How would you...?
I have a spreadsheet containing contacts, leads, and people new to our ecosystem whom I need to add to a campaign. On the spreadsheet there is no indication of who is a lead, contact or new. There IS an email address for most people. When I tried to bulk load, my leads hit some duplicate rules.
If they exist, I want to still add the existing member to the campaign. I do not want to create leads if a contact exists, and I want to create a lead if NONE exist.
How would you tackle? Is there a way I am not thinking of that I can take the spreadsheet and determine before loading who exists, and if so as what type of object record?
The dummy field workaround works but it's a lot of manual steps for what should be a simple matching operation. The bigger problem is that Salesforce treats matching as exact-or-fail.
I'd recommend using a semantic matching tool. Sharing the one I'm building:
everyrow.io/merge if you'd like to test it out free the next time you run into this. Upload your spreadsheet and your Salesforce export, and the tool returns a cleaned file ready for Dataloader with the IDs filled in. It understands that "Bob Smith, VP Sales at Acme" and "Robert Smith, Sales VP, Acme Corporation" are likely the same person. And then for ambiguous cases like two different people with the same name, it will flag these for review.