Skip to main content

Creating & Updating Contact Records in Salesforce

How Knock2 creates and keeps Salesforce Contact records up to date from your identifications, and links each one to its Account.

Written by John DiLoreto

Overview

Knock2 can create and keep your Salesforce Contact records up to date automatically when a website visitor is identified — and link each contact to its Account.

Before setting up a play, you must have connected Salesforce (see guide).


What it does

When the Create Contact on Salesforce destination runs, Knock2:

  1. Looks for an existing Contact by email.

  2. Creates the Contact if none exists, populated from your field mapping.

  3. Updates the Contact if one already exists — filling fields according to your overwrite rules, without overwriting values your team has set.

  4. Links the Contact to its Account, creating or updating that Account as needed.

This avoids duplicate contacts: an email match is always reused.


Where you can use it

  • Contact plays / workflows — create or update the identified person as a Contact.

  • Account plays / workflows with "Find the buying committee" turned on — push the buying-committee contacts discovered at an identified account.

  • The workflow builder — add an output step and choose Create Contact.


Setting up a play

  1. Go to the Plays tab and select New Play.

  2. Name it, e.g., Contacts + Salesforce.

  3. Choose Contacts as the source (or Accounts with Find the buying committee enabled), and set your filter and timing criteria.

  4. Under Destinations, choose Create Contact on Salesforce.

  5. (Optional) Assign a contact owner.

  6. Review your selections and click Submit.


Controlling what gets written

Open Settings → Integrations → Salesforce → Contacts tab to control which Knock2 fields map to which Salesforce Contact fields, and how existing values are handled (Always, If empty, or Never). See Customizing CRM Field Mappings for the full guide.

By default Knock2 maps Name, Title, Email, Phone, and Mailing City/State/Country.


The linked Account

Creating a Contact automatically finds or creates the matching Account and links the Contact to it, using your Account field mapping. See Creating & Updating Account Records in Salesforce.


Results

  • A Contact record is created or updated in Salesforce and linked to its Account.

  • The Lead Source indicates Knock2 as the origin.

Did this answer your question?