Deduplication

Raw signal and contact feeds double-count constantly. The same job change can show up from a LinkedIn scrape and a data provider's own alert on the same day. The same person can enter a list twice under two slightly different emails, or once from a form fill and again from an enrichment pass that found them independently. None of that is unusual. It's the default state of a stack pulling from more than one source, which is most stacks.

Where it has to sit in the pipeline

Dedupe has to run before anything downstream touches the record, not as a cleanup pass after the fact. Skip it and a team enriches and scores the same event twice, burning credits proving something it already knew. Run it late instead of early and the cost shows up twice before anyone notices the duplicate: once in wasted enrichment spend, and again when a rep works the same lead under two different names without realizing it's one account.

Without it, the damage compounds quietly elsewhere in the stack. Contact records duplicated three different ways is a common symptom of a broken sourcing or list-import process, and once records like that land in a CRM, no manual cleanup inside the tool fixes the upstream habit that keeps producing more of them. Dedupe is what stops that habit from reaching the record in the first place.