How Duplicates, Lead-to-Account Matching, and Lead Routing Impact Each Other (and Your Whole Company)

In CRM data management and administration, everything is connected. And for businesses aiming to optimize their customer relationship strategies, the importance of clean, organized, and interconnected data cannot be overstated. At the heart of this interconnected web lie three pivotal processes: merging duplicates, lead-to-account matching (or association), and lead routing.

These processes are gears in a well-oiled machine. If one gear is out of sync, the entire mechanism can falter.

Merging duplicates forms the foundational gear, ensuring that the data landscape is free from redundancies and inconsistencies. Without this foundational clarity, the subsequent processes of lead-to-account matching and lead routing can become muddled and ineffective.

Lead-to-account matching, or associating contacts to their respective companies, builds upon this clean data foundation. It ensures businesses have a holistic view of their accounts, enabling them to tailor their account-based marketing (ABM) strategies and other targeted initiatives. However, associating records without first ensuring that duplicates have been merged can lead to contacts potentially being linked to the wrong companies.

Lastly, lead routing comes into play, directing potential opportunities to the right teams or individuals. But lead routing doesn’t work without accurate lead-to-account matching. Otherwise, how would businesses be able to ensure that leads are routed correctly? And without merging duplicates, how can they be certain that they're not chasing redundant leads?

In essence, merging, lead-to-account matching, and routing are not just individual processes but are deeply interconnected cogs in the CRM machinery. Together, they allow companies to manage their leads effectively, optimize their marketing strategies, and drive growth.

The Foundation: Deduplication Sets the Stage for Effective ABM

In CRMs where data flows in from many sources, duplicates are an inevitable challenge. These pesky repetitions not only degrade the quality of your data as a whole but throw a wrench in the gears of lead-to-account matching and lead routing, inhibiting your teams and harming customer experiences throughout their engagement with your company.

If left unchecked, duplicates can muddy your CRM's waters, leading to devastating outcomes for various departments.

How Duplication Issues Alone Impact a Company:

• Lack of a single customer view: Duplicate data prevents a unified view of customer information in a CRM. This leads to fragmented data across multiple records, making it challenging for teams to access complete customer information.
• Wasted budgets and harmed reputation: Duplicate records increase marketing and sales expenses. Sending multiple emails or direct mail packages to the same person can inflate campaign costs. Additionally, CRM pricing can increase with more records due to duplication. And mistakes like misnaming customers, sending repetitive offers, and providing poor customer service due to duplicate data can negatively impact brand perception.
• Poor customer service and experience: Customers expect support and sales reps to be aware of their past interactions. Duplicate data makes it hard to track these interactions, leading to repeated explanations and a frustrating customer experience.
• Less effective segmentation: Reliable data is crucial for effective marketing segmentation. Duplicate data can hinder deep segmentation, resulting in less personalized marketing campaigns and reduced conversion rates.
• Sales team inefficiencies: Duplicate data slows down sales reps as they have to search for duplicates for each prospect. They will also step on each other’s toes when duplicate records are assigned to multiple reps. Duplicate data can also skew understanding and decision-making, preventing businesses from capitalizing on potential opportunities.
• Inaccurate reporting and less-informed decisions: Duplicate records can distort database reports, leading to overrepresentation of certain data points. Making decisions based on such skewed data can be detrimental.

These impacts are devastating on their own. But the issues caused by duplicates also inhibit other critical ABM processes, like lead-to-account matching.

With Duplicate Contacts in Your CRM, You’ll Run Into Lead-to-Account Matching Issues

In the realm of CRM data management, associating contacts to their respective companies—often referred to as lead-to-account matching—is a pivotal step. It provides businesses with a holistic view of their accounts, enabling them to craft tailored strategies, especially in the context of ABM. However, with duplicates in your CRM, this association process can quickly turn from a strategic advantage to a confusing quagmire.

When you try to match duplicate leads to accounts, you’ll end up with one of three standard outcomes:

• The duplicate record is unassociated, detached from a company. This is a common but disastrous scenario. With the lead unassociated from the correct company, your system lacks context about the lead. This breaks automated processes and requires manual work. The wrong rep may be assigned to the lead, causing confusion with the account. Account-level reporting will be skewed. Opportunities will be missed.  
• The duplicate record is associated with the wrong company. This is a less common but still disastrous scenario. An incorrect association also skews account-level reporting, causes confusion, and causes errors and missed opportunities. Additionally, fixing the problem often requires manual analysis to determine that the lead is matched with the wrong company and to figure out which company it should be associated with.
• The duplicate record is associated with the correct company. This is the preferred of the three outcomes, but still creates issues within a business by inflating stakeholder numbers, potentially impacting lead scores, and causing confusion in communication that can lead to poor customer experiences.

