Lead to Account Matching and Association Best Practices

Insycle uses the existing data in your CRM to identify records that should be associated. Matching associated records requires using similar fields for both record types.

For example, if you are associating contacts with companies, you might use the contact’s “Company Name” field and match it to the company’s “Company Name” field.

If you associate a child company with a parent company, you might use the “Company Domain” field on both records.

Or, if you were associating contacts to deals, you might find the associations using the "Associated Company ID" for both the contact and the deal.

In the Advanced tab, you can make associations using related fields. For instance, you might associate two records using the “Website URL” field and also look at the values in the “Additional Domains” field of the associated record. This provides extra flexibility, allowing you to identify more missing associations.

Start small and cover the obvious bases, such as matching contacts to companies for association using the company name. Then broaden how you match associated records, by using the Similar Match Comparison Rule and you'll be able to identify more missing associations in your database. 

Similar matching allows you to match associated records even when the data has slight differences between the two related records.

You can also build multiple templates using different fields to catch more missing associations. For example, you could match child companies to parent companies using Company Domain as a standard, but you could have an additional template that uses fields like Phone Number or Address to catch more missing associations that otherwise would have gone undetected.

Start in Preview Mode to evaluate your templates. When you are satisfied, run them in Update Mode to push the associations live.

Insycle's Associate app gives you two Comparison Rule options for matching fields—Exact Match and Similar Match. While not ideal for every situation, Similar Match can be a good way to find companies that have slightly different values between the records.

Similar Match analyzes the closeness between two data points by measuring the number of changes needed to make them match. This is called "edit distance" and includes counting insertions, deletions, and substitutions. This can help you to account for differences in formatting and typos.

For instance, Similar Match could detect matches that are two keystroke deviations away from each other:

• insertion: bar → barn
• deletion: barn → bar
• substitution: barn → bark

When using Similar Match review your results carefully to ensure you aren't matching non-matching records and associating them. It's best to start in Preview Mode to evaluate your results.

With the Associate app, you can use rules to automatically copy key details between related records. If one record type consistently has values that would be helpful in the associated record, you can execute that copy in bulk. This process can be automated to run on a set schedule or, with HubSpot, when triggered by a HubSpot workflow.

Under Step 3, select the field from the source record type (in this example, child companies), and the relevant field on the target records (parent companies). You can choose to copy values from the source record to the target or from the target record to the source.

The preview CSV will include these fields and specify if the value was copied for each record.

In the below example, the child company owner will always be copied into a custom field on the parent company.

If you want to always ensure that contacts associated with a company have the same website value, you can copy the value from the company record to the contact.

You can set up ongoing association automation for contacts, companies, and deals with Insycle on the module level, using Recipes, and for HubSpot users, integrating with HubSpot Workflows. You can view all scheduled automations on the Automations page of your dashboard.

You can schedule your associations templates to run on an automated, set schedule. You do this by clicking the Review button at the bottom of the module page. Then, you go through a three-step process to run the operation. In the third step, you can choose the Automate tab, and schedule your template to run on a set schedule.

When you click the Review button in Insycle, you'll get to choose from two modes: Preview mode and Update mode.

Preview mode does not update your live CRM data, but instead produces a CSV showing you the results that the association process would have produced.

The first time you run a new association template, it is always a good idea to run it in Preview Mode first to ensure that the template is working as you intended. Once you confirm it is, you can run it in Update Mode or schedule it for automation.

When using the Associate app, you have the option to be alerted when records aren’t matched. This may be helpful if you want to investigate and address any records where a relationship has not been created.

Under Step 2 check the Count unmatched records as Failed box.

Then in the Step 4 popup on the Notify tab, you can select the email delivery option “Always send,” or “Send when errors.”

When checked, any record where there is no match to create the association will be counted as “Failed.” This will be reflected by a “with Failures” suffix on the report email subject line…

…and a "Failed, no matching record found (use 'Grid Edit' to troubleshoot)" message in the Result column of the CSV report.

When you save this associate configuration as a template and set up automation, the report emails will let you know when a relationship has not been created for a record so you can address it as needed.