If your firm has been using DealCloud for any length of time, you already have a CRM full of accounts and contacts your team has built up over years. The last thing you want when connecting Dakota Marketplace is for that work to get buried under a flood of duplicate records.
Two entries for the same allocator. Conflicting data on the same contact. A sales team that does not know which record to trust or log activity against.
It is a problem that is easy to create and hard to undo.
The good news is that our DealCloud integration is built specifically to prevent this.
In this article we’ll go over exactly how to link your existing DealCloud records to Dakota without creating a single duplicate.
For an overview of the full integration, start with Does Dakota Have a DealCloud Integration? For broader CRM adoption guidance, visit our CRM resource hub.
Why Linking Matters More Than Creating
When investment firms first connect a CRM integration, the instinct is often to create everything fresh. It feels like the clean slate approach.
But if your DealCloud already has 300 accounts and you create all of them again from Dakota, you now have 600 records, half of which are duplicates.
Your team does not know which one to use. Reports become unreliable. And the CRM that was supposed to make your firm more productive becomes the source of daily frustration instead.
Linking solves this.
When you link an existing DealCloud record to its Dakota counterpart, your existing record stays exactly as it is. Our data flows in alongside it, enriching the record without overriding anything your team has already entered.
One clean record. One source of truth.
For a full explanation of when to link versus when to create, see Link vs. Create: How Dakota's CRM Integration Keeps Your Data Clean.
Where to Start: The Data Integrations Tab
Log into Dakota Marketplace and navigate to the Data Integrations tab. You will find it by clicking the More tab on the far right of your Marketplace navigation. This is where all linking and creating happens, and where you can monitor everything our integration is doing on an ongoing basis.
Use the filters on the right side of the page to narrow down the accounts you want to work with. You can filter by account type, AUM, metro area, country, and investment preferences. Start with the segment your team focuses on most. There is no need to tackle your entire existing DealCloud at once.
Step 1: Select the Accounts You Want to Link
Once you have filtered for the right segment, select the accounts you want to link by clicking the checkbox on the left side of each record. You can select multiple accounts at once and link them in a single action, which saves significant time when working through a large list.
When you are ready, come up to the action item dropdown and select Link. Our recommendation is always to try linking before creating. If you are not sure whether a record already exists in your DealCloud, the linking step will tell you quickly, and you can switch to creating from the same workflow if there is no match.
Ready to see exactly how our linking process works inside your DealCloud instance? Book a demo today!
Step 2: Use the Fuzzy Match to Find the Right Record
When you click Link, our integration performs a fuzzy match, comparing the account name in Dakota Marketplace on the left against the accounts already in your DealCloud on the right. This is where the duplicate problem gets solved. The fuzzy match is designed to catch the naming convention differences that would otherwise cause your team to accidentally create a second record.
For example, if your DealCloud has "UMass" and we have "University of Massachusetts Endowment," the fuzzy match will surface those as a likely match and give you the opportunity to confirm the connection before anything is created.
If the fuzzy match does not find the right record, you have additional search options. For accounts, you can search by phone number, CRD number, or website. For contacts, you can search by email address, full name, or last name. These fallback options exist precisely for situations where naming conventions are too different for an automatic match to work reliably.
Step 3: Confirm the Match and Build the Connection
Once the fuzzy match surfaces the right record, review it and confirm the connection. We will show you the account name in Marketplace on the left and the matching DealCloud record on the right so you can verify the two are the same entity before linking them.
After you confirm, the connection is built and a small link icon appears next to the record in Dakota Marketplace. That icon is your visual confirmation that the record is now connected and receiving real-time updates from us. Any time we update a field on that account, the change flows directly into your DealCloud automatically.
Step 4: Monitor Everything in the Logs Tab
Once you have worked through your linking session, the Logs tab on the left side of the Data Integrations page gives you a full record of everything that happened. Every link, every creation, every update, and any failed actions are tracked here at both the account and contact level.
Check the Logs tab after each session when you are first getting started. It gives you full visibility into what our integration is doing and flags anything that needs attention. Over time it becomes a quick sanity check rather than a regular task.
What If You Have Hundreds of Existing Records?
If your firm has hundreds or thousands of existing DealCloud accounts and manually linking them one by one is not practical, our Linking & Syncing service is the right starting point. You send us an export of your existing accounts and contacts, our team runs a matching process across multiple fields, and once you approve the match file, all of the connections are built on the back end for you. Your entire existing dataset gets connected to Dakota correctly before your team logs in on day one, with no duplicates and no manual work required.
For any firm with a significant existing DealCloud, Linking & Syncing is the recommended approach before doing any manual linking.
Keep Your DealCloud Clean From Day One
Duplicate records are one of the most common and most damaging CRM problems investment firms face. They erode your team's trust in the data, slow down reporting, and create confusion that compounds over time. The linking process inside our DealCloud integration exists specifically to prevent this, and taking the time to link correctly from the start is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for your firm's data quality.
You can explore our full CRM integration suite or book a demo to see the DealCloud integration and linking process in action.
Book a demo of the Dakota DealCloud integration today!
