Question

Merging Leads and People

  • 18 June 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 238 views

I have lots of leads that are also people already. How do I merge these easily to get rid of lots of my leads?


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2 replies

Userlevel 3
Badge +3

Thanks for the question, @Courtney

There are a couple ways to merge or delete your Leads. From within your list view of Leads, you can check the box that is next to each Lead that you’d like to merge together. 

Then, click the “merge” icon above your list of Leads (arrow symbol). In the box that appears, you can choose which information you want to keep for the resulting merged record. 

Alternatively, if you want to delete Leads, you will follow the same process of checking the associated box(es) next to the individual Leads. But instead of clicking the “merge” arrow, you will instead click the 3 dot icon and then select “delete”. 

Please note that both merging leads and deleting leads is final and these actions cannot be undone. 

Alternatively, if your quantity of duplicates is very large, you can use our remove duplicates add-on from AbleBits which will provide more efficiency with this process. 

How are your Leads entered into Copper? Are they done manually or via the import process? If you/your team are using imports, I wanted to share our resource on updating records on import so that you can mitigate duplicate records in the future. If Leads are being added one-by-one, you will want to make sure you always enter an email address as this is the best way for Copper to recognize if a Lead already exists in the system. 

Please let us know if you have any questions. 

Userlevel 5
Badge +3

Hey @Courtney, Leads and People don't play together super well, there's really no easy way to de-doup across people and leads.

As Evan mentioned, a spreadsheet and external tool is going to be the best helper here, but you'd have to do the above and export both people and leads and merge the two lists to find the true duplicates across Leads and People (it'd be quite a bit of work).

Sometimes the best way to handle it is just one at a time as they come up. Searching for someone's name that you regularly visit and see a lead added there too? Jump in and delete the lead OR if any important data or activity logs exist on the Lead, simply convert the lead into a person, and given they have the same name/email, it'll merge the two people (pretty sure).

Not an ideal situation, but from there, it's about trying to nip it in the bud as it's happening to prevent it from getting out of control (I know, it's a lot of work). Definitely if you have an automation that adds a new lead to Copper with a form submission for example, there are ways to make it smart to first look up if a person exists already before creating a lead.

Another offender is the "add Cc'd people to Copper" setting we've found - where usually you want to add a Cc'd contact as a lead, but this adds them as a person, so you might end up getting a person and later a lead while being unsure which is intended. So it might be better to disable that setting.

Best of luck!