92% of the businesses in a survey admitted they face the problem of lead duplication in their business. This is a common problem that occurs due to the mismanagement of leads.
In this blog post, we’ll see – How lead duplication negatively impacts your sales and what can you do about it?
How is lead duplication killing your sales?
It’s a simple fact that when you offer the same information or product to people multiple times, they get annoyed and cost you time and company resources.
Following are the ways lead duplication can affect your sales:
Misleading data
How do you determine which one is correct if you have multiple records of the same account?
There are instances when you just cannot.
When the marketing or sales teams work on leads, they might use the wrong information. This can create a sequence of wrong actions that will kill your sales. For example, with the wrong information, they’ll be unable to send the right message to the customer at the right time. Or, they can send them the wrong information altogether.
For example, there is a lead ready for conversion, but the same lead is present in cold outreach. This will confuse your sales team, and they might reinitiate the prospecting.
Waste of time and money
Lead duplication can waste a lot of time and money for both you and your clients. Imagine how unproductive and expensive it will be for three salespeople to contact the same prospect. And this also represents a bad image in front of your customer that your company is disorganized and uninformed.
In order to save the wasted time and money caused by lead duplication, businesses must identify the reason behind the entrance of duplicate data into the system. Then, with a little effort, companies can place stop-gap measures to help reduce duplication’s effect.
Missed opportunities
If duplicate data is present, that means the data in your customer profile is scattered. In addition, information is available in various data and formats, which means you don’t have a complete picture of your client’s journey.
It means you’re missing important opportunities to increase the revenue you can earn or build a stronger relationship with your customers. You may lack all the details you need to make informed selling decisions, like recommending products or developing custom deals.
Additionally, it’s difficult to measure your sales and marketing efforts. However, you can figure out exactly which of your efforts was successful.
Inaccurate reporting
The duplicate data in your marketing and sales reports appear more impressive or less than they actually are.
For example, If you’re trying to predict the revenue from your sales funnel and already have duplicate leads, your predicted revenue may look more than you’ll actually get. And if you’re using these numbers to make important business decisions, you’ll be dissatisfied with the results.
The more genuine your data is, the more accurate your reports will be. Deduplicating leads is critical if you use reports in your business to make critical decisions. Failing to do so can lead to a major wrong decision which can be deadly to your business.
Poor customer service
Most importantly, the fact that you’re unable to verify or correct information is a disservice to your clients. They don’t want to become mere leads when they contact you and ask for help. Instead, they’re looking for personal experience, and it’s your responsibility to prove that you know their name, company, and requirements.
Having multiple leads makes it more difficult to provide the same level of service to customers. In the end, you could look unprofessional, or perhaps unable to assist the customer.
And when this happens, the only people who will be happy are your competitors.
How to deduplicate your leads?
The consequences of duplicate leads are disastrous, such as lost opportunities, frustrating customer service, and wasted time and resources.
Fortunately, there are ways for lead deduplication. You can identify and remove identical leads quickly and easily by automating your lead-creation process and tracking your leads’ journeys through your sales pipeline. Here are four tips for deduplicating your sales leads:
1. Automate your lead-creation process
The more things you automate in your marketing funnel, the less possibility there is for human error to introduce duplicates into your pipelines. This includes everything from collecting customer data in lead capture forms to automatically adding contacts to email lists after they sign up for your newsletter or download your whitepaper.
2. Utilize automated lead-tracking software
Many leading lead-tracking tools offer features that help you identify duplicates automatically (or at least detect potential issues early). These tools include features like contact lifecycle tracking, real-time lead scoring, and automatic reporting that highlights inactive or low-value leads.
3. Review your sales leads
Once you’ve automated your lead-creation process and used a lead-tracking tool to identify potential duplicates, it’s important to review the data closely to identify any possible issues. For example, You may find that some of your leads have already been closed or contacted while others haven’t progressed very far in your sales pipeline. In these cases, it’s important to prioritize which leads to follow up on and remove any duplicates from your pipeline.
4. Track your results
By automating your lead-creation process and using a lead-tracking tool to identify potential duplicates, you’ll be able to track your results over time and see which approaches are most effective in increasing sales. This information can help you improve your marketing strategy and eliminate waste resources in the future.
Summary
Lead duplication can be a real problem for businesses. Not only is it expensive to fix, but it can also damage your relationships with your customers. We hope this article has helped you to understand the dangers of lead duplication and how to deduplicate them.
By understanding where your leads are coming from, you can begin taking steps to reduce the risk of losing sales due to lead duplication. In addition, armed with this information, you can start rebuilding your database and protecting yourself from potential losses in the future.
Interesting Related Article: “Understanding Data Hygiene“