HEARD: The dedupe runbook ops teams run before any CRM migration.

HEARD: The dedupe runbook ops teams run before any CRM migration.
A source close to a Salesforce-to-pipeline move told us the merge step is where data dies. Their order of operations:
— Back up the full object, export to cold storage, verify the row count
— Standardize before matching: lowercase emails, strip +tags, normalize phone to E.164
— Match on email first, domain+name second, never fuzzy-name alone
— Merge into the record with the most recent activity, not the oldest
— Hold a 1% sample aside and hand-check the merges before bulk apply
The team that fuzzy-matched on company name merged two real customers into one. Watch this.