Category: CRM & Data Management

Duplicate data. It’s an inherent part of working with databases. Or at least the potential for duplicate data is inherent in databases. But it’s important that you do all you can to avoid creating duplicate records (often shortened to “dupes”), identify them quickly if they exist, and eliminate them as soon as possible—especially in your CRM.

If one team member is adding important information to Record A and another team member is adding data to that record’s duplicate, Record B, you can see how each record ends up having only some of the information it should have. Then, if someone makes a decision based on one record or the other, that decision is likely to be flawed—or at the very least, not well-informed.

You don’t want stakeholders being confused about what they’re looking at. That doesn’t reflect well on your firm or give stakeholders confidence in your ability to deliver accurate information and insights.

Increasingly, a firm’s success is based largely on the quality of its data. And continually “deduping” your data is essential to maintaining high-quality information.

CRM Solutions: Advice for Dealing With Duplicate Data

While there’s no way to completely prevent duplicate database records, there are steps you can take to ensure dupes don’t have a negative impact on your operations. In particular, the recommendations below from our Altvia Care Team can be very helpful:

• Search your database before creating new records. This is an easy step to take, but getting firm-wide buy-in and compliance can be challenging. When people are in a hurry, they tend to trust/hope that the record they’re adding isn’t a duplicate of one already in the database. But, of course, often it is a dupe. So, anything you can do to get team members to spend just 60-90 seconds on a quick search is helpful. This includes searching for any reasonable variations of a name, like “Elizabeth Smith,” “Liz Smith,” and “Beth Smith.”
• Use deduping tools. Tools like Dupe Hunter [A1] can be used to produce a report listing any duplicates found. We recommend running this report weekly. And you should have a “data champion” who is in charge of checking the report and merging or deleting the duplicate records. Reports that get run but then are ignored because everyone assumes someone else will review them aren’t helpful.
• Use dupe prevention tools. Dupe Catcher recognizes duplicate data and displays an error message when someone attempts to enter a duplicate record.
• Normalize data before large imports. Normalizing data is the process of ensuring that records have the same fields in the same order. If you’re adding a large number of records to a database, it’s easier to catch dupes if the data is normalized.
• Use Salesforce’s deduping functionality. Salesforce, the foundation of Altvia’s CRM, has built-in deduplication functionality that can be especially helpful when importing large data sets. Find the data import tool by clicking your name and then “My Settings” and “Import.”

Cleaner Data Gives You a Competitive Edge

In today’s competitive business environment, having to stop what you’re doing and figure out which one of two (or more!) duplicate records are accurate and up-to-date can be costly. ven one pair of duplicates that doesn’t get handled promptly and properly can lead to confusion and poor decisions.

Continually ensuring that the data in your CRM is clean takes some effort—no doubt about it. But if you put best practices into place and provide reminders about those practices until system users have developed good deduping habits, you’ll find that the benefits far outweigh your time-and-effort costs!

There’s no doubt that Salesforce.com is the world’s best-of-breed CRM application. It has been for decades and it only gets better with each passing year. But the scale at which the company operates is truly impressive—74 “server pods” distributed strategically around the globe serving close to three billion transactions every day! And odds are that in the time it took you to read that sentence, those numbers have increased.

The effort involved in maintaining that kind of operation and infrastructure is huge. Consequently, it’s no surprise that Salesforce users get regular salesforce maintenance notifications in their email.

Salesforce Maintenance Notifications Are Important

You may or may not see the notifications that Salesforce sends. At Altvia, we certainly do, and they’re very important. So, if you tend to skip right over them as you go through your email or even delete them, you should start opening the notifications and reading them.

Here’s why: The type of maintenance that the Salesforce.com infrastructure requires varies greatly, but to accommodate its extraordinary growth, a common Salesforce maintenance task is to “split” pods. That means taking customers and their data on a specific pod (like NA15, or North America #15) to a new pod.

No matter what type of Salesforce maintenance is needed, more often than not it requires a company’s system administrator to make changes to the configuration of the organization’s Salesforce “instance” and any applications (like our CRM solution) that are running inside of it. Because these aren’t Salesforce’s applications, they don’t make the necessary changes.

