Salesforce Duplicate Rules: A duplicate rule specifies what occurs when a user enters an exact record or begins producing a duplicate record. Salesforce has identical restrictions for company and individual accounts, contacts, and leads. Duplicate rules can also be created.

Salesforce has basic duplication rules for accounts, contacts, and leads out of the box. Custom duplication rules in Salesforce can also be created based on business requirements.

Duplicate Records

Duplicate Records are a problem that all Salesforce administrators experience. I’ve observed duplicates in every Salesforce org I’ve ever worked in (including those that informed me there were none!). The problem is exacerbated by the widespread belief that Salesforce automatically detects and manages duplicates. That is not the case, and the dilemma is compounded by the fact that each organization defines “duplicate” differently.

Standard Duplicate Rules

Each standard duplicate rule has a corresponding standard matching rule that governs how duplicate records are identified.

Account Duplicate Standard Rule: The standard account duplicate rule specifies what occurs when a user visits a duplicate account or attempts to create a duplicate account. It is enabled by default.

Account Duplicate Standard Person Rule: The standard person account duplicate rule specifies what occurs when a user visits a duplicate person account or begins to establish a duplicate person account. Enable person accounts before activating the basic person account matching and duplicate rules in Setup.

Contact Duplicate Standard Rule: When a user examines a duplicated contact or begins to create a record that duplicates a contact, the standard contact duplication rule determines what happens. This duplicate rule includes a cross-object matching rule if your organization was founded in the Summer of ’17 or later: It finds contacts who are duplicates of other contacts and leads who are duplicates of contacts.

Lead Duplicate Standard Rule: When a user accesses a lead with duplicates or begins to create a record that duplicates a lead, the standard lead duplication rule outlines what happens. This duplicate rule includes a cross-object matching rule if your organization was founded in the Summer of ’17 or later.

Why Is Duplicate Data a Problem?

Problems with data quality may result in the following: 

• Salespeople inadvertently phone leads and contacts owned by other salespeople, wasting prospects’ and customers’ time.
• Multiple calls to the same prospects and clients that turn out to be excessively urgent
• The organization’s work was disorganized, and the business’s reputation suffered as a result.
• Unnecessary expenditures for verifying repeated emails, sending mass email campaigns, making phone calls, and data enrichment services
• Customers may perceive data disarray as a concerning indicator since if the company can’t follow its operations, how can it adequately care for its clients’ interests? And this is when your company’s reputation may be jeopardized.

However, Salesforce would not be the market leader in CRM if the company had not planned ahead of time and established methods of weeding out inaccurate data. By detecting records that are probable duplicates and having access to all of their prospect’s and clients’ verifiable data, you may save your sales agents time and prevent them from missing critical sales chances.

As a result, your teams can be confident that they’re collecting the right data at the right time, and they can avoid wondering whether they’ve qualified the same prospect. All of this is possible with Salesforce data management solutions.

What is Salesforce Duplicate Management?

We’ve already discussed some of the problems that duplicate data might cause. Fortunately, Salesforce has enabled duplicate management capabilities to discover duplicates in Salesforce as well as track your progress in removing them to guarantee that your firm complies with various data security and privacy standards.

Additionally, Salesforce data management prevents your sales staff from creating more duplicates. CRM data deduplication, on the other hand, is not available out of the box on Salesforce and requires manual intervention to activate Salesforce duplicate management features.

Salesforce Duplicate Management makes it simple to deal with duplicates for:

• Accounts for business
• Accounts for individuals
• Contacts and Leads
• Records derived from customized objects

You can customize its logic to meet your specific demands and go beyond only perfect detection and matching. Based on exact matches, standard matching logic can discover possible duplicate records. Consider two contacts with the same name.

Salesforce’s built-in duplicate management features are already available in the Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions. They also suggest Matching Rules, Duplicate Rules, and Duplicate Jobs.

So, how exactly does Salesforce Duplicate Management function?

Matching Rules and Duplicate Rules work together to enable your teams to operate with duplicate-free data. Assume you create a contact in Salesforce. When you establish a contact, the system searches for potential duplicates based on the criteria specified in a Matching Rule and generates a list of potential duplicates.

The Duplicate Rule specifies whether the contact will be prevented from being created or will be created with a warning.

If you opt to create the contact, the rule can even add the potential duplicate to a Salesforce duplicate contact report. If you are having trouble determining how to activate duplicate rules in Salesforce or how to use Salesforce Duplicate Management features to your advantage, you can always seek professional guidance from our seasoned Salesforce professionals.

Salesforce Duplicate Rules You Must Implement Right Away

Despite the fact that data deduplication is not available out of the box, Salesforce allows you to design your own Duplicate Rules to prevent duplicates. And here’s a list of Salesforce duplication rules you must enable right now.

We’ll begin with a duplicate Salesforce Account check. When users create Accounts (companies of your future or present clients), they may neglect to search for this company and see if it is already in the CRM.

•  Account Name Potential Match
•  Lead-to-Lead Email Exact Match
•  Lead-to-Contact Email Exact Duplicate Rule
•  Contact-to-Contact Email Exact Duplicate Rule
•  Contact-to-Lead Email Exact Duplicate Rule
•  <Contact/Lead Email or LinkedIn Exact

Conclusion

Data that is clean and precise is essential for every successful organization. And, while manually activating duplicate rules in Salesforce to keep your records deduplicated takes work, the ultimate result promises to be lucrative.

If you can’t afford to spend much time learning Salesforce duplicate management functionality, our CRM specialists will help you get to a well-organized and healthy database faster. We’ll choose the best technique for your data deduplication and maintenance based on the characteristics of your Salesforce org, the number of records, the budget, and the overall project complexity.