Akamai builds trust in its CRM by cleaning data 300x faster.

The challenge:

Manual data cleanup negatively impacted employee productivity, morale, and sales effectiveness.

The Akamai Technologies team was using a Salesforce instance that was more than 10 years old, with a high volume of duplicate records creating data distrust from the sales team. The duplicate records also led to a duplication of work because reps were unsure which account to work on. In an attempt to solve the data issues, Akamai’s team was verifying data, making updates, and merging duplicates manually on a daily basis, wasting valuable time on data clean up vs. generating sales.

The solution:

Duplicate management, data modifications and standardization, and import management.

To help produce clean and accurate data in real-time, Akamai Technologies turned to Validity’s DemandTools, the industry-leading data quality platform, to ensure its data remained the most valuable asset. “Our manual data cleanup was not only time consuming, but it was also very prone to errors, which is why we needed to find a tool for standardization as well as a way to clean up irrelevant data,” said Viral Makwana, Senior Manager, Strategy & Operations at Akamai Technologies, Inc. “Our team was looking for a suite offering in a single product, which is what initially drew our attention to DemandTools. Validity’s DemandTools provided all of this and more in a cost-effective solution.”

The DemandTools platform includes tools allowing Akamai to manage all aspects of its data in bulk with repeatable processes, instead of record by record or need by need. The Akamai team could now automatically dedupe, standardize, and route data as it came in from different sources and use features like Single Table Dedupe, MassEffect, and PowerGrid to manage the data in minutes – not months. The team expected the new data hygiene practice to dramatically improve its effectiveness as an organization.

The results:

Less time spent cleaning up data and more time spent increasing sales.

At one point, the Akamai team was cleaning up duplicates at a rate of 200-300 accounts per month. Now, the team has been able to increase its speed and efficiency – averaging 20,000 accounts cleaned up per week, which opened up valuable employee time to focus on other priorities. “We literally saved one person working full-time merging duplicates. We now use that person to work on something more productive,” Makwana shared. Now, the team can easily modify data as well as quickly import, update, upsert, export, delete, and undelete records.

Akamai also accelerated its certification process, increasing the amount of clean accounts in Salesforce from 60% to 90%. Additionally, due to increased trust in the data, the team has been able to put more focus and energy into growing sales.

“Validity’s DemandTools has given our team the ability to quickly and easily ensure the quality of our data, allowing our sales team to trust it, which enables them to sell better than ever before,” said Makwana. “We’re especially fond of the DupeBlocker, PowerGrid, MassImpact, MassEffect, and Single Table Dedupe features, which have not only helped our sales, but have also been used to assist other business functions such as marketing.”

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Akamai Technologies, Inc. is a content delivery network, cybersecurity, and cloud service company, providing web and internet security services for 30% of the world’s internet. Akamai’s intelligent edge platform surrounds everything, from the enterprise to the cloud, so customers and their businesses can be fast, smart, and secure. Top brands globally rely on Akamai to help them realize competitive advantage through agile solutions that extend the power of their multi-cloud architectures. Akamai keeps decisions, apps and experiences closer to users than anyone — protecting against attacks and threats.