How do you currently manage your duplicates across both platforms?
We have tried a few contenders out there (InCycle, DeDuply) and none can manage the duplicates completely or across platforms.
Hoping to find out what other organizations are doing to manage the duplicate situation.
Hi @Melly2022
Thank you for reaching out.
I want to tag some of our experts here - @Aakar @LaurenKenny @jolle do you have any thoughts for @Melly2022 on this?
Thank you!
Best
Tiphaine
@TitiCuisset thanks for the tag!
@Melly2022 this is a great question and a common struggle when you’re using multiple CRMs. I’m not sure if you’re speaking to contacts, deals, or companies, so I’ll touch on all of them to be safe.
Contacts
You probably know this, but HubSpot deduplicates contacts based on the email address. If a contact doesn’t have an email address, there is no way for HubSpot to deduplicate it. And if you have multiple contacts for the same personal with different email addresses (i.e., work email address, personal email address), HubSpot will treat them as different contacts unless the records are merged. If you have at least a Professional subscription, you also get access to the manual deduplication tool (more info in this HubSpot Knowledge Base article). That’s the best tool I’ve found for identifying duplicate records based on name/company/etc.
In Salesforce, you can easily have duplicate records of the same lead/contact. In my experience, the best thing to do is completely audit and consolidate your Salesforce database. Any issues in Salesforce will pass to HubSpot (and vice versa), so both platforms need to be in ship shape. I’ll be honest though — no system can do all that for you. You and your team need to stay on top of database management and be mindful of the new contacts you’re creating (especially when they come in through the HubSpot Sales extension). It’s a grind, but I recommend exporting all of your contacts into a spreadsheet, consolidating them (or identifying contacts that should be removed), and reimporting them to zero out your CRMs.
Companies
Company records start to get trickier. In HubSpot, company records are deduplicated based on the company domain name. This creates a challenge for child companies or specific locations of greater companies that use the same website domain, so it’s pretty common to have at least a couple duplicates here. When bringing in companies from Salesforce, HubSpot looks at the associated contacts to determine whether or not the company record exists already. Definitely be sure that all applicable contacts are associated with the right company/account record in both HubSpot and Salesforce.
From there, leverage the duplicates tool in HubSpot mentioned above to identify potential duplicate company records.
Deals
As far as I know, deals can be deduplicated only by Deal ID in HubSpot. HubSpot isn’t looking at the deal name or anything like that to determine if it’s a duplicate. When you’re bringing Salesforce opportunities into HubSpot, every opportunity will be created as a separate deal since there’s no way to deduplicate. You just need to make sure that you didn’t have the same deal in place in both HubSpot and Salesforce (and you can check out the associated contacts to ensure that they’re not tied to the same deal more than once).
Take a look at duplicate records and see if you can track down where the duplicate originated. Sometimes there’s old data or a rep who keeps creating contacts unsupervised that can throw off the flow of everything.
Hope this helps!!
Hello @jolle
Thank you for that very detailed answer. I am referring to contacts only, and more on the topic of large-scale deduplicating simultaneously across platforms. (Currently, we sit with over 3000 dupes detected and likely much more in SF). Or something scaleable long-term. We have repeatedly addressed in-house processes with sales reps’ behaviours and put in place limits to prevent duplications, but it isn’t always stopping it.
I am our HS super user, built our current platform from the beginning and I am aware of many of the features available and also I would say intermediate when it comes to the salesforce platform. We have top tier subscription in HS.
Currently our process has us having to manually deduplicate in HubSpot then move over to SF and repeat that process again - imagine that with over 3000 duplicates 
it’s just not realistic.
Hey @Melly2022,
Thank you for giving Insycle a try. I work there as a product marketer. I’m not sure if you’ve already spoken to our team or not, but we work really hard to provide a complete deduplication solution for HubSpot/Salesforce integrations. I would love to hear more about what you were attempting to do and what wasn’t working so I can pass the suggestions on to our product team.
Thanks!
Ryan
Hi Ryan,
I worked closely with the team, but ultimately merging leads to existing contacts was not possible as well as a few other reasons. Unless there have been recent updates to the tool, it couldn’t meet our needs at the time.
@Melly2022 , Gotcha! Thank you for giving it a shot. I am not sure if we’ve had any significant updates, depending on when you used Insycle. If you’d like to DM me your company name I can look into if there are any relevant updates to share.
We will review tricky duplicate issues like this in our upcoming training session on duplicates in the HubSpot Salesforce integration. Register here!
PS - If you register in advance, we’ll email you the recording after if you can’t make it.