Salesforce CRM: API Limits and Usage FAQ

This article outlines some common questions & answers regarding how 6sense interacts with APIs supported by Salesforce CRM.

6sense and Salesforce API Versions

Salesforce has announced that Salesforce API versions 21.0 through 30.0 will be deprecated in the summer of 2022. Does this impact my integration of 6sense?

6sense has reviewed its use of the Salesforce API and does not believe that the retirement of these Salesforce API versions will impact 6sense products or integrations.

API Limits and Usage FAQ

Which exact API calls are made for SFDC?

These details cover which API calls are made for SFDC:

SOAP:
- Logging In.
- Getting Field List for Mapping Profiles (an API call is used every time this page is opened).
- Getting Field List for segment Filters using CRM data (an API call is used every time the CRM filters are created/edited).

REST (note: BULK is a type of REST):
- Import (v1 BULK).
- Exports (v2 BULK).
- Syncing CRM List / Report for Segments.

What type of API is used with your SFDC integration?

6sense uses different APIs depending on the type of activity being performed:

SOAP API is used for authentication/login/verification.
BATCH API is employed for ingestion and score export Orchestration.
REST API is used for data synchronization from SFDC.

How does 6sense ensure security and compliance standards are maintained during Salesforce integration?

API requests within the 6sense platform are authenticated and authorized using tokens/keys/sessions based on the RBAC model. For our Pardot and Salesforce integrations, OAuth2.0 authentication is supported and strongly encouraged for all customers. Additionally, basic authentication (username + password) is supported, with all credentials encrypted for storage. Data access is performed through Salesforce and Pardot APIs, which are HTTPS-secured and implement TLS 1.2 encryption.

How can we estimate API Limit needs?

This is very hard to estimate due to the nature of the Batch API process, but based on experience across customers, 5000 is a very good starting point for historical data syncs.

Here are some factors impacting API needs:

How often segments are being created.
How many segments use direct SFDC linkages like CRM Lists and Reports.
How many rows are modified/created daily across objects.
How many fields there are per object.
How many records are enriched/exported and how many objects are written to.

The way the BULK API works is the following:

6sense makes a request for new/updated records for a particular object over a time period.
- By month for historical, by last 24 hrs for daily.
- SFDC runs the query on their side and preps the data.
- While SFDC is prepping, 6sense checks regularly for whether it’s ready to download.
- Once SFDC replies that it’s ready, 6sense makes another API call to download the updated data.
- 6sense moves on to the next object.

To estimate the number of API calls needed for score exports, 6sense needs to look at a combination of the number of Records, Batch Size, and the number of API calls per batch.

Number of Records: The total number of records 6sense attempts to exports scores for.
Batch Size: The configured batch size for the Score Exports orchestration, by default, is 7000.
Number of API calls per batch: The 6sense platform typically makes eight API calls per batch for the following calls:
- Create a new job.
- Upload the data.
- Close the job.
- Get successful results.
- Get failed results.
- Get unprocessed results.
- Poll for completion (multiple, depending on the duration of that job).

To estimate the total number of API calls simply follow the equation:

(# of Records) * (# of API Calls per Batch) / (Batch size)
Example:
- (1 Million Records) * (8 API Calls per Batch) / (7000 Records per batch) = 1143 API Calls
- (1 Million Records) * (8 API Calls per Batch) / (3500 Records per batch) = 2286 API Calls