How do I update one field record without causing duplicates?

[Anonymous]

We recently had a data append company find Employee Counts for thousands of records in our database.  I would like to update that one field record without causing duplicates in the system.  Not all of them have email addresses, but they all have a Marketo ID and a Salesforce ID attached to them.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Without an email address, you can't do this in Marketo without creating a duplicate record. I'd recommend reaching out to your SalesForce admin. They can use the data loader to update records based on Salesforce ID.

[Anonymous]

How do they have a Marketo ID if they don't have an email address? 

[Anonymous]

You can have leads with no email address in Marketo. We have a bunch. You can also import leads without email addresses to Marketo. Although some of their documentation indicates otherwise, it's always worked for me. For example, tradeshow list imports.

[Anonymous]

Interesting!  I knew you could create a lead record without an email address manually and anonymous lead records don't have email addresses (or any other data other than inferred), but I didn't know you could import leads without an email address.  Our SFDC Lead/Contact records without email addresses don't synch to Marketo - do yours? 

How do you ensure you don't create duplicates during future imports without an email address?

[Anonymous]

They don't sync to Marketo? That's odd, because we can't get them to stop syncing to Marketo. They can go Marketo -> SalesForce or SalesForce -> Marketo.

I would only import leads without email addresses if I know that I need to push them to SalesForce and get them on a campaign. So yes, it may create a duplicate record, but I just push them to SalesForce and use the "Find Duplicates" feature to merge it with any potential match. It's easier to do it there than in Marketo.