CRM data cleansing before the import, with an audit trail

Cleaning inside a CRM means editing live records that other people are looking at, with automation and workflows firing on every change. A mistake there is visible immediately and hard to unwind.

On an export you can be careful. You see every proposed change at once, compare rows side by side, and produce a list of what will happen before it happens. That list is also what makes the change acceptable to the account owners whose records you are merging.

Merging accounts touches ownership, quota and commission, which is why sales teams resist a cleanup they cannot see. Handing them a list of the exact merges, with the row that was kept and the reason for the match, turns an argument into a review. The matching that produces that list is fuzzy matching, grouped into records by entity resolution, and the system specific walkthroughs are Salesforce deduplication, Zoho CRM deduplication and Pipedrive duplicate contacts.

We exported seven contacts the way most CRMs hand them over, with first and last name, email, account, phone, state, created date and annual revenue, and ran the engine on the file. It proposed fourteen field changes and three duplicate clusters, and applied none of them until they were approved.

The field changes are the boring, high value kind: state names to codes, dates written three ways to one ISO date, revenue with dollar signs and commas to a plain number, an email re-keyed in capitals with a trailing space. The clusters are where a person earns their keep. Olivia Hart and OLIVIA HART share an email and are safe to accept. Marcus Reed at Reed Freight LLC and Reed Freight has two emails at one domain, so it is flagged. And Ben Ward at Ward HVAC and Ben Ward at Summit Roofing was proposed on the same name and email user name, flagged because the emails differ. That one should be rejected, and the review step is what lets you reject it before it reaches the CRM.

The buyer is a RevOps or sales ops lead with a deadline: a migration from one CRM to another, a list import after a trade show, or a territory reassignment that only works if each account exists once. They are measured on whether the pipeline report is right the week after, and they need a record of every merge to show the account owners.

The Analyst plan cleans unlimited exports of up to 25MB each, and Enterprise puts the whole ops team on one invoice with a DPA and purchase orders. See pricing, or run the demo above on your own export first. If the CRM is HubSpot, the walkthrough for its merge rules is HubSpot merge contacts.