None of these outcomes is ideal. Each one causes a variety of issues for ABM teams and their companies.

Lead-to-Account Matching and Duplication Issues Make Effective Lead Routing Impossible

CRM data management is a delicate balance of processes, each relying on the other to ensure a seamless flow of accurate information. Lead-to-account matching and lead routing are at the heart of this system—two processes that can drive significant business growth when executed correctly. However, throw association and duplication issues into the mix, and this harmonious system quickly turns chaotic.

The Interplay of Lead-to-Account Matching and Lead Routing

Lead-to-account matching, or associating individual leads with their respective companies, provides businesses with a comprehensive view of potential opportunities. This association is the foundation upon which lead routing builds, ensuring that potential leads are directed to the right teams or individuals for timely and effective engagement based on the lead routing rules that your organization sets.

Lead-to-account matching in a CRM plays a pivotal role in ABM lead routing. Here's how it impacts the process:

• Accurate account-based assignments: When a new lead is associated with an existing account, it can be automatically routed to the sales representative or account manager responsible for that account. This ensures that the lead is handled by someone already familiar with the account's history, needs, and challenges. Without accurate lead-to-account matching, your ABM is at best inhibited, and at worst completely broken, depending on the severity of missing or inaccurate associations.
• Streamlined communication and faster response times: When leads are matched to the right accounts, communication becomes more streamlined. Sales reps can leverage existing account information to tailor their outreach, making it more relevant and effective. Automated lead-to-account matching that allows for near-instant routing to reps leads to better experiences and higher conversion rates.
• Geographic territory management: For businesses that assign sales reps based on geographic territories, lead-to-account matching ensures that leads are routed to the reps responsible for a particular territory, based on the associated account.
• Efficient resource usage: Lead-to-account matching ensures that leads are routed to the most appropriate sales rep or team. Then they can make better use of their resources.
• Data integrity and full account interaction view: Reliable lead-to-account matching helps ensure that all interactions with a particular company, regardless of the contact point, are consolidated under one account, providing a holistic view of that customer.
• Cross-selling and upselling opportunities: When leads are accurately matched to accounts, sales reps can identify opportunities to offer additional products or services based on the account's purchase history or needs.

In ABM, accurate lead-to-account matching is a requirement for leads to be appropriately routed to the teams that are handling them. Without reliable associations, your company misses out on valuable opportunities.

But inaccurate or nonexistent lead-matching isn’t the only thing that affects routing. Duplicates do too.

Duplication Disrupts Lead-to-Account Matching

Duplicate lead records also impact the lead-to-account matching process directly, in several ways:

• Conflicting account associations: Duplicates can lead to a scenario where the same individual is associated with multiple accounts or where different individuals from the same company are treated as separate entities. This fragmentation can lead to confusion, with leads potentially being routed to multiple teams or overlooked entirely.
• Lost or fragmented interaction histories: If previous interactions with your brand impact where a lead is routed, duplicate records can cause your system to miss critical interactions and therefore, route leads to the wrong owner.
• Lead scoring issues: Lead scoring often impacts lead routing. Duplicate leads cause skewed stakeholder counts of accounts and misrepresentation of job titles within the account, and may impact lead prioritization.

Both inaccurate lead-to-account matching and duplicate records can have a profound impact on your lead routing.

The Bigger Picture: The Interdependence of Data Management Processes

The interconnectivity of duplication, lead-to-account matching, and lead routing highlight a broader theme: the interdependence of CRM processes. Just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, the CRM data management process is only as effective as its most flawed component.

Duplication issues, while seemingly minor, can ripple through the system, undermining the efficacy of subsequent processes. And just like duplicates, lead-to-account matching issues also flow down stream, impacting lead routing.

Ultimately, an inability to tackle any of the processes in this chain result in less revenue and worse customer experiences.

