Salesforce merge contacts and leads from one reviewed list of duplicates

Contacts come in through every door. A rep adds Laura Bennett after a call, a list import brings her in again with her email in capitals, a marketing sync creates a third record from a webinar form, and a lead that was never converted sits beside the contact it should have become. Duplicate rules only stop what passes through a path that checks them, so years of imports and integrations leave a backlog nobody planned for.

The cost shows up in front of customers. Two reps email the same buyer in the same week, campaign history and activities split across records so nobody sees the whole relationship, opted out people get mail from the copy that never recorded the opt out, and contact counts in a board deck include the same person twice.

Three. Salesforce lets you select up to three contacts in one merge, in Lightning and in Classic, and the API merge call has the same ceiling of one master plus two others. A person with five contact records takes two merges, and a backlog of 600 groups takes at least 600 merge actions.

Mass merge apps on the AppExchange run those calls in batches, but they still need a rule that says which contacts are the same person. A rule good enough to run unattended is one you want to have read on a sample of your own data first, which is exactly what a pass on the export gives you.

Yes, in Lightning Experience. Salesforce lets you merge contacts with different primary accounts unless one of them is associated with a portal user, and you choose which account the surviving contact keeps. In Classic the Merge Contacts button sits on the Contacts related list of one account, so the records have to be on that account.

Different accounts are also where a wrong merge does the most damage. Laura Bennett at Granite Peak Builders Inc and Laura Bennett at Granite Peak Builders are probably one person on two duplicate accounts. Laura Bennett at Granite Peak and Laura Bennett at a hospital system are two people. The pass groups the first pair and shows the account names side by side, so the second kind of pair gets read, not merged on a name.

Delete on contacts. Merging contacts enabled for a Customer Portal also needs Manage Customer Users or Edit Self-Service Users, and Partner Portal contacts need Manage External Users or Manage Partners. Leads follow the same pattern: Salesforce Help lists Delete on leads to merge them.

That usually means a sales ops admin runs the merges while reps own the records. A merge list the reps saw beforehand, with each group and its reason, turns "who deleted my contact" into a review that already happened.

Leads merge the same way as contacts: open a lead, view its duplicates, choose up to three, pick the principal record and the values to keep, and confirm. Salesforce Help lists lead merging in Lightning for Starter, Essentials, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, Pro Suite and Developer editions with Sales.

A lead and a contact cannot be merged with the merge screen, because they are different objects. The route is lead conversion: convert the lead and, on the conversion screen, choose the existing contact instead of creating a new one. That is why the pass should see leads and contacts in one file. Export both reports, add a column called Type with Lead or Contact, and stack them. A group with one Lead row and one Contact row is a conversion to run, not a merge.

They follow the master. Campaign history, activities and other related items from the losing contacts are related to the record you keep, and Salesforce Files attached in the feed or the Files list stay on it. Chatter feeds are kept from the master only. The surviving contact keeps the Created By and Created Date of the oldest record in the merge, whichever record you picked as master.

Ownership causes the arguments. The master keeps one Contact Owner, so a merge can quietly move a buyer from one rep to another. The pass shows the owner as a conflict on every group where the owners differ, so the decision is made before the merge and not after a dispute about who sourced the deal.

No. A merge is permanent. The contacts that lost the merge go to the Recycle Bin and can be restored while they are there, but the field values and related records already moved onto the master stay on the master, so you are left splitting history by hand. The audit log from the pass fills the gap Salesforce leaves: which Contact IDs merged into which, and the reason given at the time.

Build a Contacts report in tabular format with Contact ID, First Name, Last Name, Account Name, Email, Phone, Mailing State, Mailing Zip, Contact Owner and Created Date, and export it as a CSV. Data Loader or the weekly data export work too and return the 18 character ID, which is the safe one to join on.

One header needs a change before the pass. Rename Contact Owner to Owner. Our engine reads a column called Contact Owner as part of the person name, which hides real duplicates whose owners differ; under the plain header Owner it is read as text and shows up as a conflict, which is what you want. Then load the file into the demo at the top of this page. Nothing uploads, the contacts are matched inside your browser tab, and the audit log keeps the Contact ID next to every decision.

Every duplicate contact copies across when the org feeds another system. A marketing platform bills both records, a support tool opens tickets against both, and a migration to another CRM loads both. Duplicate accounts are covered on Salesforce merge accounts, and a full lead, contact and account cleanup on Salesforce deduplication. If the contacts are about to arrive from Zoho, the cleanup belongs before the load, as set out in Zoho to Salesforce migration.

The buyer is the sales ops or RevOps admin with a contact backlog, a marketing platform that bills per contact, or a migration with a cutover date, and a sales team that will notice every contact that changes owner. They need the merge list decided before the merges, and a record of why each group was merged when a rep or a compliance reviewer asks.

DataUntangler is a data cleaning tool on the Analyst plan at 59 dollars a month, or 348 dollars a year, with unlimited files up to about 100,000 rows each. It does not connect to your org and writes nothing to it. You export, review the groups, and run the merges in Salesforce yourself, three at a time.