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If your sales team has ever contacted the same prospect twice in one day or a customer has received conflicting information from different team members, it’s likely that your HubSpot database contains duplicate contacts.
Duplicate data isn’t just an inconvenience—it's a barrier to effective marketing, distorts your metrics, and can damage your professional reputation. It wastes valuable time and revenue, which can hurt your business.
If you're struggling with duplicates in your HubSpot database, you're not alone. Nearly all organizations face data quality issues, with duplicate records being one of the most common problems. In fact, 94% of companies report dealing with some form of data quality challenge, making duplicate contacts a widespread issue.
In this blog, we’ll walk you through the steps to identify and merge duplicate contacts in HubSpot, helping you clean up your database and improve team productivity. Let's dive in!
HubSpot Training: Building and Navigating Your Contacts Database
If you're new to HubSpot or haven’t yet built your contacts database, we recommend starting with our YouTube video HubSpot Contact Management for Beginners. Once you have a clear understanding of how contact creation and management works, you’ll be better equipped to identify and resolve duplicates.
Identify Duplicates in HubSpot
Before merging your duplicate contacts, you'll want to first identify how many duplicates you have.
HubSpot provides tools that make it easy to identify and merge duplicate contacts. We’ve helped over 1,000 companies clean up their messy contact databases and have developed a simple approach to resolve this problem once and for all.
HubSpot offers two simple ways to find duplicates.
(1) Use HubSpot's Duplicate Management Tool
- Go to CRM > Contacts and click Actions in the upper-right corner.
- Select Manage Duplicates from the dropdown.
- HubSpot will scan your database and flag contacts with similar emails or other matching criteria.
- Review the grouped duplicates that HubSpot identifies.
(2) Manually Identify Duplicates
For cases where automated detection might miss something:
- Use the Search bar at the top of the Contacts page.
- Enter information like email, name, or company.
- Review the search results for potential duplicates.
- For more targeted searches, use "Add filter to narrow down results based on specific properties
What most standard guides won't tell you is that duplicate data comes from multiple sources—different entry points, multiple databases, and even customers providing slightly different information across interactions. This means you'll need both automated and manual processes to truly clean your database.
💡 Expert Tips: Data Hygiene
Before merging contacts, ensure data integrity by following these tips:
- Choose the right primary record: Select the contact with the most complete and recent information. If both records contain information within a property, such as a mobile phone number, the primary record will override the secondary record's information.
- Review every property: Don't assume the primary record always has the best data.
- Check timeline events: Remember that all notes, activities, and timeline events will be preserved from both records.
- Verify associated records: Ensure related deals, tickets, and company records are transferred correctly.
How to Merge Contacts in HubSpot
Once you’ve identified the duplicates, it’s time to merge them. Here’s how to do it:
- Go to Manage Duplicates and click Review to examine your selected records.
- Choose the Primary Contact: HubSpot will display a comparison view of the contacts. Select which contact will be the primary one.
- Choose which contact should be the "primary" record (this determines which data is kept when there are conflicts).
- Select Which Properties to Keep: Choose the properties that should be preserved.
- You can set more properties to review and add as many as you need.
- Click Save if you added or removed any properties.
- Take one final look at the selected properties.
- Click Merge to complete the process. Be aware that this action is permanent!
😓 Common Mistakes to Avoid
Avoid these common mistakes when managing duplicates:
- Rushing the Process: Hurrying through merges can create more problems than it solves.
- Overlooking Custom Properties: Missing information in custom fields can lead to incomplete records.
- Focusing Only on Email Duplicates: Don't forget about phone numbers and other matching fields.
- Merging Different People: Be careful not to merge contacts that are from different companies but share the same name.
- Ignoring associated records: Not checking how merges affect related deals and tickets
HubSpot Best Practices to Prevent Duplicates
Here are some best practices to avoid creating duplicates in the first place:
- Enable Duplicate Detection: Go to Settings > Objects > Contacts > Duplicate Management.
- Create Consistent Data Entry Guidelines: Standardize how names, addresses, and other contact information are entered.
- Implement Validation Rules on Forms: Check for existing contacts before creating new ones.
- Make Key Fields Required: Ensure essential fields like email address are mandatory.
- Schedule regular cleanups: Even with prevention, some duplicates will slip through—make data hygiene a regular habit.
📊 What the Data Says: We've found that organizations implementing these preventative measures experience a significant reduction in new duplicate entries within just a few months... which means better reporting, more organized marketing segmentation, and more revenue.
Advanced Deduplication Tools
If you’re dealing with a large database, manual management can be time-consuming. Here are some tools to help:
- Explore HubSpot’s Marketplace: Find third-party tools specializing in data cleansing.
- Use HubSpot Operations Hub Professional: Set up automated workflows for deduplication.
- Consider Data Enrichment Tools: Use these tools to standardize contact information automatically.
Why Clean Data Matters
Maintaining clean data in HubSpot isn’t just about avoiding duplicates. Clean data helps:
- Improve reporting and analytics
- Increase sales and marketing efficiency
- Reduce storage costs and optimize CRM processes
By keeping your database clean, your team can focus on what matters—building relationships and growing revenue.
📺 Want to see more helpful tutorials? Click HERE to master HubSpot 📺
Not seeing ROI from HubSpot?
Lots of companies feel like they were sold a 'dream' when they bought HubSpot -
But overtime, they get slowed down by:
- A lack automation... leaving their Team with unnecessary, manual work.
- Unreliable, messy data... making reporting and outreach hard.
- Poor lead attribution... don't know what marketing is working or what isn't.
- Internal bandwidth... takes too much time to learn the ins and outs of HubSpot.
The bottom line?
You're likely paying a LOT for HubSpot but not seeing ROI because you're not using the tool's full capabilities.
Powerful automations, reporting, marketing and sales tools are at your finger tips-
You just need to build reliable, scalable systems within HubSpot to see ROI!
So what's the solution?
There's 3 things that can happen now...
(1) Nothing. Absolutely nothing is implemented. HubSpot keeps burning a hole in your wallet.
(2) Do it yourself - If your a go-getter with spare time... read this blog. Watch tutorials. Learn how to clean up and optimize HubSpot yourself!
(3) Offload the heavy lifting to experts. This is for BUSY Teams.
Busy Teams who want to focus on sales and strategy... NOT learning HubSpot.
If you don't have the bandwidth optimize HubSpot but you want it to do more, book a free consultation using this link.
During a consultation, we'll review your setup and share EXACTLY how we've helped 1,000+ businesses Audit, Cleanup and Optimize HubSpot.
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