Merging two records for the same partner
Sooner or later the same person ends up in your network twice. You imported a CSV that spelled her name "Kathy" while your mailbox already knew her as "Katherine," or a partner replied from a personal address after you had added their work one. Merging combines the two records into one, moves every referral, introduction, meeting and note onto the record you keep, and deletes the other. You choose which record survives and which value wins wherever the two disagree.
Where to find it
Where to find it: Sidebar → My Network → Partners → the ⋮ Actions menu → Merge a duplicate.
That menu is on every partner, in every view, so you can start the merge from wherever you spotted the problem:
- On the Partners list, the ⋮ button at the right end of any row.
- On the board view, the ⋮ button in the top right corner of any card.
- On a partner's detail page, the ⋮ button at the right end of the breadcrumb line.
Whichever one you open, the partner whose menu you used is the record ReferralPulse assumes you want to keep. You can flip that later in the dialog, so it does not matter if you guessed wrong.
Step 1: pick the other record
The dialog opens on a list of your partners with the likely duplicates pulled to the top under a Likely duplicates heading, each tagged Likely match.
A partner shows up there when they look like the same human being: the two records share an email address, or they have the same last name plus a first name that is the same, a shortening of the other (Bob and Robert, Liz and Elizabeth), or the same initial. If nothing looks close enough, the list is just your partners in alphabetical order.
Use the search box to find someone by name, email, or company. Searching switches the list to plain ranked matches, with the closest thing to a duplicate first.
Click the record you want to fold in. That takes you to the review step.
Not sure the two are actually the same person? Open both detail pages in separate tabs first and compare their history. A merge cannot be undone, and telling two genuinely different people apart afterward means re-entering one of them by hand.
Step 2: review what happens
The review step is the whole safety net. Nothing has changed yet.
Which record you keep
At the top, Keep names the record that survives and Merge in names the one that gets deleted. If they are the wrong way around, click Swap. The preview rebuilds, because which record you keep changes which values count as conflicts.
Keep the record with the history you care about most. If one of the two has all the referrals and the other is a near-empty stub from an import, keep the busy one.
Fields that disagree
Any field where the two records hold different values becomes a two-up choice: the kept record's value on the left, the duplicate's on the right. Click whichever one is right. Every conflict starts out set to the record you are keeping, so if you change nothing, nothing on the surviving record gets overwritten.
An empty value on one side reads as (empty), which is useful when the duplicate has a phone number and the record you are keeping does not. Picking the duplicate's side fills it in.
What gets combined for free
Under Combined automatically you will see everything that needs no decision from you:
- Second email. If the two records have different email addresses, the duplicate's address is kept on the surviving record as a second email, so mail from either address still matches this partner.
- List fields, like services offered or networking affiliations, keep both records' values instead of one replacing the other.
- Blank fields on the record you are keeping get filled in from the duplicate. There is no conflict to resolve when only one side has an answer.
What moves
The amber block at the bottom counts what is about to be re-pointed at the surviving record: referrals, introductions, meetings, notes and the rest of the history. It also says plainly that the other record is deleted and that this cannot be undone.
If both records appear on the same introduction, you get an extra warning. After the merge that introduction lists the same partner on both sides, which reads oddly on the introduction's page, and you may want to open it afterward and clean it up.
When you are happy, click Merge partners.
After the merge
The duplicate is gone and everything that belonged to it now sits on the record you kept. If you merged from a partner's detail page and used Swap so that the page you were on was the record being removed, ReferralPulse takes you to the surviving partner's page.
Counts that summarize the relationship, like referrals given and received, are recalculated from the combined history, so the totals on the surviving record cover both.
Two duplicates are common, three is not unusual after a messy import. Merging handles two records at a time, so run it again from the surviving record to fold in the third.
Avoiding duplicates in the first place
- When you import a CSV, the When a row matches a partner I already have panel decides what happens to rows that match someone you already have. Fill in blanks only updates the existing partner instead of creating a second one. See importing partners from a file.
- Give every partner an email address where you can. Email is the strongest signal ReferralPulse has for recognizing the same person arriving from a different source, and the reason most duplicates come from records that have none.
- Suggestions your assistant raises from your mailbox are checked against your existing partners before they reach you, so a person you already have does not come back as a new suggestion. See reviewing what your assistant finds.