The benefits of aligning marketing and sales teams are well known at this point. One of the elements of a strong marketing-sales relationship is having a seamless integration between their tech tools, like the one between Oracle Eloqua and Salesforce. These integrations make it easier for separate teams to collaborate and share lead data in real-time, thus accelerating the buyer’s path to conversion. Plus, integrating applications helps them take advantage of each other’s data so they can strategize for growth with confidence, not guesswork.
However, as companies adopt these new applications and integrations, some will inevitably hit a wall in their tech capabilities.
“Why can’t my software or integration do this?” they might ask.
That’s where the Solution Architects in the Demand Generation Group at BDO Digital come in! When an Eloqua client expressed a desire to create duplicate lead records — on purpose. Given the negative connotation associated with having duplicate records, the idea sounded a little out of left field. In the end, however, the BDO Digital Solutions Architects decided to take on the challenge of building a seemingly counterintuitive solution: intentional lead duplication.
Asking the Essential Question
Before we got started building this solution, we had to answer the question…why?
That’s not a judgmental question. Traditionally, duplicate leads in your sales and marketing system aren’t desirable. In fact, we have a whole article about how to head off duplicates.
When multiple records exist for one lead, it can cause numerous issues, including:
- Inaccurate data in reporting.
- Inflated forecasts and missed targets.
- Wasted marketing resources and sales efforts.
- Higher costs on data storage.
Duplicate records can also have a negative effect on the customer side. They can unintentionally trigger unwanted outreach, and prospects rarely appreciate being contacted multiple times to have the same conversation. For these reasons, sales and marketing platforms are usually designed to prevent teams from entering duplicate lead records. In the case of the Eloqua and Salesforce integration, a user would encounter an error message when trying to move duplicate data from marketing to sales.
If duplicate leads are known to cause confusion, waste resources and possibly even lose sales, why would anyone ask to make it easier to create them intentionally?
As it turns out, there are a few strong use cases:
The Business Has a Wide Range of Products
Having a wide range of products can help boost revenue and spread risk between various markets. A company with a wide variety of products is more likely to seal the deal if they tailor their processes to those specific products. At the same time, that level of customization means building and implementing more complex rules, triggers and automations. There’s also more nurturing content being sent out and more touchpoints being arranged.
Thankfully, creating complex lead management processes — and executing them with ease — isn’t difficult with system integrations like Eloqua and Salesforce.
But what if a lead has multiple pain points that require two or more vastly different products? Do you track them in one pipeline or all of them? What if the pipelines have some stages in common — do you repeat certain stages with them and risk hurting the buyers’ journey?
Having duplicate leads makes sense if you have one contact who is pursuing more than one product and those products are different enough to necessitate separate lead management processes. This makes it possible for teams to track a single contact through separate instances from the moment they enter the system to the moment the deal is closed while avoiding confusion about where they stand with regards to each product.
The Business Employs Several Sales Teams
Having separate sales teams has its pros and cons. On one hand, sales teams dedicated to a particular product, territory or customer segment have more bandwidth to focus on their specific area and become more knowledgeable about its benefits and features. On the other hand, we have to ask: What if a single contact falls into more than one area?
Splitting an individual lead’s attention between two salespeople isn’t impossible — but it can get confusing on both sides. Leads expect multiple company contacts to communicate with each other, so they don’t have to repeat themselves or get lost in the jumble. Intentional lead duplication lets companies avoid having to restructure sales teams if an individual needs to be tracked by separate sales teams. They can collaborate and share data between each other without messing with the contact’s separate pursuits.
Different Funnels and Pipelines
Suppose a company has a range of products that are all relatively similar but vary slightly in features or inclusions. Imagine also that this company only has one team of marketers and salespeople. Why might this company have a need for duplicate leads?
Suppose one of their leads — Mark S. — is considering two slightly different products, Product A and Product B. He only needs more education and nurturing before he can ultimately determine which solution is best for his needs. However, it’s possible for Mark to be in the interest phase of the Product A marketing funnel while also being qualified to be passed to sales for Product B. Which stage does Mark S. actually fall in? And how do you move him further for either product without making a misstep?
Different products don’t typically have unified taxonomies. By intentionally creating duplicate leads, however, you can track and trigger different statuses within funnels and pipelines, allowing leads to move toward conversion without getting held up or having to repeat phases they’ve already experienced in their journey.
The Key Differentiator: Individuals vs. Pursuits
To make this solution workable, we had to establish a very clear distinction: In duplicate instances, the lead is represented not as an individual but as multiple pursuits. This distinction helps prevent inaccurate reporting and inflated forecasts. By tracking leads as pursuits rather than individuals, marketing and sales teams can trust that their system is taking each instance into account and generating accurate reports.
Pursuits bring to the table the ability for our clients to leverage the power of distinct sales teams and funnel positions across a wide range of products and services — without tripping over themselves trying to maintain a distinction that may not even serve their bottom line.
Intentional Duplicate Leads Aren’t for Everyone
As you can see, there are only a few instances where they would really make sense. For companies with diverse product lines, separate sales teams and highly customized funnels and pipelines, having duplicate lead reports allows them to pursue leads on a product-by-product basis. This saves them from having to entirely restructure their sales teams and practices if they run into problems, which can be an expensive and headache-inducing undertaking.
Creating duplicate leads on purpose sounded like a strange idea at first, but it turned out to be a clever method of expanding our Eloqua integration capabilities. As we said, it’s a niche solution. We recommend implementing duplicate leads for enterprise companies with a clear-cut use case within their Eloqua and Salesforce integration. This solution enabled one of our enterprise clients, for example, to follow up on multiple product interest pipelines simultaneously through different product sales groups. Additionally, adding Eloqua Profiler on top of this integration provides a full view of every single pursuit to enable even greater alignment between marketing and sales.
Leveraging the team at BDO Digital
When Eloqua customers come to us with an idea for a new marketing capability, it’s our job to design it. And because Eloqua is an incredibly powerful platform to work with, we have a fantastic amount of flexibility to make those requests happen — even if they initially seem a little bizarre. We’ve completed hundreds of Eloqua projects with marketing teams around the world. Learn how our team can help you harness the full power of Eloqua in your organization.
Sean Gearhart is an Eloqua Solutions Architect for BDO Digital. As a Solutions Architect, he designs marketing automation solutions to help our clients see their campaigns achieve their fullest potential. When he’s not nerding out in Eloqua, you’ll find him riding roller coasters at an amusement park; or in his back yard grilling, doing landscape work, or playing the bagpipes.
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