Find and merge duplicate contacts and companies
Detect duplicate contacts and companies, then merge each pair into one clean record: choose field by field which value survives, see how many linked contacts and deals move over, and undo the merge if you got it wrong.
Every CRM accumulates duplicates. The same person imported twice, one from a CSV and one from a reply. The same company spelled two ways. Left alone, duplicates quietly split a relationship's history in half, some emails on one record and some deals on the other, until neither record tells the whole truth. FirstSales now finds those duplicates and lets you merge them back into one, carefully and reversibly.
What changed
FirstSales now detects likely duplicates on its own, contacts that share an email address and companies that look like the same organization, and surfaces them as groups for you to review. Nothing merges automatically. You stay in control of every decision.
When you merge, you make two choices. First, which record survives, the one everything consolidates onto. Second, for each field where the two records disagree, which value wins. Keep one company's phone number but the other's website. Keep one contact's title but the other's spelling of their name. The merge preview lays the competing values side by side and flags exactly where they conflict, so you're never guessing what you're about to overwrite.
Before you confirm, the preview also tells you the blast radius in plain numbers: how many linked contacts and deals will re-attach to the surviving record. That's the count that matters. Merging two companies isn't really about the two rows, it's about the dozens of people and opportunities hanging off them, and now you can see that move before it happens.
After a company merge, the merged-away company disappears from the list and no longer opens its own page. Everything now lives on the survivor. And if you realize it was a mistake, undo restores the original records, including the per-field choices you made. If you ever try to merge into a company that was already merged away, you get a clear message instead of a confusing failure.
How to use it
- Open Companies (or Contacts) from the left sidebar.
- Open the duplicates view. For companies, that's the Duplicate companies dialog, showing the groups FirstSales detected. If there are none, it says so plainly.
- Pick a group and start a merge. Choose which record survives.
- Review the preview: check the flagged field conflicts, and note how many contacts and deals will move to the survivor.
- For each conflicting field, choose which value to keep.
- Confirm. The merged-away record folds into the survivor.
- Changed your mind? Use Undo to restore both records.
Why it matters
Duplicates aren't just untidy, they actively mislead. A rep looks at a contact, sees three emails and no deals, and assumes the relationship is cold, when the deals were all on the duplicate record they didn't open. A forecast double-counts a company because it exists twice. Merging fixes the data, but doing it safely is the hard part, which is why the emphasis here is on showing you everything before you commit and letting you take it back after.
The per-field survivor choice matters more than it sounds. Most merge tools force you to pick a winning record wholesale and lose whatever was better on the other one. Choosing field by field means the merged record is better than either original, the best phone number, the best title, the best everything, instead of a compromise.
This is part of the Companies and Deals CRM, works hand in hand with the Contact 360 and Deal 360 pages where merged history shows up, and respects the typed custom fields you've defined when it decides which values conflict.