The contact record

Every person in your CRM has a record: the email that identifies them, the profile your team keeps on them, where they came from, what they are filed under, and what the site recorded about them. You can add a person by hand, and edit every part of that profile from their own page.

Plan availability

The contact record is part of the CRM, included from Starter: reading a contact, adding one by hand, and every edit to one — their name, phone, job title and address, tags and notes, owner, lifecycle stage and company, custom fields, tasks, deals, files, logged calls and activities, one-to-one email and merging two records. On Free the Contacts section is shown locked, with the rest of the CRM. The people your sites capture are still kept, and members holding Privacy requests, which workspace owners and admins hold by default, can export them, or erase a person, from Settings → Privacy. See What each plan includes.

Adding a contact by hand

Open CRM → Contacts and choose New contact. A drawer opens over the list — the list itself stays exactly where it was.

Field	Notes
Source site	At the organization level. Optional: the site the person came from, if any. Every site sees the contact either way, unless your workspace keeps each site's records apart, where this reads Site and is required.
Email	Optional. A contact needs a name, an email or a phone number, and any one will do. When you have an address, it is what makes two captures one record.
Salutation	Optional. One of your organization's salutations — Mr., Ms., Mrs., Dr. and Prof. to start with; add your own under CRM → Fields → Contacts.
First name, Last name	Optional. While either is filled in, the Name is made of them and cannot be typed separately.
Name	Optional. Your own name for the person when you keep it as one field; the record also keeps the name they gave on a form.
Phone, Mobile phone	Entered with the country code, like +1 512 555 0107. Stored in E.164 so the same number typed two ways is one number.
Do not call	Tick it when the person asked not to be phoned. It is a warning, not a block — see Do not call.
Job title, Department	Free text.
Company	A picker over the companies your site may see. Type to search by name or domain; a name nobody has filed yet gets a Create row that makes the company and selects it. Once the email is typed, a company whose domain matches it is suggested beneath the field — offered, never applied. Leave it empty for no company.
Lifecycle stage	Where the person sits in your funnel; see Lifecycle stages.
Owner	The team member responsible for the relationship, picked from your workspace roster.
Tags	Comma-separated. Tags are lower-cased and deduplicated, so VIP and vip are one tag.
Mailing address	Street, city, state or region, postal code and a two-letter country code.
Opted in to marketing email	Tick it only if the person actually agreed. Adding a contact is never itself consent, and the checkbox says so. It needs an email, since there is nowhere to send marketing without one. With a Source site it records the opt-in for that site; with none it records it for every site in the workspace.

The rest of the profile — the other phones, the birthdate, the assistant, the manager and the other address — is filled in on the record page.

If the email already belongs to a contact, nothing is duplicated: what you typed merges into the existing record and the page tells you so. With no email, a phone number that is already on a contact you can see merges the same way. A name alone never does, and neither do two blank emails: two people with no address are two people. On a plan whose records band is a hard limit, a full band refuses the new record with the same wording the list shows.

Adding a contact by hand is part of the CRM, included from Starter. On Free the Contacts section is shown locked, with the rest of the CRM.

The record page

Clicking a row in the list opens the person's own page at …/crm/contacts/{id} — an address you can paste and that every other CRM record links to. The page opens with the person's name, their lifecycle stage, their owner, when they last engaged with one of your campaigns, and — for a buyer — how many orders they have placed and what they have spent; the order count is a link to the site's orders list narrowed to the person's address. When a sender has given a verdict on the address — a bounce, a gateway block, an unsubscribe, a spam complaint, a do-not-contact mark — or the address's domain has no mail server (Would bounce), it leads the chip row, with the date and the server's words on hover, and Send email is disabled with the reason; the Contacts list carries the same verdict in its Email column and filter. Beside it, a chip names the mail gateway in front of the address, when its domain names one. It is the lead's email state, on the contact the lead became or was always. Beside Send email it carries Call, which dials the person's number, and Log a call — see click to call. Under it, one card per aspect of the record:

