Preface
This guide will walk you through the process of using mDesktop to dedupe your Salesforce database.
Introduction
Salesforce is an award-winning cloud based computing service designed to manage customer relationships, integrate with other systems and build your own applications. Salesforce can power serious business insight with analytics and other tools, but only when the system houses clean data that is well maintained.
Obtaining and maintaining clean, accurate data is often seen by sales professionals as a daunting task. Countless hours are wasted sifting through reams of unnecessary data or working on the wrong opportunities. Here’s where we can help.
mDesktop makes the problem of housing clean & accurate data obsolete. Fuelled by our 360 engine, mDesktop allows you to identify and analyze duplicate records in your data prior to merging customer information.
Overview
By simply exporting your customer and/ or account data from Salesforce, and importing into mDesktop our technology utilizes the 360 matching engine to identify matching entries within your customer/ account records which you can then use to merge duplicate contact or account records together.
Step 1: Exporting Account/Contact Lists from Salesforce
* Please note: Step 1 is a detail of Salesforce's existing ability to export data and is only included in this document to detail the process of deduping your Salesforce contact data with mDesktop from start to finish.
In order to generate a list from Salesforce a report must first be generated of all the contacts or accounts. This list can then be exported to a flat file which can then be imported directly into mDesktop.
1.1 From the Salesforce home screen, click the Reports tab:
1.2 Click on ‘New report..’:
1.3 Expand Accounts & Contacts and select ‘Contacts & Accounts’:
1.4 Select the report criteria. Be sure to select all accounts to ensure that all accounts are output, not just the accounts that are owned by a single user.
1.5 Also be sure to check to ensure the date range of the records you are outputting is set to ‘All time’ .
1.6 Select the tabular report format.
Salesforce should default to the tabular format.
1.7 Select the columns to be displayed on the report.
These will be the fields that are imported into mDesktop. For best matching results mDesktop will require a minimum of:
- Account name (Company name)
- Address Lines (Company/ Mailing address)
- ZIP/ Postal Code
- Contact name (optional)
In addition to this if you are running a contact level match you will also need to output the a contact name field.
When selecting the address lines, be sure to pay close attention to whether you need to consider the Company, Billing or Contact address lines. In most instances you will probably be dealing with the account address but if you are unsure please consult your Salesforce.com administrator.
When selecting the Contact & Account report template Salesforce will automatically select the contact mailing address lines. By default, Salesforce will select the Mailing street as opposed to the individual address lines, we recommend using the individual address lines, i.e. company address 1, company address2, company address 3, Company city, Company state, Company ZIP.
By default Salesforce will create the report with the following structure: default or controlled by organization?
- Salutation
- First Name
- Last Name
- Title
- Mailing Street
- Mailing City
- Mailing State/ Province
- Mailing ZIP/ Postal Code
- Mailing Country
- Phone
- Mabile
- Fax
- Account Owner
- Account Name
* For best matching results in mDesktop a minimum of Account name (Company name), 2 Address lines (Mailing Address 1,2) and ZIP/ Postal Code (Mailing ZIP/ Postal code) should also be included.
You can easily add fields to the structure by double clicking the field name to include from the toolbar on the left hand side.
To remove a field from the structure simply hover over the field in the tabular field view, you can then click the down arrow to select ‘Remove column’.
1.8 Once you have made your selections to create the report, click Run Report:
1.9 Once the report has been generated, verify that all the columns are named appropriately and click Export Details:
1.10 Salesforce will prompt you to select the file type and encoding. Select CSV as the file type and ISO-8859-1 as the encoding, then click Export:
Step 2: Using mDesktop to find duplicates
As detailed in the Getting Started with mDesktop section, you will need to run a single file dedupe on your customer file. In addition to identifying duplicate entries this process will also allow you to verify the quality of the matches found.
2.1 Start mDesktop and use the Single File Wizard to import the flat file output from Salesforce:
2.2 The setup wizard will present you with a configurable preview of your DBF. Here, you are able to scroll through each field assigning the correct field mapping by right clicking and selecting the correct field type:
* For best matching results we recommend mapping in the contact data, name information along with the address and ZIP.
2.3 Select the desired level of matching and run the matching process:
2.4 Review the matching results
Once matching records have been checked for accuracy via mDesktop’s data visualization and Quality Assurance reports you are now prepared to output the matching results
For manual inspection of the matching results mDesktop has the ability to create reports showing both the matching pairs and matching sets:
2.5 Alternate output option: Creating an output file
Instead of outputting the matching results to a report there is also the option to output the matching pairs into Excel.
Step 3: Merging duplicate records within Salesforce
Once you have used mDesktop to report the duplicates you are now ready to merge the accounts in Salesforce:
*Please note: Salesforce.com only permits for 3 accounts to be merged at one time. This step will therefore have to be repeated for each duplicate group (or pair) reported by mDesktop.
3.1 Enter the name of the account that has a duplicate:
3.2 Once an account is selected, a list of the matching accounts will be displayed. Once the accounts have been selected, click next:
3.3 Select the value of the account to retain:
3.4 Click merge which will prompt the following confirmation message:
Once you select OK the duplicate accounts will be merged into one:
3.5 Repeat these steps until all duplicates have been merged in Salesforce.com
Finding Overlap’s between a file and a Salesforce.com database:
mDesktop can easily compare an external list to your Salesforce.com database by finding the overlapping records between the two files. If your aim is to import a list into Salesforce.com without introducing any matching records mDesktop has the ability to purge the external list of any overlapping records. This would essentially leave you with a unique external list which can then be imported directly into Salesforce.com.