Better Support for Salesforce Lookup Fields

[Anonymous]

We have several Salesforce user lookup fields on the Account record (account manager, service specialist, project manager, etc).  Marketo only displays the SalesforceID for these records, not the display name or email address.

Not helpful:

I would like to see Marketo provide better support for these lookup fields so we can use the name & email as tokens in campaigns.  Other discussion threads talk about using Salesforce formula fields, which is an option but we have hit system limits in SFDC.  I also saw a recommendation to use triggers in Marketo, which seems unnecessarily complicated.

[SanfordWhiteman]

And our trial licenses always do expire after a set number of days. Currently, when the license is issued, I add them to a campaign that sends the email based on a formula field that calculates 7 days before the expiration.

Right, but when I say always a distinct number of days from its expiration I mean that based on the day the person was (re)added to the object you know exactly how many days from then it will expire, without looking at the object properties themselves. Or maybe there's a simple object property that determines whether it's a 30-day, 60-day, or 120-day license, but not an arbitrary days-from-today. So if Added to License Key triggers, you can always put someone in a Wait Step for 23 days, 53 days, or 113 days without any further computation. Is that the case?

[Anonymous]

We could put them in a wait step for a set number of days but in case we changed the license timeframe (which we did once), I decided to calculate the 7 days before expiration so that we wouldn't have to worry about keeping the campaign in sync.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Well, that decision makes the difference between having to flatten the field onto the Lead/Contact and leaving it only on the Custom Object.

[Anonymous]

I see. So, if I did put the leads in a wait step for a set number of days, how would I pull the related record with the latest expiration?