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Your Salesforce is one of your firm's most valuable assets. Years of relationship history, activity logs, and carefully maintained account records all live there.
So when you hear "CRM integration," the first thought is not always excitement. It is concern.
What happens to everything we already have? Are we going to end up with two records for every contact? Is our team going to spend weeks cleaning up a mess we did not create?
We hear this from firms all the time, and it is exactly why our Salesforce integration is built the way it is.
In this article we'll review how to link your existing Salesforce records to Dakota Marketplace without creating a single duplicate.
For a full overview of what our Salesforce integration includes, start with Does Dakota Have a Salesforce Integration?
Why Linking Is the Most Important Step You Will Take
When firms first set up a CRM integration, the instinct is often to start fresh and create new records from Dakota Marketplace. It feels simpler.
But if your Salesforce already has 400 accounts and you create all of them again from Dakota Marketplace, you now have 800 records, half of which are duplicates.
Your team does not know which record to log activity against. Your reports stop making sense. And the CRM your firm invested in becomes a liability instead of an asset.
Linking prevents all of that.
When you link an existing Salesforce record to its Dakota Marketplace counterpart, your existing record stays exactly as it is. Our data flows in alongside it, enriching what you already have without overriding a single field your team has entered.
One record. One source of truth.
Where to Start: Marketplace Accounts and Marketplace Contacts
Our Salesforce app gives you two places to link records: the Marketplace Accounts and Marketplace Contacts tabs, or individual account or contact pages. These tabs are where you will do most of your linking, especially when you are working through a large segment of your existing Salesforce at once, and they load automatically when you open them, no need to click Search first.
Log into Salesforce, open the Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce app from the app launcher, and navigate to Marketplace Accounts or Marketplace Contacts. Use the filters at the top to narrow down the accounts you want to work with: account type, AUM, metro area, country, and investment preferences are all available. Start with the segment your team focuses on most rather than trying to tackle your entire Salesforce at once. Once you have a filter combination you will reuse, save it as a custom list view so you are not rebuilding it every time.
See linking and the mass wizard in your own Salesforce instance, book a demo of Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce.
The 5 Steps To Link Existing Salesforce Records in Marketplace
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, or use Select All with Load More to work through a larger filtered list in one pass. You can select multiple accounts at once and link them in a single action.
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 unsure whether a record already exists in your Salesforce, the linking step will tell you immediately, and you can switch to creating from the same workflow if there is no match.
Step 2: Use the Fuzzy Match to Find the Right Record
When you click Link, our app performs a fuzzy match, comparing the account name in Dakota Marketplace on the left against the records already in your Salesforce on the right. This is where the duplicate problem gets solved before it ever starts.
The fuzzy match is designed to catch the naming convention differences that would otherwise cause your team to accidentally create a second record for an allocator you already have. If your Salesforce has "UMass" and we have "University of Massachusetts Endowment," the fuzzy match will surface 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, last name, or CRD number. 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 show you the account name in Marketplace on the left and the matching Salesforce 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 inside your Salesforce. That icon is your visual confirmation that the record is now connected and receiving updates from us.
Any time we update a field on that account, the change flows directly into your Salesforce automatically. The Marketplace Updates log on each record shows you exactly which fields we changed, what the old value was, what the new value is, and when we made the modification.
Step 4: Linking at the Contact Level
Linking works the same way at the contact level. If a contact already exists in your Salesforce, linking connects their record to ours and adds our data alongside what you already have, including career history, education history, and current contact information.
For contacts, the fuzzy match runs on full name and last name. If that does not surface the right record, you can search by email address or CRD number. The same rule applies: always try linking a contact before creating a new one, especially if you have been maintaining contact records in Salesforce for any length of time.
Step 5: Monitor Everything in the Marketplace Updates Log
Once you have worked through your linking session, the Marketplace Updates log on each connected record gives you a full audit trail of everything we have changed. Every field update is tracked with the old value, the new value, and the date of the modification.
This is especially useful in the early stages of your integration when your team is still getting comfortable with how our data flows into Salesforce. It gives everyone full visibility into what we are updating and builds confidence that the integration is working exactly as it should.
Linking at Scale: The Mass Linking and Unlinking Wizard
For firms working through a large backlog manually, a guided wizard links up to 5,000 contacts and their related accounts in a single pass, matching on the same fields used in individual linking: name, phone, website, or CRD number for accounts, and email, last name, full name, or CRD number for contacts. The same wizard handles mass unlinking, disconnecting 2,000+ accounts at once if you ever need to reverse a bad match, and individual unlink buttons are available directly on account and contact detail pages for one-off corrections.
This does not replace the fuzzy match workflow above. It applies the same matching logic at scale, so a firm with a large backlog of unlinked records is not stuck working through them one at a time.
What If You Have Hundreds of Existing Records?
If your firm has hundreds or thousands of existing Salesforce 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 Salesforce, Linking & Syncing is the recommended approach before doing any manual linking.
Start Clean and Stay Clean in Your Salesforce!
Duplicate records do not happen all at once. They build up slowly, one accidental creation at a time, until your Salesforce becomes a source of confusion rather than confidence.
Taking the time to link correctly from the start is the single most important habit your team can build when working with our integration, and it is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for your firm's long-term data quality.
Book a demo of Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce today!
