How to Prevent Lead Duplication

Duplicate leads mean connecting the same prospect twice…sending marketing emails twice…calling them twice… offering a discount twice…and so on.

Everything for two times. As the prospect you select will appear twice in your database. It can majorly drain your valuable resources. Plus, you cannot see any major change in the long term at all.

Let’s understand why it happens and how you can prevent lead duplication in this blog.

As you can guess, the matter is from its name. Lead duplication happens when there is more than one record for the same person in your system. Sometimes detecting duplicates becomes a challenge in itself.

Duplicate information may not look exactly the same. What happens sometimes is that people register themselves or sign up from their different emails. A slight difference in their information, but it indicates the same thing. When different types of information about the same person are entered into the CRM, it produces data duplication. It’s a responsibility of your systems to reduce the occurrence of duplicates in your crucial data operations.

Detecting the causes of data duplication is important for businesses. Because it helps maintain a clean and highly efficient CRM system. Duplicate records can accumulate quickly within the system if left unchecked.

As we all know, the results of duplicate record accumulation within the system. It can damage campaign results, reduce sales productivity, and damage customer experiences. So, here we are going to discuss the main reasons why duplicate records get generated.

Human errors can cause serious harm in the record-keeping process. Let’s accept the fact that mistakes can happen while entering records. Small differences in formatting, spelling, or even some incomplete or missing fields can result in duplicate records. The issue of duplication even becomes worse if the company misses having a deduplication system in place.

A majority of the duplication issues appear when it comes to integrating two separate databases. Two distinct databases should sync together if integration happens. Otherwise, it will create a major issue in synchronization.

There are some special situations when the scale of creating duplicate entries increases rapidly. It happens when your organization uses different types of software for different purposes and later decides to integrate them all. Each software or tool uses different types of formats to store data. Therefore, when combining all formats together, it creates a mess within the data system.

A clean and crystal-clear guideline should be there for managing data ownership. In the field of data, it is referred to as data governance rules. Without having a data governance rule, the data processes may suffer from various issues. For example, your team can handle data in various ways without even knowing whether the process is accepted or not.

Even though many companies now have deduplication processes but it can remain bland. Setting the data governance rule beforehand can save your system from duplicate records. If inconsistencies remain in your database, it can produce duplicate data. A lack of data governance, systems could not understand lead matches, and it resulted in duplicate leads.

In marketing and sales operations, leads are being collected from multiple sources. Most interestingly, after collecting leads, most of the time, sales and marketing teams store the lead data into multiple systems. Some get stored in spreadsheets, some lead into third-party software, while some randomly get stored in a legacy system.

When leads enter a database from multiple sources, it creates a mess. Maybe not all the leads are available in the same format. Some in an Excel file, some in random chat, or anything. When combining all together, it will definitely make the lead database bloat and create mishaps, i.e., duplicate leads.