Beyond Deduplication: How Data Orchestration Builds Confidence in Your Salesforce Data

Picture this: Martin is the CRO of a large retail company and a long-time happy customer of an accounting product called FastSheets. Each year, FastSheets publishes a financial report aimed at executives like Martin. When the report catches his eye, he clicks on the link, inputs his contact details, and downloads the report. 

Just hours later, Martin gets a call from a FastSheets sales executive, Stacy, who delivers a cold pitch and asks if Martin wants to sign up for a free trial. He carefully explains that he’s been using the software for six years now, which is an awkward conversation for all involved. 

So, what went wrong? 

The Challenge of Poor Salesforce Data

The case of Stacy and Martin is just one fictional example of a common challenge in sales and customer service. On the surface, it looks like poor due diligence from Stacy. In truth, the problem is much more technical. 

FastSheets uses Salesforce to record details of all current customers and new leads. When Martin filled out the form, he was registered as a lead without the system checking whether an existing record existed. Here’s the issue: FastSheet’s Salesforce environment is full of inaccurate, incomplete, and duplicate data.

In truth, this problem is far more widespread than you might think. According to our own research, roughly 47% of all new Salesforce inserts are duplicates. And when those records are generated by tools like HubSpot, Marketo, or Webforms, the number rises to a shocking 82%.

While these duplicates can cause chaos in your Salesforce ecosystem, it’s actually a sign of a positive customer experience. After all, it can only be a good thing if you’re having multiple interactions with the same customers. But it becomes an issue when these new interactions aren’t saved into the right place in Salesforce when they’re entered.

For sales executives like Stacy, this is a real challenge. First and foremost, cold pitching to existing customers is a poor use of her time and has a negative impact on the relationship that Martin and FastSheets have built over the last six years.

But crucially, Stacy now has 20 other contacts who downloaded the same report, and she doesn’t know which are already customers. At the same time, she wants to reach out to these customers as quickly as possible to get the highest chance of conversion. But if she can’t trust her Salesforce data at first touch, it’s impossible to do her job effectively.

Data Orchestration: Create Unique, Accurate, and Complete Customer Records

For sales and CS teams to succeed, the information they’re working from needs to be reliable at first touch. That’s where data orchestration comes in.

Data orchestration is an end-to-end process designed to ensure accurate and complete customer data at every stage of the record’s lifecycle. The goal is to ensure new Salesforce records are accurate, complete, unique, and consistent. This includes a range of tools to validate records, route information to the right Salesforce location, and remove duplicates.

When executed correctly, data orchestration transforms your Salesforce environment by ensuring every record is accurate, complete, and consistent. This isn’t merely a technical clean-up – it’s a strategic enhancement that empowers sales teams, customer success leaders, and CRM managers to make informed, data-driven decisions. By streamlining lead follow-up and improving customer insights, it lays the foundation for more effective marketing strategies, higher conversion rates, and sustainable business growth.

But to do that, you need an automated workflow that can capture customer information in the right format and assign it to the right place in Salesforce. Here’s what that looks like:

1. Event Created 

The first stage is to validate the quality and completeness of new Salesforce records.

Ideally, information being entered into Salesforce would be done in a complete and consistent format every time. But this isn’t always possible. 

Therefore, it’s helpful to have a tool that can automatically validate and complete the data. This involves checking the validity of emails, addresses, and phone numbers. It also involves adding additional information (e.g. missing postal/zip codes) to ensure the record is complete. 

This has several two benefits. First, complete and consistent data makes it much easier to find and remove duplicates. It also makes it easier for sales teams to quickly reach out and helps to reduce the bounce rate of any emails being sent. 

2. Duplicate Check

Next, it’s important to identify whether the lead has an existing record by comparing the new details with the rest of the database to find duplicates. Generally, you’ll require third-party software (like Plauti) to do this, since Salesforce doesn’t offer this functionality out of the box.

If the information is unique, you can enter a new record and send the lead straight over to sales for a follow-up call. Since the system has already verified that they’re definitely a new contact, sales can reach out with confidence as soon as the record is routed to them.

3. Update Existing Record

Let’s assume the new contact is an exact duplicate. In this case, you’ll want to ensure the new activity is logged in the existing record, rather than creating a new one.

Once you’ve identified duplicate information, this rule can be implemented using built-in Salesforce automations. This ensures activity from existing customers like Martin doesn’t get logged as a new lead. Crucially, the account manager can then be notified that Martin downloaded a report, which will be helpful information and context ahead of their next quarterly review. 

4. Customizable Logic

Most new contacts will be either unique or an exact duplicate. But occasionally, the situation may be more complex. What happens if the record is a new contact, but their organization is already a customer? Or perhaps an existing contact has been in touch, but with a new company and email address. 

Each of these unique situations will require its own bespoke response. Therefore, you need the ability to build your own automated workflows for these scenarios based around your specific organization and team structure.

5. Notify Relevant Stakeholders

Once you’ve saved the information in the correct place, it can be helpful to notify the relevant account managers or sales executives, particularly if it’s an existing customer or lead. Having more accurate information at their disposal will make it easier to convert new customers and help existing ones.

Keep Your Data in Tune With Plauti

When it comes to Salesforce, data accuracy is hugely important. But, in reality, the situation is as much about trust as it is accuracy. 

The quality of your customer relationship depends on account managers and sales execs being able to trust their data and act with confidence. Data orchestration might seem like a complex term on the surface, but at its heart, it’s simply the process of achieving just that. 

Luckily, most of the logic-based rules we described in this piece can be achieved with built-in Salesforce automations. But if you want to identify duplicates, verify contact details, or assign new leads to sales teams, you’ll need a third-party tool like Plauti Data Orchestration (PDO).

Our data orchestration package offers a range of features designed to make your Salesforce data unique, complete, and consistent. Crucially, Plauti enables you to integrate these functionalities into a seamless workflow, so you can trust in your data at every stage of the record’s lifecycle. This includes

• Verify contact details: This checks that phone, email, and physical addresses are valid, so you can rely on your communications to reach the right person at the right time.
• Remove duplicates: Find, clean, and prevent duplicate records, ensuring existing contacts aren’t logged as new leads. This allows the organization to understand the context of an incoming record at the point of entry, and take quick, personalized action based on the outcome.
• Assign information: Build automated policies to assign information to existing Salesforce records, or intelligently route new records to the right user. This reduces the need for manual assignments, routing errors, and poorly targeted sales calls.

Final Thoughts

If FastSheets had used these tools, Stacy would never have had Martin’s contact details in the first place. Done right, this reduces stress for sales execs like Stacy and avoids customers like Martin having a painful experience. When Salesforce data is reliable, everybody wins.

Try Plauti for free for 14 days, or book a call to learn more.