How Planet Reduced Duplicate Accounts by 40% with Traction Complete

Highlights

• Significantly reduced time spent on data cleaning through automated deduplication of accounts and contacts, turning processes that took days into minutes.
• Automated lead routing ensured leads from marketing campaigns and events were instantly routed to the correct sales representatives, eliminating manual assignment and delays.
• Improved accuracy of sales opportunity categorization (new, cross-sell, upsell), providing reliable data for executive reporting and ensuring correct sales commissions. This led to the identification of €4 million more in cross-sell deals in a pilot program.
• Enabled better tracking of sales lead engagement with lead timers, fostering quicker follow-ups and reducing the risk of leads going cold. 

Overview

Planet is a leading provider of payment solutions, encompassing payment gateways, payment services, and terminal solutions for the hospitality and retail industries. They offer a comprehensive suite of services designed to streamline payment processes for hotels, restaurants, shops, and other businesses requiring payment solutions.

The Challenge

Tackling data complexity from acquisitions

Following several acquisitions, Planet faced significant challenges with data management within their Salesforce environment. The influx of data from different systems resulted in a large volume of duplicate accounts and contacts.

This “messy data” led to confusion in customer identification and hindered effective marketing campaigns.

Additionally, inconsistencies in data entry, particularly in categorizing the type of sales opportunities (new, cross-sell, upsell), led to inaccurate reporting and potential discrepancies in sales commissions.

“We had about four or five companies merge into ours, which obviously created a data challenge. We had many different data sources to integrate, leading to potential duplicates in a lot of places. Additionally, some people internally didn’t always follow the processes, which also created duplicates.”

– Jack Dickinson, Marketing Operations Manager at Planet

Inefficient, manual sales operations

The lead routing process at Planet was largely manual, requiring someone to assign leads to the appropriate sales team members. This created delays and required significant back-and-forth communication, hindering the speed at which sales could engage with potential customers. 

The onboarding team spent a considerable amount of time manually adjusting incorrectly categorized sales opportunities. There was also a lack of automated notifications to inform sales teams of these changes. 

The monthly process of manually cleaning duplicate contacts consumed hours of valuable time and resources, diverting the team from strategic initiatives.

Solution

Recognizing the need for a streamlined and automated approach to managing their Salesforce data and sales processes, Planet implemented several Traction Complete solutions.

“Being able to look at everything we’re doing from a more automated standpoint and being able to set up these automations to streamline our processes has benefited what we’re doing and really aligns with the company values.”

Improving data integrity with deduplication

Planet leveraged Complete Clean to tackle their data quality issues, establishing criteria across various data points to identify, review, and merge duplicate accounts. This process provided the flexibility to choose which data to retain from each record, ensuring no critical data was lost and resulting in a 40% reduction in account duplicates in the initial phase. 

To further streamline data management, the system also automatically identifies and merges newly created contacts with existing records based on customizable matching rules, significantly reducing the manual effort involved in proactive contact deduplication.

Automating and accelerating lead routing

To improve lead response times and efficiency, Planet implemented Complete Leads to automate their lead routing process. They configured flows to automatically assign leads to specific sales representatives based on the lead source (e.g., marketing campaigns, events). This eliminated the reliance on manual assignment, ensuring leads reached the right people instantly and improving follow-up speed. 

Complete Leads’ intuitive flow configuration simplified the management and updating of routing rules, even for team members who were new to automation tools. 

Additionally, the implementation of lead timers provided visibility into how long salespeople were taking to progress leads, encouraging quicker engagement and preventing leads from going cold.

“The biggest improvement I’ve seen when using Traction Complete’s solutions is that it’s definitely taken a lot of processes down from what could potentially be days into a matter of minutes or hours.”

Streamlining opportunity management with customizable flows

Planet also used Traction Complete’s automation capabilities to develop custom flows for analyzing and correcting the categorization of sales opportunities. These flows examined the products associated with closed opportunities and compared them to existing account information to determine if they should be classified as new, cross-sell, or upsell opportunities. 

This automation helped cleanse historical data and ensure the accurate categorization of new opportunities, leading to more reliable reporting for the executive leadership team, particularly regarding cross-selling efforts, and ensuring accurate sales commissions.

This process identified an additional €4 million in cross-sell deals that were previously miscategorized.  

The Final Word

The implementation of Traction Complete solutions has been transformative for Planet, enabling them to overcome significant data quality challenges and streamline their sales operations. 

By automating critical processes such as lead routing and data deduplication, and by improving the accuracy of their sales data, Planet has achieved substantial time savings, enhanced the reliability of their business insights, and fostered a more efficient sales environment.

“Using Traction Complete solutions really aligns with our company’s sales and growth strategies. A big focus for us is efficiency, making sure all our processes work as smoothly as possible, cutting out a lot of unnecessary work, and ensuring we’re not wasting time on things that aren’t a priority.”

With cleaner data, automated processes, and improved visibility into their sales pipeline, Planet is well-equipped to continue driving efficient growth and achieving their strategic objectives.

“I would 100% recommend Traction Complete to anyone that uses Salesforce. They will help you sort out any type of automation that you want to implement.”