Survey Integration

Hank_Hansen
Level 5

Survey Integration

We have periodic client surveys and we'd like to store survey responses within each client's Marketo record. Has anyone figured out a way to do this without an expensive integration? The integration Survey Monkey recently added will not be an option for us.

6 REPLIES 6
Stijn_Heijthuij
Level 7

Re: Survey Integration

Hi Hank,

Marketo recently deployed the ability to create custom objects. This would, by far, be your best bet to get data from surveys (multiple surveys per lead possible) into the Marketo system.

Any other way just won't scale since Marketo's lead table is built for a 1-to-1 relationship. (1 first name, 1 last name, 1 job title, etc.)

Hank_Hansen
Level 5

Re: Survey Integration

Thanks Stijn. That makes sense. I still need a survey solution that fills this need without requiring custom development - and that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

Stijn_Heijthuij
Level 7

Re: Survey Integration

If you're using Salesforce; did you take a look at the possibilities of storing survey results in Salesforce and then sync'ing that over to MKTO?

Usually integrations with SFDC are a lot cheaper than with MKTO. Also, the API for SFDC is a lot more powerful than MKTO's own API.

Hank_Hansen
Level 5

Re: Survey Integration

We're using SugarCRM and their Marketo connector which does not support Marketo custom objects.

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

Re: Survey Integration

Hank, like Stijn noted, any survey tool that can maintain, or even simulate, a many:1 survey:lead relationship is going to require some level of development or at least what we might call "power admin."  Even a tool that's been purpose-built to use a Salesforce custom object is likely going to assume you can create custom objects and get the possible technical consequences.

For a very quick-and-dirty simulation of many:1 without custom objects, you can store the lead's responses to multiple surveys in one big textarea using a standard format such as JSON, making each completed survey a sub-object within the field (literally a JS object). Using a webhook, you could intelligently append to that field. We sometimes do stuff like that to avoid the complexity of dealing with APIs.  But it is custom development by definition.  Or you could create a new textarea for each survey, which might even eliminate the dev effort completely -- but you'd still need to find a survey provider who understands that you want responses packaged as one JSON block.

Hank_Hansen
Level 5

Re: Survey Integration

Thanks Sanford - that is really helpful info to have. We might have to tackle this with our next engineering phase.