Watermark Insights is an American company that offer technology in the education services space. Watermark Insights helps colleges and universities use better data to improve learning.

Our company acquired three companies last year & each company had their own Salesforce instance. We had to merge all of the company’s Salesforce Orgs together.

Following the acquisition of 3 companies, Watermark Insights inherited 3 Salesforce Orgs. The data operations team was faced with the resource-intensive task of merging this new data with their existing Salesforce & Marketo records.

Even with a Salesforce consulting team to aid them in this 6-month project, the merging of these databases led to an overnight disaster of 100,000 duplicates added to Watermark’s Salesforce & Marketo.

When we combined the 3 Salesforce instances, the duplicate contacts in Salesforce pushed all these duplicate records back to us in Marketo.

Watermark Insights needed to not just merge object to object duplicates, but cross object duplicates too (lead to contact and lead to account).

One of the biggest challenges is this wasn’t just contact to contact records or lead to lead records. The majority of these duplicates were lead to contact object records.

Duplicate records created huge problems for Watermark’s sales and marketing team. Marketing was unable to run personalized campaigns, and the sales team couldn’t distinguish the accurate data from the inaccurate data, killing productivity and revenue generation.

From a marketing standpoint, we just added 100,000 duplicates and now we’re trying to do personalized campaigns. This obviously didn’t work. On the sales side, Sales reps didn’t know which fields we were actually using, what data was sourced correctly, and what record was actually a duplicate.

Calon Alpar, the Senior Manager of Demand Generation, took on the responsibility of solving the dirty data nightmare. After, spending time assessing the database issue, Calon understood that there was no solution within their current set of tools

We needed a tool that could merge different objects effectively and we know that Salesforce doesn’t play too nicely when it comes to deduping lead to contact across objects.

To ensure that he was going to not lose any valuable data during the merge, Calon sought a solution in which he could effectively customize and prioritize how the information from the duplicate objects were merging –

With RingLead we were able to customize their dedupe merging templates to fit our custom processes and workflows. For example, we could combine the lead scores on duplicate records and we were able to priorize picklist values in our our lead lifecycle and status fields.

He also needed a data quality vendor that would function with a dedicated on-call support team so his team could effectively get this project up and running quickly.

One of the things that were fantastic with RingLead was their support team – which was led by Elliott Lowe a 3x Marketo Champion. He helped me build out all the rules and processes in RingLead & got accustomed to my frequent calls. Throughout the onboarding experience and still to this day being a RingLead customer, I’ve worked a lot with Elliott.

With the RingLead Platform, Watermark Insights’ data ops team was able to remove all of 100,000 duplicate in a few weeks. They merged all of their cross object duplicates while ensuring that the data on those fields was prioritized and combined effectively/correctly.

We saw MQLS happening after every task because we are now combining activity of records that should have been together all along

In addition to solving the person to person duplicate problem, Watermark was able to effectively set up an automated process to link incoming leads to existing accounts. RingLead’s proprietary lead-to-account linking gave the sales team a more accurate view of their accounts and leads, allowing Calon to utilize the account data at the lead level.

Before we are able to implement RingLead’s lead to account matching, we weren’t really able to market to leads from an account based marketing perspective.

Overall, RingLead helped Watermark with the challenging task of merging databases while providing ongoing duplicate protection.