QUESTION:
How can I avoid creating duplicate Contacts and Accounts when converting Leads?
ANSWER:
There are 3 modules in DemandTools that can be used to mass convert Leads:
- Lead to Contact Deduplication
- Lead to Account Deduplication
- MassLeadConvert
More information on each of these modules can be found here
To minimize the creation of duplicates when mass converting Leads the modules should be run in order.
Lead to Contact Deduplication compares Leads to existing Contacts and will convert the matching Lead, merging it into the existing Contact. This should be run first, so as not to create duplicate Contacts when a matching Contact exists.
Once this is complete, Lead to Account Deduplication can be run to avoid creating duplicates when a matching Account exists. This module will convert the Lead, creating a new Contact and link it to the existing Account.
Now that all Leads where a matching Contact or Account existed have been converted, MassLeadConvert can be run to convert all the remaining Leads. This will result in a NEW Contact and NEW Account being created for each Lead that is converted (NO MATCHING IS DONE WITH MASSLEADCONVERT).
However, duplicate Accounts could still be created if neither the Contact nor Account existed. So once this is complete, it is suggested that a Single Table Dedupe be run on the Account table to merge any duplicate Accounts that may have resulted from the MassLeadConvert.
Conditions can be defined in the Single Table Dedupe module to only look for duplicates among Accounts where the "CreatedBy" user is the person that just ran the conversion, and the "CreatedDate" is "TODAY". These conditions will only look for duplicates within the new Accounts that were just created as a result of the MassLeadConversion.
