Inconsistent Filtering of SFDC Custom Objects

[Anonymous]

Our SFDC has a custom object for License - it references a table for 10 professional licenses in 50 states that our clients could possibly have. I've synced the License object over, and I'm able to get some leads to populate my lists; but not as many as are appearing in SFDC. For instance, I get 2,000 "Nebraska Superheroes" from the smart list, but there are 7,000 SFDC records with that license. Some are duplicates, but they're showing up in both locations anyway.

New leads getting captured are going to new fields that specify license and profession. Marketo Support's solution is to map every existing client over to those new fields; which we are doing until we find a better solution. 1 person can have multiple licenses, which is why the custom object is important and can't be replaced easily with fields.

Thanks for your help,
Bryce

[Anonymous]

Bryce,

This topic has alot of depth.  Am I understanding you if I assume your custom object is stand alone, like account or lead.  And this object has inside of it data feilds for multiple licenses?  So in a data structure, a contact or lead object can also contain a licence object?

If so, then you are correct.  Without custom work and a workaround data strategy, Marketo has just the one unique object.  A Lead.  You would need to create custom feilds for each licence for Lead objects to contain each individual licence possibility.  And sync them with API calls pointing to the correct Marketo feild.  Sync to salesforce seems more tricky, but if the feild is mapped then it should work.  Example: mktLead.licence1 ->sync to -> SFDC.leadObj.licenceObj.lincece1 (this is very loose guess).

Understandably frustrating.  There might be something custom that could be put together, but I can not guarantee this, and would not be able to ensure the data structure would work as intended.  Otherwise individual custom feilds will work, but not as dynamic as you would hope.

Maybe in the future, this could be a suggestion idea for us to work on 🙂

Hope this helps,
James

[Anonymous]

Bryce's colleague here... Let me try to clarify and make sure I'm understanding you correctly, James.

The custom Licenses object contains lookups to the Contact and Lead objects. It also contains lookups to two separate State and Profession custom objects. 

The information that we need to capture on our smart lists comes from the data on the State and Profession tables. Since these tables are not directly linked to the Lead or Contact objects, we have to go through the Licenses object. We were told to do this using the "has licenses" feature. Like Bryce stated, this returns some records, but there is a discrepancy between what Marketo returns versus what is shown in SFDC as matching our filter criteria.

Are you saying that we would have to create multiple lookup fields on the Lead and Contact objects to the Licenses table and map the fields to each license an individual person may have? With over 3.5 million Licenses records, that simply isn't feasible.