• Sharing — the site that holds the person and every other site the record is shared with, and why, with Share with sites… in the card's header — see Share records across sites.
• Properties — the editable profile; see The Properties card.
• Relationship — the sources that created the record (a form, a checkout, a booking, an import, or by hand), the campaign attribution recorded from the link the person followed, the marketing email basis this site holds (opted in, opted out, or no record — the last is not a refusal), and the campaigns your team has filed the person under, saved with Save filing in the card's header. Filing is your own bookkeeping; it never adds anyone to a send.
• Timeline — what the site recorded about the person, what your team has logged, and the campaigns they were sent, newest first: the forms they submitted, the orders they placed, the bookings they made, the calls, emails, meetings and notes filed against them, and every campaign email with whether it was delivered, opened or clicked. Each entry is one collapsed row that opens to the rest, paged ten at a time, with Expand all and Log activity in the card's header. A captured entry links to the record it names — Open submission, Open order, and the Bookings and Users pages for a booking and a sign-up — see Activities & the timeline.
• Deals — the deals the person is named on, as the Primary or in any other contact role, with the role beside each, and a New deal shortcut that starts one already linked to them — see Deals pipeline.
• Tasks — the open tasks about this person, each with a checkbox to complete it, and a New task shortcut — see Tasks & follow-ups.
• Likely duplicates — other records that may be the same person, found when you ask; see Merging two records.

The Properties card

The Properties card is the person's editable profile: change any field, then Save in the card's header writes everything at once, and Discard changes beside it puts back what you had not saved.

The fields are grouped the way Salesforce groups a contact's details — see The standard fields — then an About box for your team's notes, then under More fields one control per custom field your organization has defined. Add the email here whenever you have it. Every site shares a contact's address, so replacing one changes it for all of them, needs access to the whole workspace, and is refused if another contact already has that address: merge the two instead.

The Company field is the same picker the New contact drawer has: search the companies your site may see, create one by typing its name, or clear the field to unlink the person. A record that carries a company name with no link — an import, or a save from before the picker — shows the name as a note beneath the field, with one click to link the company of that name or create it. Changing the company here moves the count on the companies list with it.

The standard fields

The Properties card carries Salesforce's standard contact fields, in four groups:

Group	Fields
Contact information	Email, Salutation, First name, Last name, Name, Job title, Department, Company, Lead source, Lifecycle stage, Owner, Tags.
Phones	Phone, Mobile phone, Home phone, Other phone, Fax and Do not call. Every number is entered with its country code and stored in E.164; each one but the fax has a dial button beside it.
Addresses	Mailing address — the address a letter goes to, and the one the CSV file's Mailing columns and the API's address carry — and Other address.
Additional information	Birthdate (a past date), Reports to (another contact, picked from your contacts), Assistant and Assistant phone.

The name. While a first or last name is filled in, the Name is made of them — First Last — and is read-only; clear both to type the name as one field again. A record that only ever had a name keeps it as it is: nothing splits a stored name into parts after the fact. Email merge fields {{contact.firstName}} and {{contact.lastName}} use the first and last names when the record has them, and otherwise split the name at its first space.

Salutation is a picklist: Salesforce's standard values, which your organization can relabel, reorder or deactivate, beside values of its own, all managed on the Contacts tab of CRM → Fields.

Reports to names the person's manager among your contacts. A contact cannot report to themselves, and a pick that would make a loop — the manager already reports, through others, to this person — is refused with that reason. When the manager's record is merged into another, the person reports to the record that was kept; when the manager is erased, the field is cleared.

Do not call

Do not call records that the person asked not to be phoned. It never blocks a call — a call they asked for, or one they are returning, is still a call — but every way of dialing says so first: the Call button in the page header reads Call (do not call) and its tooltip gives the reason, and the dial buttons beside each number turn amber with the same warning.

The overflow menu (⋮) on the page carries Merge into… — see Merging two records — and two ways of removing a person, which are not the same act — see Deleting and erasing.

Deleting and erasing

Delete contact removes the person from this site's CRM — its notes, tags and timeline. Other sites in your workspace that captured the same person keep their own records, and the person's form submissions, orders, bookings and membership records are separate and are deleted from their own pages. It is a housekeeping act, and it is not a privacy erasure.

When no other site holds the person, the record itself is deleted, and what pointed at it is tidied in the same act: every other contact's Reports to that named them is cleared, on every site, and the person is taken off every deal's contact roles — a deal whose Primary they were is left with none. When other sites still hold the person, your site lets go of them, and the Reports to of your site's contacts that named them is cleared; the other sites' are not. The same happens for a contact deleted over the REST API.

Deleting a contact does not forget that they turned down your marketing email. If the person said no to email from a site, that answer is kept after the record is gone, and adding their address to an email list is still refused, even when you confirm you have permission. It stops applying only when the person opts in again themselves, for example through one of your forms.

