Looking for best practice deduplication

Hi Geoff,

You can outsource this work. NetProspex can help and many other companies.

If you'd prefer to do this yourself, you can use a tool like CRM Fusion to merge many duplicates at once. The tool is fairly cheap but requires training.

I receive Marketo alerts each time a new lead is created in Salesforce that has a matching email as another lead. This helps me to react in real-time to sales people adding leads to the database of people who already exist.

We have Demand Tools for SFDC, which has routines running, but there are a few gaps, as identified by the Marketo Possible Duplicate list.

I like the idea on the alert, however the way our business operates, sales isn't creating leads, rather Marketing is.

Also, we recently implemented a method in SFDC that will alert the Sales team, in Salesforce, that a record with that email is already in existence.  Not sure on speicifcs as that was our CRM team who implemented it.

I look at my "Possible Duplicates" list once a week or so and merge leads that are real duplicates. I also created my own smart list for "leads with the same name" as not everything is caught by the "Possible Duplicates" that comes pre-programmed in Marketo. I also created a non-smart list called "Ignoring Same Name" for those leads that have the same name but I don't feel certain the leads should be merged together. I add names to this list and then have the "leads with the same name" smart list exclude names that are on that list from showing up. This means I don't have to review the same possible duplicates more than once if I've already decided they should remain as two leads. 

This is more of an ongoing thing for us so may not help you right now when you're sitting with 20k possible duplicates, but could be a way to do maintenance once you are initially set up. 

How do you sync this back and reconcile with your CRM if you are integrated?

Business rules between my Marketing team and what the CRM team must come into play.  It's not quite as easy due to "data ownership" and potential consequences with the Sales Org for me (who are not in Marketo)