Marketo vs. Saleforce for loading contacts

[Anonymous]

I need to load a list of contacts into either Marketo or Salesforce. Taking into account the constraints listed below, what are the pros and cons of each system.

Some info:

• Most of the companies will be in SF and Marketo already, but not with the same set of contacts in my list load.
• Some of the contacts may be in Marketo already, but with different emails registered

These issues may cause duplicates when importing – not sure there are ways to work around it.

I have tried including as many fields as possible to improve the data in Marketo for our targeted campaigns.

Thoughts?

[Josh_Hill13]

Chad,

I would always use Marketo to import unless you had (and know how to use) Demand Tools for SFDC.

Once in Marketo, you can sort dupes by Name or Email to merge any that had different emails. I wouldn't worry about Company names.

Of course, when you import in Marketo, NEW records will go to SFDC as Leads. 

[Anonymous]

Like Josh mentioned the big difference is the ability to create leads vs. contacts (cannot create in Marketo, but can in SFDC). Additionally, with a Marketo upload you can create a static list that keeps the records tied together without needing a field or campaign in SFDC.

If the companies already exist in SFDC and your list is pretty clean as it relates to the company names, I would upload in SFDC as it will automatically match them to the company. It would be great if you had a tool like Demand Tools or my favorite dupe tool, RingLead, to automatically remove dupes. 

Whether you load in Marketo or SFDC, you can manipulate the data quickly and easily in Marketo (merging records, deleting outdated records, updating certain fields, etc.)

Hope that helps!