Marketo Architecture Question - Please Help

[Virginia_Smith]

Hello,

Today I decided I was going to start studying to pursue a Marketo Expert Certification. I have been using Marketo for about 3 years and I am pretty comfortable in the tool from an operations perspective.

However, in my current position at work, there have been a few times that I wish I had more technical skills with the solution. 

For example, I have no idea how to create a custom field and map it to Salesforce. Can someone please help me understand where I can find an overview of some of the more technical aspects of Marketo? I know there is an Architecture certification out there but are there resources available to study for it? I do not necessarily want to achieve this certification but I do want to educate myself on some of the more technical aspects of Marketo.

Thanks in advance!

Virginia

[Jay_Jiang]

the "Marketo certified solution architect" is only available to Marketo employees and agency partners focused on implementations.

The example you gave, is simply accomplished by creating the custom field in Salesforce where it will automagically sync to Marketo and create a custom field in Marketo.

The real way to learn anything Marketo is by being hands-on. Create a controlled environment so you don't have to worry about making mistakes and go and explore. Of course, having access to your CRM is a pre-requisite...

By the way, how you defined "technical" is opening another discussion, with how connected the Marketo platform can be, there is a lot of technical possibilities to explore.

[Virginia_Smith]

Thanks for the quick and helpful response, Jay!

[Jay_Jiang]

If you want to become more knowledgeable at Marketo, there are 3 broad areas (in my opinion) you can improve, but I don't know of anyone who's excelled at all 3.

1. Core - skills and experience in pioneering best practices related to building automation using programs, smart campaigns, assets and, other core functions of Marketo

2. Governance - skills and experience in pioneering best practices related to building frameworks around governance (naming conventions), user/role administration (related to risk), workspaces/partitions etc... all aimed at optimising effectiveness of large (usually global) teams using Marketo

3. Technical - skills and experience in pioneering best practices related to utilising Marketo APIs or connecting Marketo to various web technologies to increase the potential of the platform

Everyone starts off at improving their core set of skills. People who further improve their skills then tend to focus on either governance or technical.