Custom Objects - marketo

[Anonymous]

Has anyone- successfuly used Custom Object in marketo. If so can you share best practice and how you have mapped Custom Objects to SFDC if you have a 1:many relationship in your email being uniqu identifier ?

[Anonymous]

There are a number of facotrs, I'd like to hear about your current set up and what you want to achieve so that the community can offer more specific advice/answers.

[Alicia_Bell]

I'd be very interested in this answer. We are wanting to do the same thing. In our case, we are creating a custom object in Salesforce to house customer survey data (with a many to one contact relationship), and we want to be able to update this data based on survey forms (2.0) that live in Marketo.

[Jep_Castelein2]

@Alicia: Custom Objects are read-only in Marketo. You'll have to update them in SFDC. If you capture form information in regular form fields, sync those fields to SFDC, then copy them into the Custom Object using a custom trigger. 

[Alicia_Bell]

Hi Jep,

Thanks! So we would actually have two versions of the field - one on the contact record that Marketo syncs to, then one on the custom object in Salesforce and the custom trigger would be a Salesforce trigger?

[Jep_Castelein2]

yes, however, the fields on the Lead/Contact will be overwritten with every new form submission. Therefore those will always only have the most recent information. The custom object will have the full history. 

[Alicia_Bell]

Thank you!

[Anonymous]

This conversation has been very helpful, as we are a new Marketo user and are running into the same issue. As another question pertaining to this topic, can we filter smart lists using fields within a custom object?

For example our custom object has product information and it keeps the history of everytime someone filled out a form to show interest in a specific product line. Each entry within that custom object contains fields like status of the product (active or inactive), and segment and subsegment information for each kind of product line.

[Jep_Castelein2]

@ Alexandria: yes, that's a very common use case.