How to use UnDupe to Merge Duplicates

When your Nimble account is running with 1,000s of contacts, there’s bound to be a few duplicates here and there. It can eventually get out of hand.

Duplicate data can be an absolute pain. Especially to your sales people. Imagine having four copies of the same contact, each one with different lead info, notes and details.

What happens is:

  • data gets lost
  • your sales reps get confused
  • your clients wonder why you don’t seem to remember their last conversation (because your note is assigned to another duplicate)

In the end, everyone’s less effective.

Shouldn’t this be added natively?

We can argue that Nimble should add this as a native feature.

Nimble has decided not to go this route. I can’t speak for Nimble, but it seems as if they are pretty sure what they want to focus on.

You can go with a competitor. But then you give up the other features that make Nimble great.

Apparently, Nimble isn’t the only CRM that has this issue. You’ll also run into this problem in OnePageCRMFutureSimple and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

So, let’s go over a few ways you can avoid duplicate contacts:

Method #1: Nimble’s Manual Merge Feature

Nimble offers a nice little manual merging feature that allows you to merge selected contacts.

Simply do the following:

  • Search for the contacts by email or name
  • Select the contacts by ticking them off in the list
  • Hit the “Merge” button

The pro’s and con’s:

This works great if you can quickly find your contacts without much trouble. If you don’t have many contacts, you can spend a few extra minutes merging your contacts. No serious amount of time wasted.

The problem comes in when you need to merge large amounts (as in 50-100) of contacts on a daily to weekly basis. Now, you and your sales team are spending up to a 15-30 minutes each day merging contacts.

Add that up in a dollar amount, you’re paying your sales guys to do grunt work. And the worst part is that it’s costing you every month. Either, in time that could be focusing on sales, or in billable hours.

Method #2: Outsource The Task

Okay, so establishing that it’s not in you or your sales team’s pay grade, you can always go another route. Outsource the task to a data entry guy or gal on Freelancer or oDesk.

A freelancer for this job may cost anywhere from 100 to 300 USD or more, depending on where they’re from, their rates and how much work it actually is. When you add up the numbers, you’re probably saving money by taking the load off of your other, better paid, personnel.

The pro’s and con’s:

  • Can save your team hours of work
  • These guys could easily steal your entire contact base and sell it to a competitor. This depends entirely on your relationship with the freelancer.
  • They’re human, so their tendency for error is something to be considered.
  • They might overlook things like similar email, and other fields other than just name.

Outsourcing is always the better route when freeing up time for more effectiveness. You simply need to hire a freelancer who you trust to have access to your Nimble account and company data. Overall, it’s a pretty affordable route.

Method #3: Be extremely careful

This one is probably not going to cut it. But if you’re not using 3rd party integrations with tools like Zappier, that often create contacts without checking for duplicates, you can just give your sales guys a heads up when adding new contacts to Nimble.

How you want your data managed and updated can always be apart of your on-boarding.

As, I said, this will only work if you’re not using 3rd party tools, like Mailchimp, that create new contacts on the fly.

Method #4: Use UnDupe

So last June I rolled up my sleeves and decided to create a bulk duplicate contact merger.

This does everything you’d do manually, but in bulk, so there’s no extra time wasted. You can just go on with your day, knowing your contacts are being merged.

UnDupe also displays your merges and tells you of any issues encountered.

Better yet, you know your contact data is safe. And it’s been added to the Nimble App Marketplace.

Sign up for an UnDupe account here.