SFDC Sync: Multiple Account Associations via "Shared Contacts" | Community
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Anonymous
June 17, 2016
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SFDC Sync: Multiple Account Associations via "Shared Contacts"

  • June 17, 2016
  • 10 replies
  • 16359 views

Salesforce has had default support for multiple Account associations for several years (via AccountContactRoles), but visibility into multiple Account associations (especially from MA platforms like Marketo) is generally lacking.

This month, Salesforce rolled out their Summer '16 release, which includes general availability of the new (poorly-named) "Shared Contacts" feature (success.salesforce.com/ideaview?id=08730000000BrBSAA0). This is an opt-in feature which unifies the existing "Contact: AccountId" and "AccountContactRole" relationships, replacing the "AccountContactRole" with a new "AccountContactRelation" object. This new feature supports both "direct" and "indirect" relationships, automatically setting the "Contact: AccountId" for direct relationships but using the junction object for indirect.

Currently, we have the ability in Marketo to sync the "AccountContactRole" junction object via Salesforce Objects Sync. This has the potential to be useful, but suffers from two major limitations:

1. Account entities are ignored in the Salesforce Objects Sync, so we cannot access fields on Accounts which are related via "AccountContactRoles". We want to specify a filter something like "Has AccountContactRole >> Account" or "Has AccountContactRole: With Account" with Account-level field constraints, such as "Revenue >= 1mil" or "State == NY".

2. The "AccountContactRole" entity does not permit the creation of custom fields, so we cannot work around #1 by mirroring Account information directly into the junction object.

The major difference between the old "Role" and new "Relation" is the ability to create custom fields on the junction object, which would resolve #2 and provide us a path to leverage many-to-many Contact-to-Account relationships from inside Marketo... so I was very excited to see if this new feature would help address some of the difficulties with handling multiple Account associations in Marketo.

When I enabled this new feature and synced the SFDC schema, I was crestfallen to discover the "AccountContactRelation" object was not available in "Salesforce Objects Sync". I'd like to see the "AccountContactRelation" exposed to "Salesforce Objects Sync", because it would be a short path to building segments from multiple Account relationships.

    10 replies

    Grégoire_Miche2
    Grégoire_Miche2
    Level 10
    June 17, 2016

    more doc on this availble here: Release Notes

    A
    Anonymous
    March 15, 2017

    Hey Kyle and Gregoire,

    If many:many contact-account relationships were available in Marketo, what particular use cases would you be interested in accomplishing?

    Thanks,

    -Derek

    Grégoire_Miche2
    Grégoire_Miche2
    Level 10
    March 16, 2017

    Hi Derek Fung ,

    • Being able to target people who have a role "X" in at least one account.
    • Being able to target people who have a role "X" in at least two accounts.
    • Being able to target people who have a role "X" in one account and no other account role
    • Being able to target people who have any role in 1 account only (people attached to more than 1 account being often consultants)
    • ...

    There would be a thought about making this a feature of the ABM product or a feature of the basic MLM one.

    -Greg

    A
    Anonymous
    March 16, 2017

    Thanks Gregoire, that's very helpful.

    Once you have targeted such people, what would be the actions you would want to take next in the campaign?

    -Derek

    Andrew_Donnelly
    Andrew_Donnelly
    Level 2
    May 29, 2017

    This is also a very important feature for us. We are B2B and have multiple contacts associated with our many accounts in Salesforce. In each account, we have given contacts roles such as "key contact", "IT contact", etc. We often want to send an email to just a given contact (based on role) from each account. This need arises almost every week.

    Right now in Marketo we cannot target our contacts based on account contact role. This means each time we have to download an updated list of contacts from Salesforce and upload them into Marketo so we can send to the suitable contact role. This workaround is as good (or as bad) as the system we had in place when using MailChimp.

    Marketo is a far superior product than MailChimp. Considering we send multiple email campaigns to thousands of contacts each week, and we have multiple contact roles in thousands of accounts, I really hope you make it possible to sync account contact roles ASAP.

