CRM 3.0 - SImple Duplicates Detection and cleansing

I recently de-duped all out CRM dbs and tried to use various products to do it. Dupes can really destroy your marketing and CRM cred if you dont be careful. Just imagine you spend a bunch of time developing a nice personalized and individualized email for sending out to propsects and cleints and leads etc. Then you run your blast email campaign and your valuable prospects get THREE personalized "Dear, John" emails flood their inbox. THis does not make you look very competent.

Microsoft CRM has some good tactical features to help cleanse your DB and thus enhance your marketing.
1. Deactivate leads and contacts - This revolves around the concept of never deleting records and the status of Active vs Inactive.
2. Merge records - Nice feature for leads, contacts and accounts merging of two duplicate records.
3. SQL Reporting Services Reports and their drill back/thru capabilites

Using these powerful and native features we quickly (hours) developed a few different reports to interrogate our CRM dbs and surface any and all email duplicates. We used Emails as the primary matching record. We looked at dups of Lead emails, Contact emails, and also compared lead and contact email lists. We also looked it they were Active or inactive.

Once we had the list in front of us with the Active v Inactive and the date created and modified we could easily see which record to keep and which to deactivate or delete. Once the decision was made we could easily use the SRS drill thru feature to easily click through and open the record and either delete or deactivate it.

It is crud and brute force but is also very black and white and straighforward.

We now trust our data a lot more and that means we can use it a lot more and communicate with our clients a lot more to build our relationships and expand our social and business networks to enable our success!


Jon Petrucelli www.productivegap.com Austin Texas