Merging leads or contacts

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If you discover that you’ve added duplicate versions of leads or contacts, you can easily merge the two (or more) records into one. Specifically, you can merge one or more contacts with a contact, or one or more leads with a lead.

This article contains the following topics:

• Best practices for merging leads or contacts
• Merging leads or contacts
• Interesting facts about merging leads or contacts

Related articles:

• Using smart lists to bulk update and take action on your leads, contacts, and deals

Best practices for merging leads or contacts

While you can merge multiple records in Leads or Contacts, you cannot merge leads with contacts. However you can convert a lead into a contact (but the not the other way round).

Before you merge two or more records together, check the following:

• The information is correct
• There are no typos
• The information is consistent (for example, the names and phone numbers match)

If the information was inconsistent (for example the records had two different phone numbers) then Sell automatically creates additional custom fields to retain the non-identical information.

To clean up the additional fields

1. In Sell, click the Settings icon (), then go toCustomize > Leads or Customize > Contacts.
2. In Fields, click the trashcan (), icon next to the field you want to delete.
   Note: Deleting the field also deletes the data of that field.

Merging leads or contacts

You can access the merge feature from the Index or Table views in the Leads and Contacts pages.

You must have permissions to update and delete leads or contacts in order to merge them.

To merge leads or contacts

1. From the Leads or Contacts page, use either the Index or Table views to select the duplicate records.

   

2. Click the Merge button.
3. You’ll be prompted to confirm that you want to merge the records.

   

4. Click Merge.

The topmost selected record is the one that the other record(s) will be merged into. You’ll see a confirmation of the merge in the notes for leads or contacts.

Interesting facts about merging leads or contacts

The merge feature follows certain rules and has the following limitations:

• If the records you've merged had different values in the same data field, Sell automatically creates a custom field to store this data. None of your data is deleted. For example, if the email field contained different values, Sell creates a new custom field called Email#1 and preserves the data.
• You can merge up to 5 records at one time.
• You can’t merge a person contact into a company contact.
• You can’t merge person contacts that have different companies assigned to them.
• You can’t merge a lead into a contact, and vice versa.
• You can convert a lead into a contact.