With Insycle, You Can Fix Your Duplicates, Lead-to-Account Matching, and Lead Routing Issues Automatically

Insycle is able to help companies fix common issues with duplicates, lead-to-account matching, and lead routing to create a healthy, interconnected CRM system.

Merge Duplicates Flexibly and in Bulk

With Insycle, you can merge duplicates flexibly, in bulk, using any field as a potential matching field. Additionally, there are a number of ways to evaluate the data in those matching fields during the matching process to catch more duplicates.

Insycle allows you to set advanced rules for data retention on a field-by-field basis, using rules. This gives you more control over deduplication and ensures that important data is not lost in the merging process.

You can also set rules for retaining data when merging on a field-by-field basis. For example, in the screenshot below, we are instructing Insycle to:

• retain the email from the record that had the most recent email received;
• retain the name from the record that had the last activity date;
• combine and append all data for the Multi Colors field; and
• retain the organization from the master record.

These customization options allow you to tailor the deduplication process to your specific needs, making it more efficient. This can improve the quality of your customer data, enhance the effectiveness of your sales efforts, and lead to better business outcomes.

Identify and Create Lead-to-Account Associations in Advanced Ways

With Insycle, you can associate contacts and leads with accounts in bulk and automatically. You can match links using any field in your CRM database to identify and match missing associations.

Manage Your Lead Routing and Load Balancing

With your database deduplicated and leads reliably matched to companies, you can install advanced lead routing strategies with confidence.

With Insycle, you can filter your database and assign leads in bulk. First, you tell Insycle which segment you’d like to filter down to and assign. For example, if you have a certain group of reps that handle leads with specific job titles, you would set a filter like this:

Or you could route Salesforce leads based on locations:

Or get even more advanced, routing leads based on multiple field variables:

Once you’ve decided which leads you’d like to route, you need to determine where you would like them routed to.

Then, you tell Insycle how leads that meet these criteria should be assigned, in bulk:

You have numerous options for how leads are distributed among your selected reps.

• Even: All leads that meet your criteria will be evenly distributed among selected reps without considering current assignment workloads.
• Random: Leads will be assigned at random to your selected reps.
• Balanced: Taking current assignment workloads into account, leads will be assigned to all selected reps so that they have balanced workloads.
  • Balanced in current month/quarter/year: With balanced lead assignments, you can also select a timeframe. For example, if you chose to balance within the current month, leads that were assigned to your selected reps prior to the current month would not be considered when assigning.

Additionally, Insycle allows you to set the availability of individual reps to ensure that they do not receive lead assignments when they are not available. This helps improve communication with leads.

You can also set out-of-office days for reps so that they are not assigned new leads over the weekend, while on vacation, while taking a sick day, or visiting a conference. Then, you can automate all of these processes to run automatically.

Automate All of Your Time-Consuming Data Management Processes

With your templates in these respective areas working, you can schedule them to run on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. For example, you could instruct Insycle to run the template automatically on a daily basis, to ensure that new leads are quickly associated with the correct companies.

HubSpot users can inject Insycle Recipes for deduplication, association, and lead routing directly into your HubSpot Workflows. This ensuring that all new leads have these processes taken care of, in the correct order, as soon as a new contact is created in your system and before you begin communicating with them.

Tackling Data Challenges with Insycle

Insycle is the solution for seamlessly addressing the issues of duplicates, lead-to-account matching, and lead routing that can significantly impact a company's CRM data management. With its advanced features, Insycle can automatically fix duplicates, ensuring accurate lead-to-account associations, which, in turn, enable effective lead routing. By eliminating these pain points, businesses can focus on optimizing their customer relationship strategies.

A Comprehensive Solution for CRM Systems

Beyond just addressing the specific issues highlighted, Insycle stands as a complete customer data management solution for popular CRM systems. It offers a holistic approach to data management, from merging duplicates in bulk to automating time-consuming data management processes. Data issues are often a blind spot for companies, which operate unaware of the deep problems they cause across their organization. With Insycle, companies can ensure that their CRM data is clean, organized, and ready to drive impactful customer engagement strategies.

Take the Next Step With Insycle

Don't let data challenges hold back your company's potential. Dive deeper into how Insycle can revolutionize your data management strategies and processes. By investing in a robust solution like Insycle, you're not just fixing data issues; you're reshaping the future of your customer relationships. Learn more today and take the first step towards a streamlined and efficient CRM system.