Why merge records and what does it mean?

It is common for one record, such as a contact or lead to exist in multiple systems within your technology stack. 

As an example, one record may exist as a contact in your CRM where your sales teams can use to prospect or your service team can use to handle support cases. The same record may also exist within your marketing automation system, where your marketing team runs campaigns. 

The larger your organization, the more likely you are to have many systems with the same data existing in each system.

Navigating within this state can be tricky. One of the benefits of a CDP is that it is able to create a source of truth in which the same record that exists in many systems can be combined into one single record while still maintaining all of the information you care about. Powerful stuff. 

Example: Johnny Appleseed exists in both Salesforce and Marketo. Some of the information I care about is in Marketo and some other important information is in Salesforce. I really need one place where I can see all of the important information. 

There are two important things to remember when you think about multiple records from different systems combining together.

(1) Both Salesforce and Marketo will contain important, unique information about Johnny Appleseed. These two different records with unique fields will be combined into one record. In the CDP, you will see one record with all of the unique, important fields from Salesforce and Marketo. This is where using match Ids and D&B's Identity Resolution engine comes into play. 

(2) Some fields in Salesforce and Marketo will represent the same information. Some examples are First Name, Last Name, Email and the list goes on. For more information on which information will be retained and why check out our related article. 

Identifying how your records merge together is an important step to setting up a CDP.

Taking our example where we have Salesforce and Marketo. It is very common for these two systems to have a bidirectional integration. To achieve this bidirectional sync these systems must know which record in Marketo is which record in Salesforce. This means that one or both of these systems is storing the ID of the other system. 

In our case it is more common for Marketo to store a Salesforce ID than vice versa. This means that when we load our Marketo data to the CDP, we can use this stored Salesforce Id to tell the CDP "Hey these two records are actually the same." 

Related Articles: 

Identity Resolution: How does the D&B CDP match and merge records?

Planning Ahead of Loading Data in the CDP

Importing Accounts and Account Data

Import Contacts and Contact Data