Creating smart lists based on SFDC custom objects

[Anonymous]

We are using SFDC with Marketo. We are using Person Accounts in Salesforce. We sell products for high school students. When a parent purchases the product/course, we create an enrollment object (custom SFDC object) associated with the parent's person account and it gets synced to Marketo. We also create a separate Person Account for the student (child) who will actually be using the product/course which is also synced to Marketo. The student's Person Account does not have the enrollment object associated with it. However, within the enrollment object associated with the Parent, there is an ID field which links to the student.

I can easily pull the list of parent's email address with a smart list with "has Enrollment" and the appropriate constraint filters.

However, we also want to send an email to the students. How can I get the list of students within Marketo?

I read that you could create a custom object that defines the relationship between the parent and student. However, its still not clear to me how that would work within Marketo.

I can't seem to find a way to say give me all the students who are child of the parents who have purchased a course.

Is there solution/work around for this?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Not possible. To send to a person, their Email needs to be directly referenced on the selected Person object.

That is to say, the Person in the Smart List results is the Person that receives the email, even if other relationships exist.

[Veronica_Holme4]

The lookup relationship between the enrolment and the student is the wrong way around. As Sanford says, the Person comes first. If on the Person account you have a type field (parent or student) you could find the students. The student would then need to have an associated enrolment, like you have for the parent.

Considering that you need to launch campaigns to both parents and students, the way I think I would have built it if I'd been your Salesforce architect is to have two people (Contacts), who both belong to a Household (Account) and have a Relationship role with each other (Parent and Child), and the student has an Enrolment. That way you could have sent to all parents with children who have an Enrolment, and also to all Students who have an Enrolment. I think the way the object structure is defined here works against you for Marketo list building. I can't really think of how you could make that work unless you now also associate the Student Person Account with the Enrolment.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Veronica. This is very helpful. Yes we do have a type field to distinguish the parent and student. The problem is the student doesn't have the enrollment.

I am not an SFDC expert but your idea of creating two contacts that belong to the same account and having a relationship role between them is interesting. If we were able to do that Salesforce, how would that work within Marketo? Since we have two contacts, would that create two Person records within Marketo? If so I can see how we can get the students since they have the enrollment. How would the query within Marketo work to get the parent list?

[Veronica_Holme4]

Yes that would create two person records in Marketo, one with type = parent and one with type= student. In Marketo you could use this value to select which "type" of Contact you wanted to send to. if you made the parent the primary contact on the account, you could select all accounts with a student who has an enrolment, and then send the email to the primary contact? That's just one way I can think of. I would seriously consider getting a Salesforce consultant behind this problem to help you to architect the object structure appropriately.

[Anonymous]

Thanks! Very helpful. Going to work with our SF admin to try that out.