Are You Duplicating Leads from Multiple Channels? Use Predictive Match in Your CRM to Clean Up.

 You kick-start the campaign and end up selling only 20-25 units. A whopping 50% decline from the original sales prediction. What is the cause? Your CRM is loaded with bad data, possibly duplicate data. Some databases are found to have as much as 30% duplicate data records.

It affects you on two levels. Firstly, this misleads your marketing campaign and budget as you end up thinking you covered two leads while in reality, you managed just one. Secondly, this kind of bombardment may infuriate the lead and make your company look highly unprofessional which is not a very good sign.

These duplications can be due to an error on customer’s side or your team. Whatever be the reason, you need to identify such duplicate leads/ contacts and ensure that they never find a way into your system.

The Diagnosis

Why it happens is quite obvious. You may meet the same consumer through emails, through phone, through physical event etc. However, the bigger problem lies with your CRM and it happens at three stages.

1.    Your CRM may not be equipped to stop duplication at the time of entry / feeding.

2.    Your CRM runs in silos and you create multiple datasets.

3.    Your CRM may not facilitate cleaning up.

The Remedy – Predictive match feature

Consider these entries provided by leads at one time:

Lincoln Rd, Darcy Parker, Nic Smith

Now look at this duplicate data provided by the same leads to some other sales rep:

Lincoln Road, Darcy P, Nicholas Smith

In order to save yourself from the complications posed by duplicate leads, turn on Predictive Match feature or De-Duplication rule on your CRM that identifies similar data present in different sources of your database. This is based on context matching that scans data from multiple fields.

Ask these questions to implement it effectively

The presence of Predictive Match or de-duplication rule has made CRM more reliable but not every CRM is created equal. Implement it using the industry-best software and ask these questions.

·      Identification is only one part of the story. Does your CRM allow you to merge duplicate leads? Leading CRMs like Microsoft Dynamics CRM & Salesforce will help you append, overwrite, update and even ignore the possibilities.

·      Does your CRM allow you to customize the rule for finding duplicates? The default program may check only first name across data sources. You may want to add more fields like company name to make duplication a distant possibility.

·      Does your CRM score the duplicates? Some duplicates may be an exact match, some may be fuzzy.

·      Does your CRM act like a gatekeeper? It should stop duplicate entries by throwing errors right at the data feeding stage.

Keep your database clean

With such features CRM gives you all the power to maintain an almost flawless database. Besides, implementing this feature, you can ensure certain discipline by your team members.

·      Ensure that your sales team has divided labor strictly. For example, the responsibility of creating new records should only be handled by one section of your team to reduce the frequency of human errors.

·      Assess the customer database frequently to change/ update customer’s data, feedbacks, emails and other entries

Mark these words

Data is only as good as its quality. While deploying CRM look for a solution provider that understands the value of data. Always check with them the features that take care of sanctity of data. “The best solution is just as good as it is implemented”