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.
- Corrected opportunity categorization (new, cross-sell, upsell) so executive reporting and sales commissions ran on reliable data, and found €4 million more in cross-sell deals in a pilot
- Routed inside sales leads on a round robin that skips reps who are on vacation, including the language-specific assignments
- Stamped a first-response time on every routed lead, measured against Planet’s own business hours
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.
It’s really important for us to have reliable, updated and accurate data.
Jack Dickinson, Marketing Operations Manager at Planet
Planet has grown through multiple acquisitions. And each one brought its own systems and customer data into the same Salesforce org. Existing customers also come back for additional products, so every opportunity required correct categorization as new business, upsell, or cross-sell to feed both executive reporting and sales commissions.
Over time, multiple years of acquired legacy data filled the org with duplicate accounts and contacts that manual cleanup could not fix.
Opportunity types were also set by hand and often wrong, which skewed executive reporting and sales commissions.
Lead ownership was decided by hand, too.
Campaigns and event leads waited for a person to decide who took each one, with back-and-forth over ownership. And no field on the lead recorded how much time elapsed before somebody picked it up.
The Challenge
Tackling data complexity from acquisitions
Several acquired companies’ datasets fed into Planet’s Salesforce environment, each getting a light pass of matching and cleaning before joining the shared org. But Planet didn’t source its accounts from a data provider, so the acquired records carried no shared identifier to match on.
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
Planet bulk loaded the acquired data, and Salesforce overrides duplicate rule settings for records that arrive through the data import tools or the APIs, so the data went in unchecked.
Once the records were in, an API merge took three records at a time and kept the main record’s values, blanks included, and the team had to copy a better address from a duplicate onto the main record by hand before merging.
The duplicates made it hard to identify which account was the customer and hindered the marketing campaigns the team built on that data. Cleaning duplicate contacts by hand each month consumed hours.
Manual opportunity categorization skewed reporting and commissions
Planet’s original setup required reps to set opportunity type by hand, new, cross-sell, or upsell. And it wasn’t consistent.
Commission rates differed by opportunity type. And Planet’s leadership team tracked pipeline targets per type, so a miscategorized opportunity paid the rep the wrong amount and put the wrong cross-sell number in front of executives.
An opportunity holds one type-of-sale value while the products on it can be a mix. And Planet calculates commissions on the opportunity, so the mix has to resolve to one value.
Fixing this problem required the onboarding team to invest 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.
Lead assignment waited on a person, and vacations broke the language routing
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.
Some of Planet’s leads route by language, and those entries point at one named rep each. Planet needed those assignments to skip that rep during vacation, and needed a way to see how long a lead had been sitting once it landed.
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.
Jack Dickinson, Marketing Operations Manager at Planet
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. On each merge, the team chooses which data to keep from each record, so the best data from each legacy system survives the merge.
Due to multiple acquisitions, we faced significant data challenges with a high volume of duplicate records.
Traction Complete has been instrumental in allowing us to pick and choose the best data to retain. This has been crucial in dealing with the legacy data from the acquired companies and ensuring we have a cleaner, more accurate view of our customers
Jack Dickinson, Marketing Operations Manager at Planet
The team reviews each set of matches before the merge runs and chooses what to keep, so the merge drops no critical data. During the first cleanup phase, the team cut duplicate accounts by 40%.
There’s a lot of pick and choosing we can do. There’s a lot of customizability and it’s just a really great way of helping us at the moment make our data as clean and as individual as possible.
Jack Dickinson, Marketing Operations Manager at Planet
To further streamline data management, Complete Clean 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, with a clock on every lead
Complete Leads took over Planet’s lead assignment work. A configured flow automatically reads where a lead came from (e.g., marketing, campaigns, events), and assigns it accordingly. In Jack Dickinson’s own words:
If we want to route our leads to the correct people, send them to our inside sales team or send them to specific salespeople based on where these leads come from, we can set that up in a really easy manner that’s really easy to understand.
Jack Dickinson, Marketing Operations Manager at Planet
Complete Leads’ intuitive controls also meant that team members new to automation could manage and update the routing rules themselves, without pulling in IT or a Salesforce admin.
And to ensure Planet’s language-based routing still worked with team members out on vacation, Planet reused the vacation rules already running on its inside sales round robin.
Language-specific leads go to one named person each, and a rotation of one has no second rep to skip to. Planet set each of those reps up as their own round robin with the other inside sales rep as the backup user, and a language-routed lead arriving during a vacation falls through to a colleague.
Each routed lead also starts a first-response timer that stamps its elapsed time to a field on the lead record when the timer stops. Planet asked for those timers to measure against non-default business hours, so the elapsed time counts the hours the team was open. The timers show how long salespeople take to progress a lead, which encourages quicker engagement and prevents leads from going cold.
Planet also added in some exception rules to duplicates, because some were deliberate.
When a contact Planet already knows comes back through a form or an event and starts talking to a different salesperson, a flow creates a second lead on purpose, and the new conversation keeps its own activity thread separate from the older relationship. A guard stops that flow running twice on the same contact in one day.
Streamlining opportunity management with customizable flows
For the opportunity-type problem, Planet built flows with Traction Complete that validate the category against the account’s actual purchase history.
The flow reads the products on an opportunity and compares them with what the account has bought before: no prior products means new business, the same product again means upsell, and a different product means cross-sell.
This flow counts a product as bought only where a prior opportunity has a signed contract or the account is already live and transacting, because an open opportunity is not evidence that the merchant owns the product.
Criteria groups then combine the product with the result, so the flow evaluates a case like acquiring cross-sell on its own terms.
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.
Jack Dickinson, Marketing Operations Manager at Planet
Planet ran this flow retroactively over its historical opportunities in batches by account, and Jack Dickinson checked a processed flag on every record afterwards and went back through the ones that had not cleared. A pilot of the correction work identified €4 million more in cross-sell deals sitting under the wrong type.
The categorization logic came out of working sessions with Traction Complete’s customer success team.
Much of that work went into defining Planet’s own rules, including whether a second sale of a product the merchant already runs counts as upsell or cross-sell.
My experience with the customer success team at Traction Complete has been incredible.
The best thing is definitely just having people there to work with, bounce ideas off of, and to help you implement these crazy, insane solutions that you might think would be impossible based on the data that you have. But actually using Traction Complete, it’s really viable
Jack Dickinson, Marketing Operations Manager at Planet
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.
Jack Dickinson, Marketing Operations Manager at Planet
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.
Jack Dickinson, Marketing Operations Manager at Planet
