Short answer
Data deduplication is finding and merging duplicate records, such as the same client entered twice, so a CRM has one accurate record per person, household or company. It improves reporting, stops duplicate outreach and lowers costs that depend on record counts.
Data Deduplication explained
Duplicates come from web forms, imports, integrations and manual entry. Deduplication combines matching rules (exact and fuzzy matches on name, email, phone, address or account numbers), a survivorship policy that decides which values to keep, and a merge process that preserves activity history. Prevention matters as much as cleanup: duplicate rules, validation and integration design stop new duplicates appearing.
In Salesforce this uses matching and duplicate rules or tools from AgentExchange; in HubSpot, Data Hub's data quality tools.
How Vantage Point helps: we run deduplication projects that have taken clients from tens of thousands of data errors down to a few hundred, then keep them clean.
Frequently asked questions
Can I just delete duplicates?
Merging is safer than deleting because it keeps activity history, related records and the most accurate field values.
How do I stop duplicates coming back?
Use duplicate rules, required fields and validation, and fix the integrations and forms that create them.