Have you ever tried tracking an investor in your CRM only to find they’re listed twice under slightly different names or emails? It’s frustrating, messes with your reporting, and creates headaches for your team when they work from different records. For private capital firms, tackling duplicate contacts in Salesforce is more than just good housekeeping—it’s essential for efficient dealmaking.
In this blog, we’ll explore why duplicate contacts happen, the problems they cause, and practical strategies—from prevention to contact merging—to eliminate duplicates and keep your CRM running smoothly.
The problem with duplicate contacts
Duplicate contacts in Salesforce are often a result of manual data entry, integrations with other tools, or incomplete processes for managing new records.
Ultimately, this leads to a few complications:
- Crossed wires: Imagine two team members reaching out to the same prospective startup or limited partner (LP) without realizing it. It’s awkward for your team and can impact the overall perception of your firm.
- Inaccurate reporting: Duplicates can throw off your reporting, leaving your dashboards looking better or worse (and certainly messier) than reality.
- Extra work: Every duplicate means someone has to spend more time cleaning up records, which makes the fundamentals of data maintenance even harder to uphold.
These issues chip away at your team’s confidence in the CRM, making them less likely to trust your processes or fully rely on the system. This ultimately leads to low adoption and no proper shared system of record.
Best practices for reducing duplicates in Salesforce
1. Establish a single source of truth
Your Salesforce org should be the definitive home for all contact data. Data entry standards should be clear across your firm to ensure that everyone plays by the same rules.
2. Set up Salesforce duplicate prevention
Salesforce matching rules and duplicate rules are your first line of defense against duplicate records. Matching rules define which fields to compare and how to compare them, like exact matches for email addresses or fuzzy matches for company names. Duplicate rules then use these matching criteria to control when and where to check for duplicates, alerting users before they create potential duplicate records.
Firms using the Affinity for Salesforce add-in can take this a step further with Affinity’s enrichment data. For example, if two contacts share similar names, fields like “Current Organization” or “Industry” make it easier to differentiate or identify if they’re the same person. This ensures your data stays accurate, even when dealing with lookalike records.
3. Use Affinity for smarter contact management
Affinity’s automations and data help maintain clean, reliable data in Salesforce.
Teams can add alternate email addresses directly to contact records, ensuring all interactions with known email addresses sync to the correct record. This prevents duplicate contacts from being created. Affinity's enrichment data also includes a Known Email Aliases field that automatically surfaces additional email addresses your team might not know about, helping you discover and consolidate communications you might otherwise miss.
Additionally, enabling Affinity’s automatic contact creation ensures new contacts are automatically created based on email communication and in adherence to your team’s established rules. This reduces reliance on manual data entry—one of the main culprits behind duplicates.
4. Merge duplicate contact records
Even with prevention measures in place, you'll need to clean up existing duplicates. Once you’ve set up duplicate and matching rules, add the "Potential Duplicates" component to your Contact page(s) to easily spot duplicate records. When you merge contacts, you can select which record should be the master and choose which field values to keep from each record—ensuring you preserve the most accurate and up-to-date information. (Tip adapted from Salesforce Ben)
5. Audit and clean regularly
Even with great tools in place, some duplicates will slip through. Run regular deduplication audits using Salesforce reports or third-party apps to identify and merge duplicates. Bonus tip: This is a quarterly ritual for many ops teams!
For a step-by-step guide to maintaining clean data in Salesforce, check out our blog post on Salesforce data hygiene best practices.
6. Train your team
Duplication often starts at the source—manual data entry. Make sure your team understands how to search for existing records before creating new ones and how to follow your firm’s naming conventions. Additionally, take time to train them on any additions to your tech stack that automate or change these processes.
How Affinity for Salesforce can help
Reducing duplicate contacts in Salesforce isn’t just about cleaner data—it’s about creating a foundation for more strategic dealmaking.
Affinity for Salesforce can help your firm:
- Sync all activities to the correct records—even across multiple email aliases—so interactions don’t slip through the cracks.
- Surface and track email addresses your team didn’t know about, keeping contact records more complete and up-to-date.
- Automate the creation of new contacts, reducing manual data entry and the risk of duplicate records.
With tools like Affinity for Salesforce and a commitment to data hygiene best practices, private capital firms can unlock the full potential of their CRM—focusing less on manual data entry and more on building relationships, sourcing the top opportunities, and closing deals confidently.
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