Deduplication tools to have or not have?

[Anonymous]

Dear Community,

I am trying to figure out whether or not we need to actually purchase a deduplication tool or not.  The reason is we use Salesforce.com which just released a native duplicate management tool that would allow us to prevent duplications from being entered.

So here is the situation-

If we de-duped our Salesforce instance and the data is clean then we could set up duplicate matching rules with the new Salesforce tool.  This would prevent manual entry of duplicate records (in theory).

Marketo is where lead lists would be uploaded and since it has a duplicate prevention built in would ensure there are no duplicates syncing back to Salesforce.

This way we would not have to purchase any third party tools.

Any one else consider doing this?  Trying to understand reasons why or why not to do this.

Thanks in advance for any information anyone wishes to share.

David

[Anonymous]

Hi David - we're looking at deduping tools and here are some considerations/issues we are encountering
1. Marketo will still allow a duplicate if somethign is manually entered in SFDC. it happens other times as well.  We find Marketo's innate de-duping capabilities to be insufficient for us
2. Deduping tools have subtleties with big impacts on the business - for example, we have a hierarchy of lead statuses - if we merged a "cold" early lead with a warmer active lead, we'd want to keep the lead status of the warmer lead. Some tools don't allow for this kind of prioritization.
3. One deduping tool we used, when merging leads, would literally "add" all the campaigns of lead 1 to lead 2.  So, if lead 2 was the final merged lead, it add lead 2 to all the campaigns associated with lead 1 (ie, added to webinar program, change member status to attended) - and that would trigger scoring changes, which would trigger other rules that we did not want to fire upon a merge.  a different tool does not do this.

This are very specific to us, but hopefully suggests a few things to take in to consideration when making your decision.

[Anonymous]

Hi David, 

You already mentioned this, but just to reiterate: both Marketo's as well as SFDC's new native deduping mechanisms are about preventing the creation of duplicate records at point of entry.  The other angle to consider is managing/mergin existing duplicates in your database, if that is currently an issue for you, as Amy elaborated on, above, as well.

If lead merging is something you need to do to clean up existing data, there are two options I would recommend, both of which are relatively inexpensive.

You can do a one-off "EZ Merge" service that Marketo actually provides (contact your account manager to get more details).  They will have a service rep work with you to determine all the custom merging exceptions and master record criteria, do a couple sandbox merge tests, then run it live for you.  This is a good option if you don't have the bandwidth to execute all the setup, tests, and so forth, and just need to run one big database cleanse.

On the other hand, if you want to own a tool to dedupe your database on an ongoing basis, I would highly recommend Cloudingo.  You can find this tool on the SFDC Appexchange and you can purchase a license for a full year for about $1k. It is very flexible and will serve you well if you have the time to manage it.  Good luck!

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the answers.

We finally decided to install Cloudingo.  Looked at a number of solutions including the SFDC native solution.  So far it appears to be working as intended.  Although there are still ways duplicates are created and in some cased intentional.  Would recommend Cloudingo as the support was excellent when setting it up the first time.  We also installed DupeCatcher from the same vendor which is free.

[Anonymous]

We're currently considering Cloudingo - did you do a mass de-dupe? Did this process cause any scoring issues or attribution woes?

[Anonymous]

Marketo will only dedupe list imports based on exact match emails, so gregg@ringlead.com and gthaler@ringlead.com will result in two different records.

generally speaking list imports, especially from trade shows are the Typhoid Mary of bad data.

Duplicates, nonstandard data (Dear GREGG). list imports are a nightmare.

Cloudingo is a good choice for batch deduping, good tool, great team, but Dupecatcher thier free native dupe preventer will not work well for preventing dupes from Marketo.

Free software is usually more like a free puppy than free beer. If it works, it will take a lot of work to enjoy it.

Prevention is the best practice because whatever it costs to get the data right at the point of creation, it will cost 10x, at least to fix it later.

Don't do that.

RingLead specializes in Marketo duplicate prevention.

DupeAlerts the new-ish native Salesforce app alerts users who enter records in Salesforce that the record already exists, but only after they complete the form and click "save".  Ever spend 90 seconds creating a new Lead only to find out that the record you just entered was already in Salesforce? Wow, that is frustrating.

If you would like to share your requirements with me, I can give you some excellent advice.

gregg@ringlead.com

[Jashan]

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