Where to upload a Customer List - Marketo or Salesforce?

[Anonymous]

Hello!  First I am absolutely amazed at how interactive and supportive people are on this site.  Thank you all very much.  I need some advice regarding our customer list.  At present, we have not uploaded our Official Customer List into Marketo or Salesforce.com.  I have been a little gun shy, but need to do it soon.  The lists that are in our Marketo Database do contain our customers as well as prospects/leads, but those records have not been identified as such as of yet.

Do I uploade our customer list to Marketo and allow it to migrate over to SFDC or do I do it in SFDC first and migrate over to Marketo?  I do need to put it into Marketo as I need to use it as a smart list to keep emails that are prospect based from being sent to current customers.

Additionally, (and I am sure this is typical of many organizations), our customer list contains incorrect spellings, wrong punctuaion, all caps/no caps, etc.  I know this will cause some issues.  Does any one have experience with this and how did you handle it?

Thank you very much and I look forward to hearing back!

Penn Hoyt

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

1. Cleanup your Customer list first. Excel can help you automate some of the fixes; an intern; or a service like RingLead.
2. I think you will want to set this up to import into SFDC because you'll want to create Accounts and properly associate the records. I'm not sure of the best tool for this, so ask your SFDC rep. RingLead or another service may help too.
3. In general, you want to import into Marketo because it dedupes by email, however, this is a special case where if you do this, you will end up with thousands of junk SFDC Leads and it will be difficult to fix the data in SFDC.
4. Make sure you have Contact and Account Statuses that indicate if someone is a Current Customer, Ex Customer, Prospect, Partner, etc. This will help in both systems later. See if you can automate the update of that data based on Opps or Orders.
5. Once you get your SFDC Customers up, then you can pull a list of emails of Customers, then use that list to create static lists in Marketo for use as smart lists.