Erase this person is the privacy erasure — what you use when someone asks to be forgotten under GDPR, the CCPA or any similar law. It removes the person from every site in the workspace, whoever captured them, and it cannot be undone. It takes the Privacy requests permission over the whole workspace, which owners and admins hold by default; for everyone else the item is present but disabled, and its tooltip says why. It is offered on a site's hub and on the organization's alike. The same erasure can be filed by address, without opening a record, from Settings → Privacy — on every plan, including Free, where the CRM is locked.

Choosing it opens a dialog that lists exactly what will happen, and asks you to type the person's email address back before it files anything:

Removed across the workspace	The contact record on every site — profile (birthdate, phones and addresses included), notes, tags, timeline and custom fields; any other contact's Reports to that named the person; every lead for the address on every site; the tasks and logged activities filed against the person; the person on any email audience list; the campaign delivery log for the address, with its opens and clicks.
Kept, with the person taken off	Orders and bookings stay as financial and appointment records with the name, email, phone and addresses removed. Deals stay on the pipeline, unlinked from the person and taken off their contact roles. Companies stay, with their contact count reduced.
Kept as they are, with the person still on them	Listed only when your workspace holds such records. Signed waivers stay as signed for your waiver retention period, then are deleted.
Not reached — finish these by hand	Form submissions, which keep the address inside the answers under whatever the form called the field — delete them from the Inbox. A site member account, which is the person's own login — close it from the site's Members page.

Two things follow the click at once, before anything is deleted. The address is closed to capture on every site in the workspace: a later form fill, order or import cannot quietly recreate the record (a hand-added contact or an import row for the address is refused with the reason), and no campaign is sent to it. And the record shows an Erasure pending banner — on the contact's page and on each site's lead — saying when it was requested.

The erasure itself runs with the platform's nightly erasure job, the same job that executes a workspace's own erasure. Until it runs, the record is kept only so the request can be seen; nothing new should be added to it. When the job has run, the record and everything listed above are gone, and the request is complete. If the person asks what was removed, the workspace's audit trail records counts of what the sweep touched — never the address.

Asking twice does no harm: a request already waiting is answered, not filed again.

What each site keeps to itself

A contact document is shared by every site in your workspace — one human who touched two of your sites is one row. Almost nothing on it is shared: the notes, tags, timeline, phones, title, department, company, addresses, birthdate, assistant, manager, owner and stage are one sender's knowledge of the person and are never shown to another sender's console. A sender is one site, or, where your organization has declared several sites one sender, the whole group, which keeps one record for everyone its sites have met. The email and the name the person gave are the only shared identity.

When sites join or leave a group

Changing a consent group moves these records with it, once the new group has taken effect:

• Sites that join have their records of the same person combined into one. Where two records disagree about a single value — the owner, the stage, the company — the group's is kept, or, for a new group, the one from the site that met the person first. Tags and other lists are combined, notes are kept end to end, the earliest and latest dates are kept, and figures such as order totals are added together.
• A site that leaves gets a copy of the group's record for each person it met itself, with the timeline entries from that site. The group keeps its record. The copy carries the person's order totals only when the leaving site is the only one that captured them; otherwise the totals stay with the group.
• Dissolving a group gives each site a copy on the same terms. Order totals for someone who bought on more than one of the group's sites can't be split, so they are removed.
• Company links, and each company's count of contacts, are recalculated as records move.

The review before the change counts how many people each of these affects. While the change is being applied, a person can briefly appear under their old group; the list settles when the change finishes.

Merging two records

A contact is one record per email address, so the same person cannot be captured twice under one address — but one human with a work address and a personal one is two records, with tags, deals, tasks and a timeline split between them. Merge into…, in the overflow menu on either record, folds the two into one.

The dialog first finds the other record — type an email address for an exact match, or a name to search among the contacts your site may see — and then shows the two side by side, field by field, with the value the kept record will carry. Pick which record to keep; the other is merged into it and deleted. At the organization level the search spans every site and a record no site captured merges too. The rule is the same for every field:

What	After the merge
Phones, salutation, job title, department, company, stage, owner, addresses, birthdate, assistant, reports to, custom fields	The kept record's value where it has one; an empty field fills from the other record. Nothing the kept record holds is overwritten.
Reports to naming either of the two records	Nobody: after the merge it would name the person themselves. The preview says so.
Name, first name and last name	Taken together, as one value: from the kept record when it names the person at all, and from the other record only when it does not.
Do not call	Stands if either record has it.
Tags, campaign filings	Combined.
Timeline	Combined and ordered, newest first. The other record's calls, notes and logged activities move across too.
Notes	The other record's notes are added below the kept record's.
Orders and lifetime value	Added together — two records of one person's purchases are one person's purchases.
Deals, tasks, activities, and a converted lead	Repointed at the kept record — on a deal, its contact roles too, one row for the kept record where the deal named both.
Contacts that report to the other record	Report to the kept record.
Companies	The kept record is filed under every company either record named.
Marketing email	A site's opt-in on either record stands on the kept one. A recorded opt-out on either record stands too: the merge says these are one person, and that person said no.
Email address	The kept record's address stays the identity. The other record's address is recorded as an alternate, shown after the address in the page header as also ….

