How much are duplicates costing your team?

Duplicates cost your team time: the hours spent finding them, checking each set, merging by hand, fixing reports and looking for the right record. For 1,000 duplicate sets at 2 minutes each, that's about 33 hours of someone's work.

That time rarely shows up anywhere. It's spread across an admin's week, a few minutes before each sales call and an afternoon fixing a report that didn't add up. Because nobody adds it together, the cost stays invisible.

In this post, you'll see where the time goes, what it adds up to and how to estimate it for your own CRM.

Where the time goes

Manual work on duplicates falls into a few tasks. Some land on the admin, and others are spread across the whole team.

Finding duplicates

Someone has to spot them first. That means sorting lists, scanning names and following up on reps who think a record exists twice. Duplicates that differ by a typo or a second email take the longest to find.

Checking each set

Before merging, a person opens the records and compares them. Same person or two people who share a phone? Which email is current, and who should own the record? Exact email matches take seconds. Near matches and records with blank fields take minutes.

Merging by hand

Native merging usually works on two or three records at a time. A person who exists four times takes several merges. Each one is its own set of clicks and choices about which values to keep.

Fixing reports

Duplicates inflate counts of contacts, companies and deals. Someone ends up reconciling the numbers by hand before a meeting, often more than once, because the duplicates are still there next month.

Searching for the right record

Reps feel this one most. Before a call or an email, they search, find two or three records and have to work out which one has the latest notes. Sometimes they pick the wrong one and log activity there, which creates more work later.

Repeating the cleanup

New duplicates keep arriving, so the work comes back. A cleanup done by hand once a quarter is the same cost paid four times a year. Why duplicates keep coming back covers where the new ones come from.

What it adds up to

The math is simple: the number of duplicate sets times the minutes each one takes. The minutes are what vary, so it helps to run the numbers at a few speeds.

At 2 minutes a set, 1,000 sets is close to a full working week for one person. At 5,000 sets, it's about a month. That's before reports, rep time or the new duplicates that arrive while the cleanup runs.

Rep time adds up differently, in small pieces. If each of ten reps loses an hour a week to duplicate records, that's 10 hours a week, or more than 500 hours a year.

How to estimate the cost for your team

You can get a working number in an afternoon. It doesn't need to be exact, just good enough to compare with what fixing the problem would take.

• Count the duplicate sets per object. Contacts, companies and deals often have very different counts. What counts as a duplicate is case by case, so agree on that before you count.
• Time a sample. Merge 20 sets by hand the way you normally would, and time them. Do a few easy ones and a few unclear ones.
• Multiply. Sets times minutes per set, divided by 60, gives the hours for the backlog.
• Add the inflow. Count how many new duplicates appear in a typical week, and add their time as a weekly cost.
• Ask the reps. A quick question about how long they spend finding the right record each week is usually enough.
• Add report fixes. Count the hours spent each month reconciling numbers that duplicates threw off.

If you have an hourly cost for each role, multiply the hours by it. You can also run your numbers through our free duplicate cost calculator. To turn the result into a proposal, see how to make the case for a CRM cleanup.

Where the hours can be won back

Not every hour has to go. Unclear sets, like two people who share a household phone, deserve a person's judgment. The time worth cutting is the time spent on decisions that are already obvious.

Three changes usually cut the most:

• Merge the certain sets in bulk. Exact matches on a strong field don't need one-by-one review once the search is tested.
• Send only unclear sets to review. The person's time goes where it's needed.
• Handle new duplicates on a schedule. Merging tested matches automatically keeps the backlog from building up again.

How long a CRM cleanup takes goes through planning the time phase by phase.

Put a number on the time

Duplicates cost your team time in small pieces that are easy to overlook. Think of a few minutes per set, an hour of a rep's week or an afternoon on a report. Added together, they often come to days or weeks of work.

Counting your sets and timing a sample turns that into a number you can plan around. Once you know it, it's easier to decide which sets need a person and which ones don't.

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