I have an external list of "leads" from a third party vendor that has information about our pre-existing customers who have a loan with another company. I created a custom object to load this information into Salesforce because of how they want to track the information. I have a lookup relationship field for account, but I don't have the account information on the external list to automatically connect it back to the person's account, so right now it's a free floating record that you can't see when looking at the Account object unless someone manually searches and adds the customer.
I can't think of a way that I can easily pull a list of those customers out of Salesforce to get the account ID so I can add that account ID to the "lead" list and connect everything together when I load the list.
There's a matching piece of information on the account and the lead list - the account number - but I'm not sure how, or if, I can use that. I'm using Data Loader to load the lists in every month.
Does anyone have any suggestions on a way to get the account ID just for the customers I need (each list is 500-600 names) OR to load the pre-existing list in a way that it will automatically fill in? I don't want to manually match that many names every month!
Thank you for any assistance you can provide!
Tabitha
1 answer
Hi Tabitha,
Are you cusing a custom field on the Account object to capture the Account Number? If so, and you set that field as an external Id, you should be able to use that as a way to tie these customers to the appropriate Account:
https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=000320964&type=1&mode=1
That way, you don't have to export the Salesforce Account Id, attempt to match the records on your file, and then perform the upload.
Also, since these external leads technically have Accounts, I would consider loading them as Contacts instead of a custom object. You could use a field, or even a record type on the Contact object to distinguish them from actual customers. If you ever want to perform mailing or campaign management with these external leads, it would be much more difficult to do on a custom object.
Thanks,
Mikey
