Data Merge Policy

A practical example

Example: a two-way sync between a CRM and a marketing platform keeps overwriting job titles.

The team sets a field-level policy: the CRM wins on firmographic fields, the marketing platform wins on behavioral fields like lead score.

What to evaluate before investing

• Ask whether merge rules can be set per field and per direction, not only per object.
• Check if the platform logs every overwritten value so you can audit what a policy change did historically.
• Confirm how the policy treats deletes and blank values, which are the most common sources of accidental data loss.

Limitations and tradeoffs

Merge policies encode assumptions that outlive the people who wrote them; an unreviewed last-write-wins rule can quietly erode data quality for years.