10,000 duplicates merged on the first cleanse
Challenge
Having quality and relevant data is essential to business productivity. MCG was faced with challenges as a result of having a Salesforce instance that was over a decade old. This included outdated data and thousands of duplicate records. Bryan Vaughn, Senior Manager of Sales Operations at MCG health, was tasked with finding a system that could sort through all of their data, organize it, and ensure that there were no longer any duplicates in the system.
“Our team was sending emails to the wrong people and to people that no longer work at an organization. This was a problem because we still had their contact information in our 15 year old database,” explained Vaughn.
As MCG’s processes and systems consumed unstandardized data, Vaughn noticed outcomes such as delayed follow-up times due to inefficient lead routing, inefficient territory management, and the inability to personalize contacts effectively due to inconsistent segmentation.
“Our team couldn’t segment a market, build lists in salesforce, or reassign territories with our old system,” said Vaughn.
Since MCG did not have a system dedicated to an Account-Based Marketing strategy, there was a lack of account lifecycle visibility, so leads were not matched to respective accounts in the CRM. This led to time delays, missed opportunities, and a lack of visibility of all contacts and accounts.
“Hot leads on hot accounts would slip through the cracks because they weren’t linked in our system,” explained Vaughn.
MCG Health needed frequent data bulk updates, but Vaughn noticed that the updates in Salesforce were time consuming and there were limits on what updates could be made, which led to missed opportunities and incorrect reporting of data.
“The Salesforce data loader requires you to download from Salesforce, make the changes and then reload, which was not the best use of our time,” said Vaughn.
“Operations allows our marketing team to be more effective since we now have clean data, no duplicates, and understand what lead scores are when we pass over leads, which are vitally important for us to succeed.”
Bryan Vaughn
Senior Manager of Sales Operations at MCG health
Solution
In search of a platform that could help MCG Health sort through their data, update it, and ensure that there were no duplicates, MCG began using ZoomInfo’s Operations platform, an industry-leading data management and orchestration platform that enables go-to-market teams to prepare, maintain, and route their data assets for activation.
With Operations, Vaughn was able to create customized deduplication tasks using a combination of strict and loose fuzzy matching criteria to ensure that duplicate records were accurately identified. He was then able to control, retain, and prioritize data while maintaining the necessary duplicate corporate hierarchy relationships by customizing pre-built surviving field value templates to MCG Health’s unique business requirements.
By performing mass updates and data normalization using Cleanse, an Operations data orchestration tool, MCG was able to standardize data that consistently flows through its systems for routing, reassignment, and reporting.
MCG Health could incorporate Cleanse into their sales and marketing ecosystem to match leads-to-accounts for prospect accounts, convert leads to contacts for existing customers and merge leads with an existing contact.
“We use lead account linking primarily for lead assignments, which is to route the leads to the right people when a lead comes in that’s associated with a client account that we can turn into a contact record,” explained Vaughn.
MCG Health used Cleanse to easily customize bulk data updates in Salesforce without having to import or export from the Operations platform.
The Results
With 10,000 duplicates merged on the first cleanse, Vaughn has seen reduced error rates and has gained control over parent and child hierarchical account information and relationships. Merged scores are now added together to accurately identify high-potential leads, which aids in their increased ROI of MCG’s marketing activities.
Speaking to the benefit of Operations, Vaughan shares how it “allows our marketing team to be more effective since we now have clean data, no duplicates, and understand what lead scores are when we pass over leads, which are vitally important for us to succeed.”
Standardizing data has helped MCG Health reduce manual intervention tasks, territory assignments and reporting. There is now consistent segmentation to route leads to the correct team member, which leads the team to connect with contacts faster and at the correct time in the buyer’s journey.
Since utilizing Operations, Vaughn and MCG Health have been able to implement automated account-based routing to send the right leads to the right sales reps, which has led to faster follow-ups. MCG Health has noticed an improved account lifespan since they have unified accounts with a single view of a customer for more personalized and effective account-based marketing.
“I can definitely see a need for the linked account feature. It helps our team see all of the leads that are associated with an account, so we can effectively market to them, which ultimately enhances our ABM strategy,” explains Vaughn.
For the team there are now unlimited possibilities for bulk data updates based around MCG’s business requirements. Since implementing Operations, Vaughn has seen how quick territory reassignments and seamless continuation of sales owner activities increase speed-to-lead and give reps more time to focus on selling.
MCG Health can now orchestrate their data using a single platform to overcome their multifaceted data challenges from data decay, lack of data standardization, to complex bulk updates. As a result, MCG has become more efficient in carrying out marketing and sales activities, ultimately improving their revenue.
