Work-Around to Trigger Smart Campaign from SFDC Formula Field?

[Anonymous]

Hey all, 

Looking for some creative solutions to a problem I'm facing right now. 

Currently I have a field called "Latency Tripwire" in SFDC -- it's a text formula field that evaluates whether the days since a customer's last purchase have exceeded that customer's average number of days between purchases. 

When this condition is true, the tripwire will go from NULL to a text value. 

What I was trying to do is have Marketo detect this data value change and activate a task for a sales rep to follow up with the customer to prevent a possible defection. 

The problem is, SFDC formula fields do not trigger a change in systemmodstamp (http://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000KzYqCAK), so Marketo does not know the field has changed to synch it and then trigger the smart campaign. 

Even worse, the fields that Latency Tripwire is calculating off of are themselves formula fields (Avg. days between purchase and Days since last purchase) so they don't trigger anything either. 

I need some kind of positive change that will update systemmodstamp to reliably trigger the smart campaign, but I am stumped. Thoughts? 

I've also thought of using Workflow rules in SFDC to trigger the task creation but not sure if those can be triggered by a formula change either? 

Any help appreciated!

Justin

[Anonymous]

In principle Marketo will notice the change in the formula field when a regular field is updated.

Defining an Apex class or, if top-level standard objects that support triggers, would update a regular field when the formula field changes. That would refresh systemmodstamp.

I have not tested that yet. I hope it helps to get closer to a solution. 

[Anonymous]

Justin,

It will tough to do this via workflow because Salesforce.com doesn't trigger workflow based on formula either:
https://success.salesforce.com/ideaView?id=08730000000BrIGAA0

You might be able to do something creative via Time Based Workflow (something like fire after [avg repurchase # days] and check whether the customer has repurchased or not). This way you're not listening everyday, and instead only check after the [avg # repurchase days].

Make sense?

Otherwise, I can't think of a way to do this outside of apex trigger.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the comments guys. 

Can anyone suggest any good resources on how to build Apex triggers for a first-timer? I haven't delved there before...