Sequential Numbering in Smart Campaign (Person Reassignment)

[Erek_Bond]

I'm looking to assign a sequential number to records that pass through a smart campaign. The use case is that we want SFDC contact records that meet certain criteria to be reassigned to our sales development team. To distribute these evenly throughout the team, we would use this number. Is there a way to do this, or a better way to do this that I am not thinking of? Any help is appreciated. I can provide more details if needed, but I want to keep this higher level initially in order to encourage ideas I might not have considered.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Only way to do this in Marketo is to call a webhook to store and retrieve the counter.  (It's possible to do this without an external webhook service proper, by writing to and reading from what I call a Resource Lead, but it's still calling a webhook, not something that has a UI shortcut.)

It also sounds like you need more than just a number to "distribute them evenly," like a round-robin distribution. This too can only be done via a webhook that applies that logic.

Or, as I think Josh​ would suggest, do it on the SFDC side if you've got a dev on hand.

[Erek_Bond]

Yep, I'm familiar with the round-robin distribution. Our lead assignment rules in SFDC work on that concept. I think I figured out how to do that through a webhook, and was just needing to figure out the starting point of assigning the number that everything is based on. In SFDC there is a field that has an Auto Number data type, don't have anything like that in Marketo.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Why do you need an auto-incrementing number if you're passing everything to an external service? It's that service (the callee) that maintains the counter, not the caller.

In other words, if I pass Lead IDs AAA, BBB, CCC, then BBB again, then DDD, I can assign the leads appropriately to owners Xavier, Yorgo, and Zayn (Xavier = AAA and DDD, Yorgo = BBB, Zayn = CCC) without ever having to store a number field on the lead.

[Erek_Bond]

I had read up a little on formula fields and being able to work with Excel formulas. If we had an auto-incrementing number, we would divide that by the number of people we are wanting in the round-robin, and take the remainder to use in assigning the leads.

Do you have any suggestions on external services?

[Grace_Brebner3]

Hey Erek,

Additional to Sanfords comment on ​how you can do this, I'd ask whether there's a particular reason ​why​ you want to do it in Marketo and not in SFDC?

Good reference thread on a similar topic: Lead Assignment through Marketo - Best Practices and Process

[Erek_Bond]

The simple answer is that getting anything done in SFDC is very difficult in our organization, and once it is done my team has little-to-no control over it. This is more of a specialized or limited assignment program dealing specifically with SFDC contacts, and as far as I know there are no contact assignment rules in SFDC. Do you have any suggestions how this could be accomplished in SFDC? I'd definitely consider that route at this point.

[SanfordWhiteman]

What did you mean by "I think I figured out how to do that through a webhook"? I don't quite understand where you're starting from. In any case, there's no auto-incrementing field in Marketo (other than the Lead ID, which is technically auto-incrementing, it just doesn't seed from 0).

[Erek_Bond]

I was referring to the bottom of the original post in this thread: Using Formulas in Marketo

I was a bit hasty as I guess formula fields cannot be used in smart campaigns? That seems a bit ridiculous, but I guess I'm back to square one now.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Marketo Formula fields have limited use but can't do the autoincrement part anyway.

Fields populated via webhook are stamped permanently on the lead and can be used anywhere thereafter. Of course if your webhook service doesn't maintain a record of the last distributed counter index, you can't use it to increment a field across different leads.