Custom Objects - Supporting many-to-one or many-to-many relationships.

[Anonymous]

I created a custom object called dealers, I linked the lead record(s) to my custom dealer object by a link field called dealercode, in which both objects share the same name as required.  I imported my 100 dealers by the REST API into my new custom dealers object.  To my surprise, only 100 leads could see dealer information.  It seems, you cannot share the same dealer object or record with other lead records.  Marketo seems to pick only the last lead with the same dealercode when creating object records.  The other lead records that have the same dealercode are ignored.  Looks like each lead record has to have its own dealer object or record. 

Unless I'm doing something wrong, Marketo only support an one-to-one relationship.  So why is this a big deal?  Lets say I have 100 dealers and 50,000 leads, I would have to create 50,000 new dealer records, instead of 100.  If I update the dealer information, I have to update 50,000 records instead of 100.  If I update 1 dealer, I have to go find all the records for the same dealercode and update those records - could be thousands.

My questions: 

1. Does Marketo support one-to-many or many-to-many relationships? In other words, can several leads share the same dealer information in my case?
2. If not, is there a plan to do so? and if so, timetime?

This is a common database scenario, I'm hoping I doing something wrong in my setup and Marketo isn't this limited or custom object support isn't done.

Thanks for any help or feedback.

[Josh_Hill13]

Did you check developers.marketo.com for details? I believe it does handle 1-many.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi JT,

Custom objects are detail objects, in a master-detail relationship, where the lead or the company is the master. There is no cross table that could enable you to have a many-many relationship.

There is not the same flexibility as in salesforce for instance.

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi again JT,

It's a 1-to-many relationship, so when you import dealers, each of them can be linked to 1 and only 1 lead, while every lead could have multiple dealers.

So indeed, if many leads have the same dealer and you want to update that dealer, you will have to update it many times.

The good news is that the the custom object rest API provides you with MarketoGUID for each dealer you have inserted and you can use this for further update. You will have to keep somewhere externally to Marketo the list of dealer rows that need to be updated.

Now if you use a CRM (salesforce), you could have a more complex model using Salesforce custom objects.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

So what you're saying is there isn't a good way to do it in Marketo? We would need another tool or Salesforce?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

HI Kelly,

Unfortunately, yes, at least at this stage of the feature.

The interest to do it in salesforce is that mapping between the 2 will be quite easy.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Are you already using the account/company object in Marketo? If you don't have a native CRM integration, you can use that object for the N:1 case (leads:accounts) like you are describing. That does kind of assume that it's just one dealer per lead, which isn't totally clear from your post and may not be the case.

The good news is that to my knowledge we do have plans to support this type of use case in the near future. You may want to talk to your CAM about getting into a beta program for this functionality if you need this before its formal release.

[Kenny_Elkington]

N:N support for custom objects is planned but is not available at this time.

[Anonymous]

Do you have a time table for the N:N?  Are we talking a few months or year or more?  Is there a beta available?

Thanks

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

This is moving into beta soon. If you're interested in joining, you should talk to your consultant or CAM.