Why does Marketo only have Leads?

[Anthony_Pica]

I'm curious, what is the reasoning behind only have one type of record instead of two like Salesforce has?

We're working with a company that is considering not using Leads in Salesforce. They think it's simpler to use only Contacts in Salesforce. They also think that in the future there will only be 1 type of record, and that the marketing automation tools already are on board with this idea.

I'm aware of the benefits of using Leads in Salesforce, but I'm having a hard time providing concrete technical reasons why it's a bad idea to only use Contacts.

Thoughts?

[Anonymous]

Hi Anthony,

The downside to using only Contacts is the challenge of making sure that they're all qualified, not to mention, storage space. But primarily, It's all about keeping the data hygiene - garbage in/garbage out.

MKTO's Leads as either SFDC "Leads" or "Contacts" is based on types of "Leads" - known, unknown, nurture subjects, operational, etc.

I've worked at two small-midsize companies who chose to forego leads.  In both cases they just grabbed a whole bunch of potential customer data an imported it as Contacts at Companies - It led to very unwieldly tasks and data maintenance.

However, if you have serious skills and IT resources for maintaining the data with great integration - it could work. I'd be curious to see it,

Lynn 

[Josh_Hill13]

I agree with Lynn that working with lots of Account based records could lead to data problems.

You need to setup a robust method of handling prospects and qualification during an Account based system. Ownership would be a big problem as well. I don't know how Lynn's clients handled that.

Marketo also creates duplicate leads in situations where Contacts are not properly assigned. For instance, if you try to assign a Contact to a Queue, it creates a new dupe Lead. Clearly you wouldn't do this in an Contact only world.

There are a number of threads here on this issue, so do a bit of digging.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for tip about assigning a Contact to a Queue creating a new dupe Lead, Josh.