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A
Anonymous
January 13, 2016
New

Better Support for Salesforce Lookup Fields

  • January 13, 2016
  • 3 replies
  • 5072 views

We have several Salesforce user lookup fields on the Account record (account manager, service specialist, project manager, etc).  Marketo only displays the SalesforceID for these records, not the display name or email address.

Not helpful:

I would like to see Marketo provide better support for these lookup fields so we can use the name & email as tokens in campaigns.  Other discussion threads talk about using Salesforce formula fields, which is an option but we have hit system limits in SFDC.  I also saw a recommendation to use triggers in Marketo, which seems unnecessarily complicated.

    3 replies

    Casey_Grimes2
    Casey_Grimes2
    Level 10
    October 20, 2016

    Since I realize having better lookup support is a bit of a tall task, I'd like to at least recommend a way to do a labeling of values as a stopgap—allow admins to put labels on lookup fields that make them human-readable for end-users (so in this case, assigning 005i0000002nV1aAAE to show up as Random Person.) Think Marketo formulas but for field values.

    A
    Anonymous
    February 24, 2017

    Thanks for the suggestion Brian and Courtney.  Can I summarize and say that you would primarily need these lookup field values when crafting emails?

    -Derek

    Casey_Grimes2
    Casey_Grimes2
    Level 10
    February 27, 2017

    Hi Derek,

    Actually, I'm much more concerned with doing this from a Smart List point of view--if you're using emails, there's at least scripting as a workaround. Salesforce IDs on smart list queries winds up tripping up a lot of my clients. For example, one thought they could put the label for their Record Type in that field and then subsequently broke half of their records! Likewise with many custom objects; if it's just a list of IDs, clients often just won't know what to do.

    That's why I'm saying at least give us the ability to map those values to something locally in Marketo that can be readable.

    A
    Anonymous
    November 11, 2017

    We also have the need to reference fields on a lookup object but there is not a predetermined relationship between the SalesforceID and the other field values like there is between a person's SFDCId and his name and email. We generate trial license keys for leads and contacts and would like to have a pointer/lookup to the SalesforceID of the license key (a custom SFDC object). We'd like to create a smart campaign that sends an email notification to the lead when the trial license is about to expire (the expiration date is on the custom license key object). It sounds like the workarounds of using a formula or trigger are only viable if there's a set mapping between the SaleforceID and the related field in question. But in our case, where we're constantly generating new trial licenses (new SalesforceID's and expiration dates), the formula and trigger workarounds are not viable unless we want to update that mapping info every time a trial license is generated. Am I understanding the previous postings correctly and does anyone have a workaround to accomplish what we're looking to do where there is not a predetermined mapping between the SalesforceID and other fields on the lookup object?

    SanfordWhiteman
    SanfordWhiteman
    Level 10
    November 11, 2017

    I'm not sure if your case is exactly the same as the one that start the thread... your term "not a predetermined relationship" isn't clear to me yet.

    Do you have a Custom Object License Key to which Leads/Contacts are added? If not, I guess I have to say why not? (Since that's the way we'd usually set something up.) 

    Are you saying you have a totally standalone License Key with no formal relationship to people in your org, merely a String field that happens to contain (if not manually changed) the SFDC ID of a lead/contact?

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    Anonymous
    November 12, 2017

    Yes, we do have a custom object, License Key, to which Leads/Contacts are added. We have lookup fields on the custom object to the lead or contact. On the License Key custom object there are two fields, license expiration date and license key. We'd like to setup a smart campaign that filters based on the license expiration date (e.g. 1 week before expiration) and include the license key (as a token) in an email note to the lead or contact notifying them of the impending expiration. Currently, we have replicated the license expiration date and license key on the lead and contact objects because it was not clear if we could reference these fields on the related custom object.

    K
    kh-lschutte
    February 6, 2020
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