But rest assured: Our team monitors these Salesforce maintenance notices closely and we handle everything that’s required to keep your Altvia solutions delivering peak performance.

Service and Support That’s “Above and Beyond”

One of the things we pride ourselves on at Altvia is providing the type of service and support that goes above and beyond both what’s expected and what our competitors deliver.

In short, we provide the kind of service we hope to get from the companies that we deal with.

But we don’t go the extra mile to beat our competitors. Honestly, we just enjoy our jobs more when we do things the right way. Leaving a support task poorly or partially completed just isn’t an option for us. And when happy Altvia clients express their appreciation, that’s icing on the cake!

So, when you get a Salesforce maintenance notification, be sure to read it. If what you need to do as a result of the maintenance is clear, that’s great. If it’s not clear, or you simply want to talk with us before making any changes, we’re here for you.

If you connect with someone you haven’t talked with before, don’t be surprised. Our commitment to unrivaled customer service gets noticed, and as the number of clients we’re privileged to work with grows, so does our employee count.

From assistance with Salesforce maintenance notifications to actionable insights based on our decades of immersion in private equity and venture capital, we’re happy to help in any way we can.

Altvia is a customizable fund manager software on Salesforce. It allows for easy management of fundraising, portfolio tracking, and reporting while also allowing users to customize their experience with third-party add-ons that provide advanced features to power firm workflows.

Altvia can be accessed anywhere through the internet or mobile devices, which makes it an ideal solution for those constantly on the go.

Altvia vs. Salesforce

Altvia is the go-to platform for Alternative Asset Managers, who love Salesforce but find that it doesn’t provide features specific to the industry. One example of this is Salesforce Private Equity/Venture Capital template. While it is a well-built product it is not a scalable solution, making it an investment without long-term potential.

Altvia’s proprietary “Interactions” functionality dynamically and automatically links data and contact information to ensure your CRM is up-to-date and accurate. Files, meeting notes, and contacts stay aligned for a 360-degree view of your firm’s activities.

Salesforce’s native activities functionality allows you to track meeting notes but limits the number of companies, deals, or fundraising opportunities to one. Comprehensive interaction tracking would require duplicative data entry, which would still result in a fragmented set of answers to a simple question: what you talked about with whom. We’ve invested thousands of hours enhancing Interactions’ flexibility, and trying to reproduce them would prove frustrating and expensive.

Build vs. Buy Your Fund Manager Software

Altvia’s CRM comes out of the box with industry-specific reports built based on best practices and feedback from clients within the industry. The system allows users to create print-ready reports with the click of a button.

Consultants will likely need to start from scratch when building reports designed for Private Capital Markets. The construction of these reports will be based entirely on the feedback of the firm and likely will not be based on the industry experience the consultant has. Ultimately, more time and money will be required to design and build insightful reports.

Salesforce is a platform selected for its flexibility and user-friendliness. You don’t need to have the technical expertise to build databases within the platform.

If time and resources can be dedicated to a custom database, an extremely viable fund management CRM software can be developed on the Salesforce platform.

Keeping the necessary questions in mind before deciding whether to build or buy is important.

Generally, these questions include:

• Who will support the system?
• Who will maintain the system?
• How will the solution continue to grow and evolve?
• What happens if the employee who supports and maintains the system leaves the organization?

Why Fund Managers Choose Altvia

Designed for alternative investments, Altvia is a solution built on the Salesforce platform,  trusted by hundreds of fund managers since 2006. When you work with Altvia, you are partnered with an experienced team of Private Capital Markets project managers and data experts who understand how our product solves top industry issues and best practices.

Implementation includes personalized sessions with a designated project manager to identify your unique day-to-day functions and make a customized platform that reflects existing processes. We ensure the platform is effective for you from day one. We also offer 24/5 support from our internal support team. We’re here to answer your questions and offer guidance throughout your journey on our platform.

Altvia has grown to be the leading fund manager software through industry-specific technology experts and years of experience.