Pipedrive duplicate contacts and deduplication, with every merge reviewed first

Pipedrive documents the rule in its own knowledge base. A person is flagged as a possible duplicate when two records have the same name and also share one of three things: a phone number, an email address or an organization. An organization is flagged when two records have the same name and the same address. You find the list under Tools and apps, then Merge Duplicates, and it is available on every Pipedrive plan to admins and to users who have the merge permission.

Look at what every one of those rules starts with. The name has to match. Kristen Lowe and Kristin Lowe are two names, so the pair is never shown, whatever else they share. A contact whose organization was linked as Harbor Logistics Inc on one record and Harbor Logistics on the other shares no organization either, because those are two organization records in Pipedrive. The tool reports what it can see, and a list with no suggestions looks exactly like a clean account.

Two more facts shape how you use it. Pipedrive uses the same rules in its import tool, so a spreadsheet that brings in a slightly different spelling of an existing person creates a new person rather than updating the old one. And once two items are merged through Merge Duplicates they cannot be un-merged. Pipedrive says so plainly, and it keeps the primary record value wherever the two disagree, so a phone number on the losing record is gone.

No. Pipedrive states that once two duplicate items have been merged using Merge Duplicates they cannot be un-merged. The primary record wins every conflict, so any value that existed only on the other record, a second phone number, an older email, a different organization link, is lost. The only protection is choosing correctly before you click, with the evidence written down.

That is what the reviewed list on the export is for. It costs one download and one upload. What it buys is a list you read before anything in Pipedrive changes, and a CSV of what you decided and why, keyed on the Pipedrive ID. When a rep asks where a contact went three weeks later, the answer is a row in a file rather than a guess, which is the same reasoning behind the Salesforce deduplication and Zoho CRM deduplication pages.

Organizations cause more trouble than people, because every deal and every person hangs off them. Pipedrive flags two organizations only when the name and the address are both the same, which is a sensible rule for companies with several branches, and it means Northgate Capital and Northgate Capital LLC with no address on either are simply two organizations.

The pass on an organization export normalizes the legal suffixes first, Inc, LLC, Corp, Corporation, Ltd and the rest, then compares the names side by side. That is how the Harbor Logistics pair in the example below comes up. Deciding which organization record is the real one, and which people and deals should end up under it, is the same problem as entity resolution on any customer master, just scoped to one CRM.

Most Pipedrive duplicates arrive through imports. A trade show list, a webinar export or a purchased list goes in, some of those people already exist with a slightly different name or organization, and Pipedrive creates new people because its import uses the same identical name rule as Merge Duplicates.

So run the same pass on the file before it goes in. You get one row per person, emails trimmed and lowercased, names and organization names in consistent case, state names turned into two letter codes and dates in one format. Cleaning a file that has not been imported yet costs nothing to undo. The general version of this workflow, for any CRM, is CRM data cleansing, and the HubSpot version is HubSpot deduplication.

A pass on the export fits a cleanup project: a backlog from years of imports, a move into Pipedrive from another CRM, or a merge list somebody has to sign off before it runs. A person applies the merges, and that is deliberate.

If you need bulk merging inside Pipedrive on a schedule, buy a product built for that. Insycle connects to Pipedrive and merges people, organizations and deals in bulk, Dedupely connects to Pipedrive and can merge automatically as duplicates arrive, and Datablist offers a bulk merge workflow too. We compare both honestly, including where they beat us, on the Insycle alternative and Dedupely alternative pages. DataUntangler does not connect to your Pipedrive account and does not claim to. It is a data cleaning tool that gives you the file, the matching and a record of each decision, on the Analyst plan at 59 dollars a month with unlimited files.