Recording Lead Sales in Marketo Engage Using Custom Objects

[ZvoidZ]

Hello Marketing Nation!

I'm considering recording lead sales in Marketo Engage's database using Custom Objects. Specifically, the client need to create segmentations based on the categories of products that were purchased, whether the client has credit to make new purchases, and/or whether they have made any orders within the last 120 days - all of it combined sometimes.

We created the CO within our sandbox instance, sent some purchases records through the API and tried those filters for the Smart lists, and it seemed to work...however, I'm concerned about the potential performance issues that might arise if our current client has a large number of sales records.

Has anyone else encountered this issue before? If so, how did you manage it?

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on whether recording lead sales in this way is a good practice, and whether the benefits outweigh any potential performance issues. Thanks in advance for any insights you can share!

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

Well, from a tech standpoint, you can't directly reference the CO filter in a segment's SL like you can in a regular smart list asset; you'd need to create a campaign setup that updates a field for the people that have the CO record, and then reference this field in your segmentation SL. Since you have multiple product types, you'd probably need a separate boolean field to indicate whether there's a sales recorded for each product type or not in the past 120 days. This makes me think that if that's only what you need, can you not just have these fields updated from the SFDC end instead of creating CO records altogether? If you still want to have greater visibility of data associated with the sales in a CO, instead of creating records in a Marketo CO, why don't you add them to a Salesforce CO, sync it to Marketo, and reference it? You'd save your API calls at the least and IMO, this would be better performance-wise too.