child companies, you could use segmentations to classify the two.  In your scoring and syncing campaigns you could add Smart List logic so that it would exclude leads that were owned by your child company based off their segment.  Segmentation and Snippets - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

[Eric_Nguyen2]

Thanks for picking up the conversation...

I was under the impression that if Janice filled out the form from the US workspace, that a purposeful dupe would be created in the US lead partition. Is that not the case?

The idea of purposeful dupes doesn't appeal to me, but I'm just trying to understand if there's even a strong case for going that route.

So is this where segments (in the default lead partition) could be used to manage regional or product-based segmentation?

[Jep_Castelein2]

By default the behavior is as I described. You can ask support to create a "dupe rule by Partition ID", which would create duplicates across Partitions. Essentially, when a Lead is submitted it will try to match on both Email Address and Partition ID. If it finds a match, it will update. If no match, it will create a new Lead. Practically, you are creating 2 independent database within Marketo. This may have consequences for a CRM sync or API sync with other systems. This setup is most useful if Marketo is connected to 2 (or more) completely separate data sources that also need to stay separate inside Marketo. This setup is not ideal if Marketo connects to 1 CRM system where there are no purposeful dupes.

Hope this helps.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Josh!

Would this allow me to set different accesses for all 9 product-country combinations? 

[Josh_Hill13]

You would create 3 WS and 3 LPs and only permit each one to see their respective LPs.

Default WS (only you see this) ==> sees all Lead Partitions
WS A = LPA
WS B = LPB
WS C = LPC

The article should help too. Just keep in mind that users granted access to a WS will NOT be able to see other leads or campaigns.

[Amy_Lepre]

Have you seen this article? It should get you started.

https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000KyxHCAS