Syncing SFDC Cases to Marketo - Any best practices or watch-outs?

[Chris_Saporito]

Hello Marketo Friends!

We have been asked to start sending client satisfaction surveys via Marketo.  Most of our surveys are triggered from Salesforce Cases, which we don’t sync with Marketo today. Other surveys are triggered from an AppExchange app called Cloud Coach. Does anyone sync Salesforce Cases with Marketo? Any best practices or watch-outs? For example, I’m curious if this will slow down our SFDC to Marketo sync process, since we create 3,000 cases every day.

Brian Vass​

[Grégoire_Miche2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Chris,

1. You will have to sync them as custom objects
2. by default in SFDC, cases are linked to contacts and accounts. If order to be able to really trigger things accurately in Marketo, you will have to choose the case-contact link for your custom object
3. Due to the way Marketo data model is built, cases will be linked to contacts with a 1-n relartionship (1 contact may have multiple cases). You will need some velocity tokens to be able to add case data to your emails. Not very convenient, all the more so as a single contact may have multiple cases with the same status at any point in time, and more than 10 cases over time (and there are some limitations with Velocity when there are more than 10 linked records).
4. Yes, adding 3000 records a day, 1000000 records a year, will slow down your instance. Not just the sync, but also some queries, such as "all contact with a case on XYZ topic in the past 3 months" will take a while when Marketo will have to scan the whole DB. And the initial sync may take a little while, plan it for a weekend
5. But, I AFAIK, there are some limitations in your licence on the number of custom object instances you are entitled to store in Marketo. These limitations are usually in the range of a few millions, but you check it.

All in all, I would rather use Qualtrics to issue, send and monitor satisfactions surveys on SFDC cases. It does a very good job together with SFDC, and also provides a Marketo connector for other use cases.

-Greg

[SanfordWhiteman]

1. and there are some limitations with Velocity when there more than 10 linked records

+1, this part is really the dealkiller IMO. You have to put a cap on the number of Cases for all time for this to work, and while the same is true of all custom objects, the nature of cases (in most, er, cases) is different from say, the number of Oppys you might reasonably expect to add for a lead. Unless, of course, you only ever populate email content using the currently adding object (the trigger object).

[Grégoire_Miche2]

+1

We are small business company, we manages cases in SFDC. Some of our contacts have logged more than 50 cases

-Greg

[Chris_Saporito]

Thank you both for the responses, I appreciate it!

We currently use Clicktools to collect survey responses. As of now we are sending automated satisfaction surveys within SFDC but would love to add versatility from sending within Marketo. It sounds like this is going be a much bigger project than anticipated.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi again Chris,

Second thought:

• You also should not use Marketo forms to collect survey data (sorry for stating the obvious)
• So anyway, you will need a survey tool.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Gregoire,

I've arrived at this thread due to the same question raised by Chris.

I am really new to Marketo and would like to ask about your statement above regarding Marketo forms: why aren't they suitable to be used for NPS? I read through Marketo documentation and thought that was the tool to be used for that.

Thank you very much for the extra clarification,

Best regards,

Eliana

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Eliana,

Please open a new thread with your question. It will maximize the possibilities to get multiple, helpful answers.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Thank you for the suggestion, Gregoire.

Will open a new thread to discuss this.

Best regards,

Eliana