“What should I do with that list of trade show attendees,” you ask yourself.
You may be itching to import them into Salesforce as leads so you can start working them while they are still fresh. Well, hold on a minute. We better think this through a bit first so you do not create a lot of Salesforce duplicates.
StarrForce has put together a few tips that will help you solve this issue without creating Salesforce duplicates.
Duplicates
How many duplicates do you have in this list? Are any of the people in the list already in Salesforce as leads? How about Contacts? If you already have 6,000 leads and 15,000 contacts, and your list has 800 names, how many are going to end up as duplicates?
Lead Import Wizard
The Salesforce Lead Import Wizard is a handy tool but it can only check for duplicates against the Lead name or email address and it only checks leads, not contacts or accounts. Since most people now have multiple email addresses, and depending on how the names were entered in the list, you need to check for duplicates against multiple criteria.
Data Loader or Excel Connector
We could use the Data Loader or Excel Connector to check the data. To do this, we would need to export all lead and contact (two exports) records with all of the fields that we would want to use for matching. Then we could use the VLOOKUP function to match our list against the two exported lists.
This sounds simple but when you start thinking about all of the different criteria, such as email address, email domain, company name, first & last name, city and state, and all of the different variations, like CA, ca, CAL, California, etc., this becomes quite the project. You may be tempted to just import the list and deal with the duplicates as they come up, assuming you find them.
Now, if you are importing lists once a week, or even once a month, you either have quite a process to go through or you are most likely importing duplicates and spending effort where it is not wanted or productive. There has to be a better way!
RingLead
StarrForce has partnered with a company called RingLead and they have just the tool for the job. RingLead’s “Declone Mass List” tool will actually check your list against all of your existing leads, contacts, and accounts. In one upload, the tool performs all of the following steps:
1. Update the matching Contact and notify the owner.
2. Update the matching Lead and notify the owner.
3. Create the new Contact in an existing Account and notify the owner.
4. Create the new Lead and notify the owner.
5. Link the new Lead to an existing Lead from the same company.
6. Have a campaign assigned as the list is being uploaded.
To keep your Salesforce database in top form, check out RingLead. The sanity you save may be your own.
Need help running RingLead? Check out StarrForce’s Administration Service.
StarrForce is a Salesforce Partner that helps companies deploy, simplify and support Salesforce.com. If you would like information on the services we offer call us at (888) 391-4493 Ext. 101.