Data sourced from Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce, the global LP and GP intelligence platform trusted by investment professionals. Learn More | Book a Demo
If you're in investment sales, you already know the feeling. You open Salesforce to prep for a call and the AUM figure looks off. The contact you're about to email left the firm four months ago and nobody updated the record. You spend the first ten minutes of your prep just trying to figure out what's actually true, and only then can you start thinking about the conversation itself.
This isn't a discipline problem. It's not that your team doesn't care about the CRM.
It's that most CRMs are only as good as the last person who manually updated them, and in a fast-moving industry, that's never good enough for long.
Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce exists to fix this specific problem: getting reliable, current allocator data into the system your team already lives in, without anyone having to babysit it.
In this article, we'll cover what Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce actually is, how it's different from a typical CRM integration, and what that means for the data your team works from every day.
What is Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce and How is it Different from a Typical Integration?
Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce is a managed app available directly on the Salesforce AppExchange. It connects your Salesforce instance to Dakota Marketplace, our continually updated database of allocators, investment firms, and private companies, so your accounts and contacts stay current without anyone on your team manually updating them.
You find it in the Salesforce App Store, install it, and your firm is up and running in a matter of days. Hundreds of investment firms already run their CRM this way.
Most CRM integrations fall into one of two categories: an iframe embedded into a Salesforce tab, or a custom API connection your team, or a consultant, has to build and maintain. Both come with ongoing technical overhead. Fields break. APIs change versions. Someone has to own it, and that someone is usually pulled away from actual selling to do it.
Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce is a managed package, not a custom build. It installs directly into your existing Salesforce instance, and Dakota's team handles the configuration, so there's no custom development and no database administration on your end. Once installed, the app looks and works like the web version of Dakota Marketplace your team may already know: job and role changes, fundraising news, metro area intelligence, and the full Marketplace database, all inside Salesforce instead of a separate browser tab you have to remember to check.
Linking vs. Creating: Two Ways to Connect Your Records
There are two ways to bring Dakota data into an existing Salesforce org.
Linking connects an existing Salesforce account or contact to its matching record in Dakota Marketplace. The app runs a fuzzy match on account name first. If naming conventions differ, your team can fall back to phone number, website, or CRD number for accounts, and email address, full name, last name, or CRD number for contacts. Once linked, a small link icon shows up next to the record so your team knows at a glance that data is flowing in from Marketplace.
Creating builds a brand-new Salesforce record directly from Dakota Marketplace in one step. You preview the account's full profile, choose which contacts to bring over, click Save and Create, and the record appears in your Salesforce. No copying, no pasting, no manual entry, and no risk of introducing the typos that come with it.
For teams with a backlog of records that were never properly linked instead of created, a guided wizard can link up to 5,000 contacts and their related accounts in a single pass, and a one-click mass unlink handles 2,000+ accounts at a time. It's built for cleaning up years of accumulated duplicates in one sitting rather than record by record.
What Data Actually Lives in Your Salesforce
Every linked or created account gets a dedicated Dakota Marketplace subtab where all of our data lives, sitting alongside your existing fields without overriding anything your team has already entered. That includes:
- Accounts and contacts, with 150+ custom data fields covering AUM, investment preferences, metro area, and asset class coverage
- Career history and education history on every contact record
- Metro area intelligence, paired with recommendations for hotels, restaurants, and meeting spots, plus nearby accounts, for smarter trip and territory planning
- 13F filings, Form ADV data, and Form D filings
- Public plan minutes and pension board meeting documents
- Fund-level data: fund presentations, fund launches, and private fund performance metrics like Net IRR, TVPI, and DPI
That's a meaningful amount of research that used to require leaving Salesforce entirely, now sitting on the same record your rep already has open.
Curious what this looks like on your own accounts? Book a demo of Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce to see.
Full Transparency on Every Change
Every linked record has a Marketplace Updates log showing exactly what Dakota changed, what the old value was, what the new value is, and when the change happened. Nothing updates silently. Your team always knows what changed and why, which matters when trust in the data is the thing you're trying to rebuild in the first place.
A Done-For-You Setup, Not a DIY Project
If your firm has a large volume of existing Salesforce records, Dakota's Linking & Syncing service does the matching for you on the back end before you ever touch the app manually. You send an export of your accounts and contacts, Dakota's team runs the match, sends it back for review, and connects everything once you sign off, typically in two to 30 days. Most firms keep using the app throughout that process rather than waiting for it to finish.
Implementation itself is a single one-hour call: 30 minutes on setup and page layout, 30 minutes on training. Dakota's Customer Success team, including a dedicated integration CSM, stays available after that for anything from a linking question to a custom report.
The Integration That Doesn't Become a Project
The difference between Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce and a typical CRM integration comes down to who owns the upkeep. With a custom-built integration, that's you. With a managed AppExchange app, it's Dakota, which means your team gets the benefit of connected, current data without taking on a second system to maintain, and without losing the first ten minutes of every call prep to figuring out what's actually true.
To see Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce in your own Salesforce instance, book a demo today.
