Accelevents-Salesforce Cross Matching Records Feature

The Cross Matching Records feature is an optional setting that overrides the default rules and behavior when contacts or leads are created or updated in Salesforce. However, before we dive into exactly what the feature can do, it's important to understand the default behavior first.

If you still need to integrate, you can follow the steps in this article to set up the Integration to Export Event Data from Accelevents Into Salesforce.

During the integration setup, you were asked to select the Record Type from the dropdown - Lead or Contact. This determines where the attendee data will be saved in your Salesforce account AND where Accelevents will search for possible matching records before it saves the attendee data.

So, if you choose Contact and someone registers for the event, Accelevents will search all existing contacts in your Salesforce account to see if there is a record with the same email address as the new registrant. If no one has the same email address, then a new contact record will be created. If there is a match, that contact record will then be updated.

Since Accelevents only searches in Contacts and not in Leads, we call it "Linear Matching."

Here are the details of the creation and updating rules for each Record Type:

In summary, the default integration behavior is that the record is updated when a registrant has a matching criterion (email address) with a linear record. If there are no matching linear records, it will create a new lead or contact depending on the integration setup.

Now that you fully understand how the integration works, let's learn what happens when the cross-matching feature is enabled.

When this feature is enabled, a couple of behaviors change, and you can add more criteria to matching.

Instead of just searching for matching linear records, this feature overrides the default behavior and replaces it with the cross-matching behavior.

Cross-Matching means Accelevents will search for possible registrant matches in both Contacts and Leads records in your Salesforce account to ensure that no duplicate records will be created when the registrant is exported to Salesforce.

Aside from searching both contacts and leads, you can add other matching criteria, such as First Name, Last Name, and Company, to filter the duplicate search further. This option appears once you enable the toggle.

If you use the cross-match feature, please follow these steps to ensure everything works!

If the rules are active, it will not export registrants with a matching cross-record (lead selected as the record type; the match is a contact). Example:

Setup: Lead as Record Type

Scenario: The registrant has a matching email address with an existing contact in Salesforce.

If you mapped the Organization or Company field, create a Company Field for contacts in Salesforce. If you don't have that field, a registrant won't be imported to Salesforce because the system won't know where to place the registrant's company name.

Integration Setup

A new registrant signs up for the event with this information:

Before exporting the registrant to Salesforce, it will check for a lead or contact with the same first name, last name, and email address. If there is a match, it will check the status to determine whether a new lead will be created or it will update the existing one. If there is no match, it will create a new lead.

In the screenshot below, a lead with the same first name and email address is found.

Since the requirement to update a record is to have the same first name, last name, and email, a new lead will be created instead.