Why does Marketo only have Leads?

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 

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.

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