Should I use Opportunity Object or Custom Object?

[Anonymous]

Hi there. I have a B2C client in the professional sports industry and have the opportunity to import individual ticket purchase transactions (via API) into Marketo. Since it's not a typical B2B sales pipeline scenario, I've considered using a custom object to store all the transactions of each member on our database. However I'm not clear whether that would exclude us from using the Marketo Revenue Cycle analysis tools. Does revenue data, by definition, need to come from the Opportunities object?  If so, should I be looking to import these transactions into the Opportunity Object instead.  Trouble is, that I would need to introduce custom fields to include the metadata of the various sports events on offer. Is it possible to do that without using SFDC?  Any assistance on this would be very welcome.

[Casey_Grimes]

Hi Paul,

This is one of those situations where you can technically set up a model that would use the custom object, but you're going to lose a lot of the built-in functionality around Revenue Cycle Explorer and Salesforce's Campaign Influenced Opportunities and would need to write additional workarounds to get that same level of dissected reporting.

It's probably not what you want to hear because it's a lot of initial setup, but I've dealt with something almost identical to this before and simply had tickets generate as custom objects once an opportunity was closed won (because this also allows you to measure things like bulk ticket purchases distributed to multiple contacts/person accounts you have in the system, calculate season tickets down to per-event ticket instances, etc.) This way, you get the best of both worlds--you can track tickets themselves apart from the actual financial transaction but still use Marketo and SFDC's tools for revenue.

[Anonymous]

Paul,

You are definitely asking the right questions. You can store transactions in Custom object but they are not available for Revenue cycle Analytics. If you want RCA you need opportunity and Opportunity Person Role. 

- Mahesh

PS - I am in the same boat.