Best way to clean up contacts?

Jonas Rajanto

I wonder if there is a way to clean up contacts that have no relevance anymore.

I can't seem to use filters to find contacts that:

1. Have no Deals associated with them
2. Have no Activities associated with them

I would like to identify and clean up these contacts.

Why do we have these contacts in the first place? A long time ago, when it was still considered OK and worth the money, we purchased some decision maker contact details. We have a few hundred contacts that never responded to any of our approaches. In all likelihood, most of those contacts are now obsolete anyway due to changed orgs, they've been retired, etc.

Any tips on how to identify these "zombie" contacts?

Do you have other strategies of cleaning up irrelevant contacts that you could share?

Amit Sarda (AmitSarda.xyz)

Create a filter with the following conditions:

• Open deals = 0
• Closed deals = 0
• Won deals = 0

Amit Sarda (AmitSarda.xyz)

Person -> Total Activities = 0

Amit Sarda (AmitSarda.xyz)

You will have to first deduplicate contacts (so they don't have the same name). You can do this using Dedupely.

Then export the Notes from the Export section.

Then identify any contact that doesn't have a note (All contacts minus the ones that have a note associated).

You can also probably export notes using Coupler or Flatly at the Contact ID level to make this process short.

Amit Sarda (AmitSarda.xyz)

Yes, you got it right now.

Jonas Rajanto

Thank you Amit! This fulfills one of my two criteria (no Deals associated with them).

The reason I also need the filter "No Activities associated" is because we have programmatically added Activities to some contacts who are not part of any Deal. We have done this because not all our contacts are B2B contacts...

Our B2C contacts have participated in one of our open trainings and may later convert to a B2B contact. We have added an Activity to signify which training they participated in and when. (I'm not sure this is best practice but I don't know of a better way to do this. We don't want to create 10 000 extra deals as only a small fraction of them convert to B2B later. Activities seemed like a low-noise solution.)

Any idea how to make sure I don't delete contacts that have associated Activities?

Jonas Rajanto

Thanks again for the quick answer. 😍

I made this filter and realized that some Contacts still have Notes - those we want to keep.

I looked again and could not find a way to filter Contacts that do not have any Notes. How to do this?

Jonas Rajanto

OK, you lost me. 😅

If I export Contacts with Notes into a spreadsheet (is this what you meant?) and identify contacts without notes... How do I then delete only those contacts from Pipedrive?

By adding a label to those contacts perhaps? 🤔

But I still don't get why I need to deduplicate contacts...

Jonas Rajanto

Oh, I see. If I export Notes, the export doesn't contain contact IDs... So I can't use the exported file to add labels to contacts 🤦‍♂️

So yeah. I'm still at a loss as to how to proceed.

Jonas Rajanto

Hold on... I maybe got it 😆

If I deduplicate contacts, that means that the Notes export Contact person field is unique and can then be used for importing data. Right? So then I could add a label HasNote to all those contacts by importing a file.

Is that what the deduplication is for?

Jonas Rajanto

I had to put this project on hold for a while but returned to it now.

I had misunderstood how deduplication works - I thought it added a unique identifier to each contact somehow.

I now understand that deduplication means merging duplicate names so that the First Name + Last Name combination is unique for each contact.

Just one problem: some people actually have the same name. The only way to make sure different people with the same name are not erroneously merged is to manually check each merge.

In our case, there are 800+ duplicates that would have to be checked manually.

Obviously we are not going to do 800 manual checks, so... am I out of options then?

EDIT: Just noticed the other suggestions of Coupler and Flatly. Will check those out now.

Amit Sarda (AmitSarda.xyz)

Check out Dedupely.

Coupler will have great application elsewhere.

Jonas Rajanto

Thanks Amit.

Dedupely was the solution I looked at first, but like I said, it only offers to merge contacts with a First Name + Last Name duplicate. The only way to know if each merge is legitimate is by checking manually. Untenable for 800 duplicates.

However, Flatly gave out an export of Notes with Contact IDs.

I was then able to import a label HasNote for each of those contacts.

I was then able to amend my filter view with the condition "Label is not HasNote".

So - problem solved!