HubSpot Ideas

Yunhui

New feature: Bulk Merge for Duplicates

Yas, we've got the feature of manage duplicates that's great. One thought is there's no way to bulk merge of contact and company duplicates, and you'll need to go through one by one manually. 

 

I'm wondering if there's a better way for us instead of deduplicating one by one, which is literally unrealistic for enterprise users with mass contacts. In our case, we have 1890 duplicates for contacts, which requires going through 1890 times of deduplicates.

 

New feature request: Bulk Merge 

HubSpot Updates
July 31, 2020 06:18 AM

Hi, @neil2 that's an interesting request. I just flagged it with the Salesforce Sync team. Is there a reason their dashboards can't help you solve that issue? 

 

@willerdmann I'm sorry you feel that way. The long response time to this issue is on me. If you want to discuss more I'm happy to set up some time to chat.

Not Currently Planned
July 29, 2020 02:53 PM

Hey HubSpot community,

 

Our team has investigated this issue and decided not to work on this feature in the next quarter or two. We will revisit after that. Our current tool needs some work to be reliable before we can add new features (you may see some big reliability changes coming soon). 

 

We want to do bulk merge right and don't feel we are in a good position to do so at this current moment. Additionally, we have many app partners who can perform this service at higher volumes. I am happy to go into the logic more if you all have questions.

 

I personally have talked to many people experiencing this issue. Reliability concerns are just as big as bulk merge and I'm very hesitant to introduce a bad product experience around destructive actions. I don't believe that is the customer experience you all deserve. 

In Planning
May 20, 2020 01:27 PM

Hi Community! 

 

I'm going to move this to "In Planning" our team is looking into the best way to deliver on quicker merging. I will update the issue when we know more. 


Best,

Ian

171 Replies
Michael_1
Member

Just to expand on my earlier 'contribution'. This is wasting a lot of time for me and my team. Aka costing us money. 

 

Another issue is that if I deduplicate companies (accounts) on salesforce, nothing happens in hubspot. So, I need to go into Hubspot too and do the same deduplication. 

 

It's not really an integration if this happens.. well, maybe a half baked 'sync' at best. 

Dedupely
Contributor

@Michael_1 and @Melly2022 Can we talk? I'd like to get you in touch with my support team to get the nitty gritty details. We're working on a perfect Salesforce <> HubSpot deduplication sync and need feedback from people like you who are really feeling the pain of this problem.

MaddFox
Member

Yes- I cast my vote for a bulk merge for duplicate contacts

teoxihui
Participant

100% agree, this would be really helpful to a lot of people. Upvoted the main post but commenting as a vote itself too, thanks HubSpot team!

chen2001md
Member

Agreed. We need this. We have over 2000 contacts and I'm not wasting my time to do this one by one.

Marlize
Member | Elite Partner

Yes we def need this 

Ikenna
Contributor

That would be an amazing fix. 

This would help data analysts a lot. 

TherisnoP
Member

100% agree! upvote upvote!

 

 

JaredKlebanow
Member | Platinum Partner

Yea this would be an incredible feature. The biggest challenge is finding the duplicates! If there's some sort of special merge section where we can identify companies or contacts that share certain properties, i.e. phone number, location, and part of name. And then we get a list of all "suggested" duplicates and then approve those and merge in bulk. That would be amazing. Sometimes the company names are similar but they are different and other properties give clues. But merging 100s of duplicates out of 1000s of companies is a really time-consuming task!

RBoze
Participant

Hey @Michael_1, I believe I can help you out with this. 

 

So, when you deduplicate accounts in Salesforce, the master is kept in sync with HubSpot, but the duplicate company in HubSpot remains. This is because the duplicate HubSpot company is trying to sync with the corresponding Salesforce account but cannot find the Salesforce Account ID anymore because it was merged with another record in Salesforce. So this is the reason why you have to handle the deduplication twice on both platforms, because the sync is effectively broken for those records when you conduct the merge in Salesforce. 

 

Additionally,  you cannot merge duplicate HubSpot companies when the Salesforce integration is active. To merge duplicate companies in HubSpot, you need to uninstall the integration, deduplicate your company records, then reinstall the integration. This is a huge pain — probably not worth it 95% of the time and there is no easy workaround.

 

However, using Insycle, you can deduplicate companies/accounts across both platforms, in bulk, using any data field to identify the duplicates, while keeping your sync in place. I won't go into the specifics of how it works too much, but essentially this is done by creating a custom field, "Deduplication Master Record," on both platforms. Insycle automatically populates the correct master record with "Yes," and then allows you to merge duplicate HubSpot companies into that record, while keeping the Salesforce sync active. 

 

dedup-master-record.png

 

Full disclosure — I work for Insycle. But it sounds like this is costing you guys time and money so it might be something you are interested in. 

 

If you'd like to learn more about how it works, we recently put together a big guide on the subject of merging HubSpot/Salesforce duplicates and keeping the sync in tact (works for contacts/leads/accounts/companies), here: How to Merge Duplicates in HubSpot and Salesforce and Keep them Syncing

 

 

 

RBoze
Participant

Edit: Accidentally posted this twice.

ianleaman
HubSpot Product Team

Hi Community! 

 

I'm going to move this to "In Planning" our team is looking into the best way to deliver on quicker merging. I will update the issue when we know more. 


Best,

Ian

iats72
Participant

I'm in agreement. We need a way to bulk manage duplicates.

Ikenna
Contributor

@ianleaman No that it is in planning, something else to consider is merging contacts with a common property that is not the domain. 

We have "Company ID's" for users. But what happens is that when the user does not have the same domain they just stand-alone and you never know they are part of a company that already exists. 

 

It will be merged to either bulk merge companies with similar name or contacts/companies with the same ID (Not HubSpot ID) or another criteria. 

rydroid
Member

I upvote and speak for about 10 other users on this one.

Duncxz
Participant

Any update on when this is being rolled out?

icon_mikeb
Member

I would like to upvote bulk merging for contacts and companies. This is a great idea and will save time! 

bethk
Member

This is a great idea, and I think the ability to choose ourselves the criteria for the merge as well as which should be the primary is best.

mjmccarthy85
Member

I need this big time. Looked into a tool called Dedupely. Because of how large my contact/deal database is in Hubspot it'll cost be almost $10k because I need to sign up for an annual plan to remove my duplicates. $10k! We absolutely need to be able to do this within Hubspot.

KevinQ247
Participant

There is an app/addon that can be used to do this but dependign on the level of HubSpot being a paid user (non-free versions), this should be included in that packaging.  This would be very helpful for day to day as well as when managing or cleaning up imports where duplicates may have been overlooked or unknown.