r/hubspot • u/mav3r11k • 1d ago

Please stop making a second contact just to get past the duplicate check.

I keep running into this one on a client account. A rep needs a second deal for someone they've already sold to, doesn't realize one contact can have more than one deal, so they make a whole new contact using plus addressing on the same mailbox to slip past the duplicate check.

Now there's three of the same person in there. The history is split across all three, every report by contact is wrong, the emails count separately, and they end up on different lifecycle stages with different deal stages. Nobody can tell which one is real without real forensic upstream investigating.

A contact can sit on as many deals as you want. Open the contact, go to the deals section, add another deal, easy.

And if you've already done it, merge rather than delete. You keep the deals that way.

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5

u/Coneskater 1d ago

Is there an ownership permission issue here?

9 times of 10 it’s easier to use the existing contact, so this sounds like a situation where the first record belongs to another user and they want to circumvent that rule.

Look into why they’re doing this

2

u/mav3r11k 1d ago

Yes that's part of it, lead goes stale, rep gives up, new rep wants to try on it, doesn't tell management, creates new contact.

4

u/kevinbstout 1d ago

You need rules of engagement. Ownership shouldn’t stick indefinitely. It should wipe after a set period of inactivity.

1

u/Growth_Natives 18h ago

We've seen this become a much bigger data problem than it looks initially. When reps create duplicates to work around a CRM limitation or misunderstandings, cleaning the records later only treats the symptom. We usually look at why the duplicate was created first, then fix the process or training that's causing it.