Uploading Contacts vs Leads in Marketo Salesforce Integration

[Nate_Oosterhous]

Situation:
We have tradeshow attendee lists that web upload to Marketo which contain some people we would consider as Salesforce Leads and some people as Salesforce Contacts because we already do business with them but they are new Contacts.  

Issue:
When we upload them all as Leads to a static list in Marketo and then once they are all uploaded as Leads we then convert the Leads we want to become Contacts with a "Lead Action: Convert Lead" single flow action.  The issue is this automatically creates a new Account and new Opportunity.  We don't want to create a new Opportunity and in some cases do not want to create a new Account.

Questions:

1. Is there anyway to upload straight to a static list in Marketo people as Contacts and tie them to an existing account or create a new account upon import?
2. When wanting to upload Contacts to our Marketo & Salesforce database should we just do this through Salesforce?

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

1. Not unless that record is already a Contact in SFDC.
2. If you prefer to create Contacts immediately, then yes...but deduping will NOT occur.

I believe RingLead and Lean Data can assist with the automation of this type of process.

[Nate_Oosterhous]

Thank you Josh

[Anonymous]

Bump on this one for a solution that doesn't involve a third party.