Contact and Account Deduplication

Deduplicating (or “deduping”) contact and account info helps your RevOps database remain clean and organized. A viable platform should automatically check for duplicates when you add or update new or existing contacts and accounts.

Let’s explore further what deduplication means for accounts and contacts and how it optimizes data to streamline your operations.

[Related: Data Deduplication Software Guide]

How does contact and account deduplication work?

In terms of duplicate detection, our process looks for potential duplicates by running detection constantly in the background. Because of this, contacts and account info automatically merge as long as the system is certain that two or more items are duplicates. However, you can specify your duplicate rules to ensure nothing merges too quickly or without your approval.

The deduplication process also detects potential duplicates. Sometimes numeral or spelling variations exist on different files. In those cases, your deduplication tool marks them as potential duplicates, and you can review that list at your convenience. 

RevOps teams usually periodically review potential duplicates. Then, they can choose to either merge or refuse any potential duplicates. With the right deduplication tools, you have the choice to merge contacts and accounts manually or have them merged automatically. 

What contact and account data is deduplicated?

To deduplicate contacts or accounts, you have to pick which fields to reference. With the right tools, you can prioritize one field over another. 

For example, let’s say you have two duplicate leads in Salesforce who are technically the same person. One email appears as john.doe@gmail.com, and the other reads john.d@49ers.com. Salesforce typically relies on the email field to determine whether a contact lead is unique. 

When John Doe used his personal email address, Salesforce automatically created one new lead. When John Doe used his work email address, Salesforce created a second lead. 

So, Salesforce currently has two leads in its system for the same person (John Doe). Because the same person owns both email addresses, there should be only one lead. As a result, your reporting and numbers are incorrect.

A deduplication script or tool will likely look at a few factors to match the two emails. The first factor might be to look at the combination of first name and last name fields. This will usually match the two emails and mark both of John Doe’s email addresses (work and personal) as belonging to the same person. 

But maybe that first attempt doesn’t work in creating a match. A deduplication script or tool will then look at the phone field or perhaps John Doe’s LinkedIn profile field, company name, first and last initials, and so on. 

Ultimately, the Salesforce user can decide the primary way that the tool or script finds two lead matches. Then, it can deduplicate the leads. 

Here are some common fields that tools use when deduplicating contacts: 

• Email
• Phone (multiple types, needs to be normalized)
• Address (if you’re in retail or e-commerce and ship products to customers)
• Name and company combinations
• Social profiles (e.g., LinkedIn)

Here are some common fields that tools use when deduplicating accounts:

• Domain name
• Company name
• LinkedIn company page 
• Company addresses (headquarters and other satellite offices) 
• Company phone

How to set up contact and account deduplication 

When contact and account deduplication settings are active, a deduplication tool, such as that within Syncari’s platform, checks in the background for potential duplicates. When a user creates or updates a new or existing contact or account, we verify whether there are potential duplicates based on any rules that you have specified.

If at least one of your default rules applies to a pair of contacts or accounts, the tool marks them as potential duplicates. This time-saving action saves you substantial effort in the long run because you don’t have to check each account or contact manually.  That’s simply not feasible. 

Your default rules will first check email addresses to ensure they’re equal. Although you can update or delete this rule, it’s important to make sure all of your database contacts have unique email addresses because it’s the primary communication method with your contact. Essentially, email addresses must be accurate and distinct.

If you want to link Syncari to an email marketing tool because it’s often key to reaching and identifying any contact, we can make that happen. Popular email marketing tools like Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor don’t allow duplicate email addresses, so it’s important to get your deduplication correct from the get-go. 

Additionally, you can select one or more fields to compare (via our tool) if or when you create a new rule. Then, you can specify how strict you want its deduplicate comparison to be. 

When creating a rule, all its fields should apply for any pair of contacts or pair of accounts to be marked as potential duplicates.

Contact Syncari to automate your contact and account deduplication

If you’re interested in simplified, reliable data synchronization, you can start a free 30-day trial or request a custom demo with Syncari today. We offer multiple tool-pairing solutions to dedupe your data, automate your systems, and organize your entire business.