Marketo Custom Field Limitation

[DH]

Is there a limit to the amount of Custom Fields that can be created in Marketo? If not, are there best practices around limiting the amount of fields created?

We're looking to import the questions and answers of all of our future surveys into Marketo/Salesforce. There are two goals: to have access to the data in Marketo to build campaigns and manage specific communications based on answers, and to store all surveys' historical data on the contact record in Salesforce. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

There’s theoretically no maximum number of Person fields. There are parts of the UI (i.e. field browsing trees/dropdowns) that get very sluggish with thousands of fields. And the more fields you sync with SFDC, the more data needs to flow between the systems and the longer it takes to complete a sync.

But let’s take a step back and reconsider your design. You’re talking about creating, let’s say, 20 individual fields for every survey? So once 10 surveys have been published, you have 200 fields? This sounds impossible to manage and digest, never mind if the systems can technically support the volume.

This seems like something we’d almost always use Custom Objects for, not Person fields. Since you need the CO to be a Salesforce (not Marketo) CO, you can embed the data in a Create Task flow step. Then your SFDC Admin can set up an automation to turn that task into a Survey CO.