Overview
Duplication and data management is one of the biggest pain points for customers. The de-duplication process can be tricky. First, how do you really know if accounts are duplicate of one another? Once identified, what do you do afterwards and what are the options for automation or prevention?
The purpose of this report is to help to identify duplicates using 2 levels of LSID fields.
How to build the report?
In SFDC > Report
Create a New 'Account' Report
Change to 'Summary' report
Group by 'LSID' then 'Site ID' (or DU ID) so you get 2 layers of LSIDs.
All Accounts and All Time
Columns
- Account Owner
- Account Name
- Account Type
- LS Company
- LS Site Company
- LS Company LinkedIn Website
- LS Company Size (Preferred)
- LS Company Revenue (Preferred)
- Created Date/Modified Date/Last Activity Date (this way can see when Accounts were created and see when then the last activity to pinpoint origin as well as most recent account)
Filter:
LSID NOT Blank (although if you do not filter out, this can help you to see how many accounts do not have LSID fields and considering to enrich those accounts)
You may see something like the following:
Which allows you to see duplicates more easily, these accounts have the same LSID AND Site ID. In the above example, we do see that there are two owners so this could be something to make sure the correct owner is assigned especially if you are planning to merge.
Here is another example where the duplicates are fairly easy to see based on the LSID, Site ID, LS Company and Site Company Name. The input of the accounts have slightly different names.
In this case, Seagate acquired EVault, so although the Account Names are different Leadspace was able to identify as these two accounts as being the same company. Using the LS Company and LS Site Company you can see they are indeed the same company. Using LinkedIn Website you can also see if these companies are the same, subsidiary, or in this case Evault's URL mentions they are a company of Seagate as well. Some may choose to keep these accounts separate to keep historical data and other update the status, others may choose to merge these two accounts and update the Account Name to reflect both Evault and Seagate in the Name
But, you may also see:
In this case, these companies all have the same LSIDs, but they differ in the Site IDs, and this could be do the some being holding companies, or companies in different locations that allow them to have different Site IDs.
This is where decisions have to be made as to what is considered a duplicate and how to handle such cases. This could differ between customer to customer depending on your product and sales strategy.
Tip: Use LS Company Size and/or LS Company Revenue to determine if they may be a holding company. The employee sizes and revenue could be a key indicator to provide hints as to account relationships.
After identifying the duplicates, you can choose to take actions either by merging accounts, deleting the duplicates (NOTE: Be sure to either move or check to make sure there are no opportunities or contacts tired to the accounts as they will also be deleted). You can also add validation rules to prevent further duplications in the future.
Salesforce offers some tools for de-duplication that are available in the App Exchange (some free and others are not).
http://www.salesforce.org/managing-duplicate-data-salesforce-strategies-worth-investment/
Other helpful articles:
https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=managing_duplicates_overview.htm&type=0
If you would like more information about these reports as well as how to identify and handling duplicates please reach out to your CSM and we will be happy to set up a call to discuss strategies to help with data management in your CRM.