Seeking a way to handle contact creation in the database

[Charlotte_Berth]

Hi everyone,

We have a unique instance which is multi-country and we are not connected to Salesforce. We are wondering how to best organise the contact creation in the database. Today either countries create manually their contacts or at a centrale level, we import excel file with list of contacts. At this stage, we do not want to provide bulk import feature to countries because we have a deduplicating process (based on 2 custom fields) and we can only partially use the native deduplication process in place.

Is any of you in the same situation as we are? What are the solutions you found to manage the contacts creaton? Eventually an external solution or an in-house developement?

Thanks for sharing,

[SanfordWhiteman]

It would be best if you could explain your custom dedupe logic and how you’re applying it now (exporting, merging in Excel/Sheets, and importing?).

But already it sounds like you need a custom bulk upload app. This won’t be off the shelf. But an app can use the Marketo REST API to implement custom matching logic. Note, though, that the REST API itself doesn’t support custom compound keys — that is, you’re not calling one simple endpoint and telling it your business rules. But by using the API you can automate the extract/filter/merge/import process, so for the end user it seems like one step.