Customer Journey - Querying separate sObjects within journey

Question

Morning all,

I've got an interesting use case for Journey Builder and I need to know if something, well, 2 things, are actually possible.

We have three primary objects (Customer, House, and Insurance), and one junction object (Lease which joins Customer and House). customers will enter the journey when a trigger occurs on Lease which is based off data in House, i.e. Original insurance for House is ending in 30 days).

First query - can we trigger the entry into the journey based purely off the known dates information in Sales Cloud without a workflow field update?

Second query - One of the decision splits at the start of the journey is 'has the customer purchased Insurance?' so we need to query the Insurance object using references from Customer and House. Is this feasible?

Feel free to direct me to the right place if there's somewhere more suitable to ask the question. And thanks in advance

Answer 1

Journey Builder does support injecting contacts based on a Date Field - http://help.marketingcloud.com/en/documentation/journey_builder/entry_sources/entry_events/create_a_date_based_event/.

I Assume you are leaning towards Salesforce Data Event and hence you mentioned a workflow field update. Salesforce Data Events will inject records into journey when a record is created / edited / both, hence you need a workflow. Its not a scalable solution because, salesforce entry event cant handle more than 50 records at a time. if you are using a time based workflow update and more than 50 records gets updated at a time, entry source will have issues.

Best way is to import a report into marketing cloud with relevant details (create a custom report type with all relevant fields from all 3 objects, Lease Expiry in 30 days (create a custom checkbox formula field) ), then use it as your entry DE. Use Automation Studio to automate the import and trigger journey.

For any reason, if you cant use formula field and control the records within the report, export everything from these objects via import or SDE(Synchronized Data Extension), write query and inject them into journey.

FOr Second Query, if you use a report, you can create a custom report type to include all the relevant fields from objects. If you use SDE / Import objects, you can create a query and join a custom de for journey purpose.

if you still want to use Salesforce Data Entry Event, you can choose related record fields within Salesforce Data Entry Events, it's under Additional Attributes section while creating the Salesforce Data Entry Event.