When you have many different team members putting in new data into your Pipedrive account, you're bound to overlap your information and create duplicates. Since not everyone can fully know what every other team member is working on, it's an inevitability of doing business.

Those duplicates can quickly spiral out of control, and all of that data can make it hard to do business effectively — the wrong contact will get added, or two salespeople will reach out to the same customer.
A clean database is an effective database, and one of the best ways to keep a clean Pipedrive database is by using the Merge Duplicates feature.

Accessing the Merge Duplicates feature

The Merge Duplicates feature can be accessed in a few ways.

• The first way is by going to "..." (More) > Merge Duplicates to see the list of possible duplicate people and organizations.
  
• You may also access Merge Duplicates through the Detail View of any person or organization contact that has been flagged as a potential duplicate item.
  
• The Merge Duplicates feature may also be accessed in either the Detail View, List View, or Timeline View of your Contacts tab in Pipedrive, by clicking the ... button found in the top-right.
  

Once accessed, the Merge Duplicates feature will provide you with a list of potential duplicate people and organizations within your Pipedrive account.

The details of these people and organizations — their names, deals, activities, creation date, owner, visibility setting — will be displayed as well. This information is invaluable when helping you decide whether the item is a duplicate, and if so, what information to prioritize when merging items together.

Merging duplicates

When you have decided that items listed here are actually duplicate items and need to be merged, select which item you wish to be the PRIMARY. The primary item's information will be prioritized in merging, in the event of any conflicting information.
For example, if two Tom Smiths have different phone numbers and are being merged together, the phone number associated with the Tom Smith that has been selected as the Primary will be saved once the merge has been completed.

Once you've chosen your Primary, click the Preview button to continue.
If you've found that the displayed possible duplicates are actually not duplicates at all, simply click the Keep separate button to remove the listing from the Merge Duplicates page.

Previewing this information will give you a glimpse of how that contact will appear once it has been merged. This is the last stage before fully merging the items, and it is good to keep your eyes open for any incorrect or inconsistent information.
If you find any information you would like to correct in the previous step, feel free to click the Back button to change any information priority before continuing.