Duplicate Leads in Salesforce? Solved
Duplicate leads, accounts, and contacts in Salesforce, How does it happen?
Lead generation across many ads and platforms can get messy. It is easy to end up with duplicate leads in Salesforce. It happens all the time.
People unknowingly sign up for something twice or request your gated content two or even three times. Since the beginning of the pandemic, everyone has attended at least one, two, or three webinars. Each time you attend you quickly give your contact information over and maybe it even auto-fills in your browser.
What kind of system do you have in place to ensure that if your lead comes back again you won’t create a new record in Salesforce?
Let’s take it one step further. What if the same person comes back but now gives you an additional piece of contact info? It’s important that each time a lead sends information to our CRM that we are consistently improving our data or at the very least not creating more clutter.
Of course, there are different ways to deal with duplicates. You can have Salesforce handle the duplicates within the system using matching rules, but that means that the bad data already got into your CRM. A duplicate record was created and now you need to clean up the system from the inside.
One solution to this problem is making the point of entry intelligent. What do I mean by this?
Smart Forms for Salesforce
If your lead generation form can seamlessly interact with Salesforce you will be one step ahead of the game. That means the bad data never gets into Salesforce and no admin has to comb through the database looking for duplicates. It also means your Reps don’t lose valuable time cross-referencing leads that they had a vague memory of seeing a few months earlier.
Titan Forms gives you the flexibility for customers to interact with Salesforce in the way that best fits your business needs.
Bi-Directional integration means that as your customer writes their information your form can already be validating it against your CRM.
Choose what field or fields you want to use to check against your current records and then decide what should happen if there is already a record with that email, last name, phone number or whatever data point you chose.
Step By Step
Let’s walk through one possible way to do this with Titan.
Step One – Build Your Salesforce Form
Drag and Drop elements in the form builder onto your canvas to create the user experience you want for collecting lead information.
In this example I used a very simple design of text boxes to collect each data point. I named the fields, First Name, Last Name, Company, Email, and Phone.
Take note, that on the right hand side under element settings I checked mandatory under the basic settings for Last Name as well as Company, and Email.
Step Two – Push Integration to Salesforce
Once your form is set up and styled the way you want head over to your Salesforce Integrations and set your PUSH to Salesforce.
Select the object that you want to send your data to. In this case we chose Lead because we want to create new leads in Salesforce. However, we set the action to update so that we can check the email that the user inputs against other emails already in our Salesforce.
On the right hand side we toggled “create” under “if not found any match.”
Step Three – Set Your Condition
Click on “Set Conditions” under the update action and decide how you want to identify the lead against your CRM. In this case I wanted to check Email against Email so I simply chose “Email Equals Email.”
Step Four – Map Your Fields
Now we need to map our fields. Mapping fields is the way that you pair up the fields in your form with Salesforce.
Click on “Set Mapping” under “Map Fields” and choose which field you want to send your data to in Salesforce.
Click “Apply & Finish” and then go ahead and publish your form. Test it out by filling out the form as if you were a user and then go to your integrations logs, at the bottom of the Salesforce Integration tab under settings. Once there you will be able to see if a new record was created or updated based on the rules that you put in place.
In the short video I made for this post I used the Email field to check against other records in Salesforce. There you can see that if the Email is already in Salesforce I asked it to update the information in that record instead of creating a new lead. This is great in scenarios where leads will sometimes give more contact info upon their second time filling out a form.
I’d like to start making a lot more of these videos and would love to hear your use cases.
Anything from basic web-to-lead forms such as this one or complex member portals is welcome!
Resources from Salesforce on the Topic:
https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=duplicate_rules_map_of_reference.htm&language=en_us&r=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&type=5
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