HubSpot Uses AI to Make Contact and Company Deduplication Simple

Machine learning takes time-intensive, data-driven tasks and makes them more efficient. Plus, the models continually improve at making predictions through more data and user input.  

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of machine learning use cases in marketing and sales.

Take, for example, deduplication of contacts and companies in your CRM. Finding, updating and merging duplicate records is a pain, and often overlooked or ignored.

And, yet, duplicate records:

• Cost your business money.
• Lead to bad customer experiences (e.g. get the same email to two different addresses).
• Create wasted effort for your sales team.
• Impact email deliverability.
• Result in inaccurate performance reports (e.g. list sizes are wrong, email open rates are artificially low).

HubSpot is tackling the deduplication challenge with a new AI-powered tool that automatically recognizes (i.e. predicts) duplicate contacts and companies, and lets users review and merge records in the CRM system.

According to HubSpot,

“Before today, your options for cleaning up duplicate data in HubSpot were painful. Do it manually, sifting through spreadsheets for hours every week. Hire an extra set of hands to do it for you. Buy an expensive third-party tool whose price explodes as your database grows. Or do nothing at all, and let the dupes pile up. You haven’t been shy about this pain — finding and merging duplicates is the second highest vote-getter on our ideas forum.

“Today, all that changes: You’ve got a brand new tool that finds duplicate contact and company data in HubSpot. No extra spreadsheets, tools, or costs. Plus, because it uses machine learning, it’ll get smarter as you grow. So you’ll be more efficient, and your customers will have more frictionless experiences with your brand.”

HubSpot’s model considers name, email(s), IP-derived country, phone number, zip code, and company name when comparing two objects. When you accept (merge) or reject (dismiss) a pair as duplicates, you’re providing feedback to the model to help it improve over time. HubSpot plans to add more data to the model in the future.

So, if you’re a HubSpot customer, visit your Contacts or Companies section in your portal and take the deduplication tool for spin.

Learn more on the HubSpot User Blog post, The Ultimate Guide to Your New Deduplication Tool in HubSpot.

Image: HubSpot