Integrate Custom Objects in Marketo

[Valerie_Armstro]

Have you seen or implemented a way to utilize data from Salesforce Custom Objects in Marketo? Currently, I am blocked on four major projects for my company because Marketo does not have similar triggers, filters and tokens available for SFDC Custom Object data as it does for the Lead/Opportunity/Account.

So far, it seems the option we have is to pay for services to create and update scripts and APIs.  This is not ideal because it isn't scalable for future projects as the costs would continue to pile up as new projects come along or changes need to be made, as I'm unable to maintain this myself (I have no coding or API experience).

What solutions have you gone with to get SFDC Custom Object data into Marketo?  Is scripting and APIs the best solution for this? What else have you seen implemented to meet the goals of a project that utilizes data from SFDC Custom Objects?

[Stijn_Heijthuij]

Hi Valerie,

I'm not sure how to get data into a Custom Object. With the upcoming release there will be more support for CDO's, but I'm still fuzzy on how to fill them.

Same thing goes for segmenting or decisions based on values in a Custom Object.

What I can help you with is how to get data from the Custom Object into your emails, landingpages and lead database. To do this you create an email scripting token and access what you're looking for through Velocity scripting.

A general user manual on Velocity can be found here: https://velocity.apache.org/engine/releases/velocity-1.5/user-guide.html

I'm not sure how helpful this was, but if you have more specific questions or a use case I'll check back to see if I can help you out.

[Anonymous]

What are you trying to do exactly?

[Valerie_Armstro]

Stijn Heijthuijsen​, Kristen Carmean​ - we have a custom object called Onboarding that is associated with a Contact record (note: one contact can have many onboarding records associated with them).

I want to create a process that will email the Contacts associated with an Onboarding object when the Onboarding object they are associated with is updated. I will need to be able to trigger the email sends to those contacts when certain data value changes happen to fields on the Onboarding object. Additionally, I will need to include fields from the Onboarding object as tokens in the emails.

[Kenny_Elkington · Accepted solution]

Hi Valerie,

The solution I've leveraged before is to create a datetime field on your lead/contact records, Custom Object Updated At, and then create a workflow for when a custom object record gets updated, it writes the current time to your custom object updated at field.  You can then set up a trigger for this in Marketo, Data Value Changes: Custom Object Updated At to fire campaign whenever a new value synchs down for this.  If you need it, you can add a Has Custom Object Filter to set any additional conditions that you need from that record.

[John_M]

I have a few customers who are writing velocity scripts themselves, it depends what you're after.  Which triggers are available in SFDC that you don't have in Marketo?

[Valerie_Armstro]

John Mattos​ - We do not have someone internally who can write the velocity scripts.  For the Onboarding object, I have the following triggers/filters:

Triggers: Added to Onboarding

Filters: Has Onboarding, Was Added to Onboarding, Not Was Added to Onboarding.

For this project, I need to have a trigger similar to Data Value Changes (only for a data value that changes on a SFDC custom object, not on the lead/opportunity/account) or one similar to the Opportunity Is Updated where you can pick the trigger attribute field and specify the old and new values.

[John_M]

Yep, you're right. That one is *currently* not available. The alternative is to use a scheduled campaign and check time ranges. "has an Onboarding in the past 6 hours", etc. Imperfect, but not horrible. There has at times been talk of the change trigger, I'll check on the status of that.

[Valerie_Armstro]

John Mattos​ - the problem we run into with using the Has Onboarding is that they could be associated with multiple Onboardings and we will run into issues on when and what qualifies them for that campaign. Also - having to pay for email scripting services each time we want to change email content isn't very scalable for the company, as we will likely have even more projects.

If you could get me a status update on when we can expect that feature to be on Marketo's roadmap, that would be great. I would hope that it would be soon as I don't believe we are the only company asking Marketo for better integration with custom objects. There are whispers here about finding alternatives if we are unable to do this in Marketo without incurring additional costs.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Valerie, if you have an Apex developer a lot of times this can be done via a rollup field on the Contact object.  Details stay on the custom/child object, but the master/parent maintains knowledge of changes to children.