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.
Related articles:
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
- In Sell, click the Settings icon (
), then go toCustomize > Leads or Customize > Contacts.
- 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
- From the Leads or Contacts page, use either the Index or Table views to select the duplicate records.
- Click the Merge button.
- You’ll be prompted to confirm that you want to merge the records.
- 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.
8 comments
Zak Wilkowski
When merging leads/contacts, are both Lead Properties and Communication (recorded calls, emails etc.) copied over to the new lead/contact?
0
Dion
Hi Zak,
Yes, all lead properties and communications will be copied over to the new lead or contact after merging.
Regards,
Dion
1
Ivan
As you say: Sell creates a new custom field called Email#1. But can I then search by this new custom field? I tried to find contacts with some email and requested https://api.getbase.com/v2/contacts?custom_fields[Email#1]=some_email, but it show me all data.
UPDATE - RESOLVED
I forgot about url encoding. When I request https://api.getbase.com/v2/contacts?customfields%5BEmail%231%5D=some_email
all works fine!
0
Dion
Hi Ivan,
The following custom field types are supported for filtering using the Core API: Single Line Text, Number, Dropdown or Multi-Select
https://developers.getbase.com/docs/rest/articles/requests
You may use the Search API to search/filter for email type custom fields but this requires you to have Sell's Elite Plan.
https://developers.getbase.com/docs/rest/articles/search/custom-fields-mapping
Hope this helps!
Regards,
Dion
0
Casey McLeod
How long does it take for all communications to move over when you merge a contact? I merged 1 contact as a test because I was worried about losing information. The new contact business description was not updated as a custom field and so far none of the emails that were tracked and none of the notes have shown up.
0
Malinda
The merge should happen fairly quickly. As a result, I have reached out to you in ticket 9719674 to receive more information in order to investigate this closer.
Thanks!
0
Dotun Olubeko
Hello, our team has been having significant issues merging and losing communications. Perhaps it has something to do with our API, but our team of devs has looked into it and doesn't believe so. Due to the nature of our business, we often receive duplicate contacts. We have since resolved this issue by changing our API but are now in the process of retroactively merging the thousands of duplicates as we found that oftentimes, texts and emails were going to one account, and not the other.
Unfortunately, during this process, we are noticing that about ~25% of the merges result in the loss of critical emails and texts (although completed tasks still show up). We are not able to discern the rationale behind this and resolve it on our own so it has become a major pain point for our company as a whole. During merging, it seems it will *randomly* prioritize the contact that did not have any communication, and that account overrides the other account that did contain past communications. At the end of the merge, this then leaves an empty wasteland of just completed tasks and none of the communications. Any insight into what might be causing this would be extremely helpful - tia.
0
Dane
The best way to isolate this is to manually merge the leads and contacts first. If the same issue persisted even without using API, please contact our support directly and we'll investigate further.
0