Let's say you're running a comparison between your prospect list and your partner's lead list. Crossbeam tells you there are 500 overlapping records — great! You get started taking action on these results, and mention to your partner that you're excited to start working on these 500 accounts.
"Wait a minute", the partner says. "Crossbeam told me there were only 350 overlaps...where are you seeing 500?"
What gives? 🤔
Root Data
First, it's important to understand how Crossbeam makes comparisons: it operates as an inner join, only showing you the data when there is a match on both sides of the equation. Keep in mind though, there's an important twist — Crossbeam will always give you results in terms of your data, aka the root data for each comparison.
So, if you have a list of 1,000 accounts, Crossbeam will tell you how many of those 1,000 accounts have a match on your partner side, even if that's a many-to-one situation.
In the above example, you'd see 4 matches, but your partner would only see 3 — this is because one of their accounts matched to two of yours.
Potential Duplicates
How does this happen? It's a result of real or perceived duplicates. Crossbeam doesn't perform any data cleansing on the data you put into it, so if your CRM (or file upload) has many duplicate accounts, they will all get counted separately on your end. Meanwhile, your partner will only see the match on their accounts, not one for each one of your duplicates.
Why don't we clean duplicates? We've found that more often than not, these are not actual duplicates — usually, they're different divisions, different locations, etc. of the same company. Merging them would reduce the visibility into each individual account you'd actually want. In order to avoid true duplicates, you should ensure the data in your CRM or file upload is de-duped or cleaned prior to comparison. You can also use advanced population filters when creating a population to attempt to weed out some of those duplicates if your data allows for it.