      Andrew_Donnelly
      Andrew_Donnelly
      Level 2
      July 14, 2017

      Any ETA as to when it's going to be possible to sync the "AccountContactRelation" object from salesforce to marketo? We have to currently do this manually, over and over again. This needs to be part of the sync.

        Chris_Willis1
        Adobe Champion
        Chris_Willis1Adobe Champion
        Adobe Champion
        July 20, 2017

        How are you conducting this sync manually today?  We have a custom object that's managing this process because Marketo isn't supporting shared contacts.  It's unfortunately not sustainable. 

        Chris Willis - Fractional GTM Operations Consultant
        Andrew_Donnelly
        Andrew_Donnelly
        Level 2
        July 21, 2017

        I run a report in Salesforce to make a list of all contacts where role = "key contact". I then export that list. I then upload that static list to Marketo. I only have to upload one field i.e. email addresses. Because all the contacts have already been synced from Salesforce to Marketo, there is no need to upload other fields. I simply use this static list upload to segment the Marketo database to identify which contacts are the key contacts.

        Then I can target our email communications in Marketo to that list of key contacts. Very manual.

        What is your solution?

        Chris_Willis1
        Adobe Champion
        Chris_Willis1Adobe Champion
        Adobe Champion
        July 19, 2017

        This is a really important feature that needs to be addressed.  Several B2B industries have structures where contacts have roles & responsibilities within 2 or more accounts and we need to be able to account for it. 

        Chris Willis - Fractional GTM Operations Consultant
          Andrew_Donnelly
          Andrew_Donnelly
          Level 2
          July 19, 2017

          Syncing roles of contacts that sit on 2 or more accounts would be awesome, as Chris points out.

          But even just syncing the role between the contact and one account would be a great start. For every single customer account we have, we have a "key contact" and a "technical contact".

          See below:

          We do campaigns all the time where we want to target the key contact at our accounts. In order to make this work, we need the roles to sync from Salesforce to Marketo. In Marketo this is not currently possible.

            W
            WyattBa
            Level 4
            November 7, 2017

            This is a big use case for Uber. In a restaurant Franchise model, Contact1 could own 5 different locations. Thus we "related" Contact1 across 4 other Accounts.

            We have a Contact Account Relationship custom object which allows us to bring back some 1:many Account 2 through 5 fields but isn't feasible to add every single Account field into said object. Additionally, we have custom objects within the related Accounts which we need to reference. We could directly tie the Contact to each custom object but that isn't scalable either.

            So, if Marketo was able to have a "Has Related Account" filter which you could treat like a custom object, you could listen across multiple Accounts to qualify that record. Additionally you could use email scripting to #foreach loop through to consolidate multiple Account campaigns into one.

              John_Muehling
              John_Muehling
              Level 2
              February 27, 2018

              Anyone from Marketo engineering able to chime in here and offer insight on when/if this might be added to the sync?  This has been a long-standing issue for companies that need to associate 1 contact to multiple accounts and market to/track each of them as such.

              Thanks!

              John

              W
              WyattBa
              Level 4
              March 2, 2018

              We ended up creating a Marketo custom object which is updated via the API whenever a new 1:N relationship is added in Salesforce. It's incredibly flexible and useful but becomes an issue if you rely on Velocity Script to populate emails via (because of duplicate records).

              Veronica_Holme4
              Veronica_Holme4
              Level 9
              July 3, 2018

              Becoming massively important with the release and uptake of new SFDC packages like the Higher Education and NonProfit Success Pack. These use multiple account relationships inherently in the package. Marketo has to show some movement on this.

              W
              WyattBa
              Level 4
              July 3, 2018

              We actually had to pivot to ET because of this functionality. The lack of Velocity depth we have on our team combined with the inability to see Related Account info means we can't qualify or report on any franchise Account model.

              Grégoire_Miche2
              Grégoire_Miche2
              Level 10
              July 5, 2018

              Hi Wyatt,

              ET standing for ?

              -Greg

              K
              kh-lschutte
              February 6, 2020
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