An alternate address is what makes the merge stick: a later capture on it — a form the person fills in from the personal account, an order placed with it — lands on the kept record rather than creating the second record again. Every place that finds a person by address reads the same way: an automation step that sets a stage or files someone under a campaign, a flow email's consent check, the engagement stamp a delivery webhook writes, the Inbox's add-to-list check, a refund, a proof's consent read, and the REST API's lookup and duplicate refusal all resolve the alternate to the kept record. The REST API performs the same merge, and reads the alternates back as alternateEmails.

What the merge does not rewrite is anything keyed by the address itself. A list membership, a suppression, and the delivery log of past sends each belong to the address they were recorded against, so the personal address's list memberships stay under the personal address and the work address's under the work address. The kept record shows both addresses in its header, which is where to look when a person's mail history seems split.

Merging is available to members whose data permission covers the whole workspace, because a contact is shared by every site that captured the person and the merge touches each site's records of them. Every site's own profile of the person is combined under the same rule; no site's notes reach another site's view.

Likely duplicates

The Likely duplicates card on the record page looks for other records with the same name and the same phone number, or the same name and the same company, among the contacts your site may see. It looks only when you press Find likely duplicates — never on its own — and lists what it finds with why, and a Merge into this record button that opens the merge dialog with this record as the one kept. Two records with different names can still be one person; merge those from the overflow menu.

Owner

The Owner is the team member responsible for the relationship. The contacts list has an Owner column, and its Filters › Owner offers Me first, which narrows the list to the people assigned to you; the record page shows the owner beside the heading and lets you reassign.

Last engaged

Last engaged is when the person last opened or clicked a campaign email sent by this site, or by a site declared to be one sender with it. The record page shows it beside the heading; the contacts list carries it as an optional Last engaged column, off until you turn it on from the column menu, and the CSV export always includes it as lastEngaged.

It is set by the delivery webhook on the first open and the first click of each campaign email, so a reader opening one newsletter six times moves it once, and it only ever moves forward. Account mail — a receipt, a booking confirmation — never moves it, and neither does a campaign another business in your workspace sent the same person: it is your relationship's pulse. Campaign mail opened before the stamp existed did not set it, so a long-standing reader can show no value until their next open.

A list built from a rule can select on it — Engaged with a campaign within (days) — which is how a re-engagement audience is built.

Lifecycle stages

The Stage says where a person is in your funnel. The list has a Stage column and a Stage filter; the record page lets you set it, with the Move contacts and deals between stages permission.

Every capture that reaches a contact sets the earliest stage that describes what happened, and never moves anyone back: a newsletter opt-in or a member sign-up makes a Subscriber, a paid booking or an order makes a Customer, and so does a deal marked won with the person on it. A converted lead arrives at Sales qualified. A form or a booking by somebody who is not yet a contact makes a lead, not a contact, so Lead is a stage you set by hand rather than one a capture sets; a customer who submits a form stays a customer. A contact you add by hand, import, or create over the API gets the stage you give it, or none, and a contact captured before this rule carries the stage its earlier captures imply.

Stage	Meaning
Subscriber	Signed up to hear from you and nothing more yet. Set by a newsletter opt-in or a member sign-up.
Lead	Showed interest — filled in a form, asked a question. Set by a form submission or a booking request.
Marketing qualified	Engaged enough for marketing to hand over.
Sales qualified	A real prospect somebody is working.
Opportunity	There is a deal on the table.
Customer	Has bought. A purchase on your site, or a deal with them marked won, sets this automatically for anyone at an earlier stage, and never moves anyone back.
Evangelist	A customer who sends others your way.
Other	A step of your own that none of the names fit. A sale never overwrites it.

Where the person's lead is

The Relationship card shows Lead on this site when this site holds a lead for the address — the lead this contact was converted from, or one closed when the person signed up or bought. It opens the lead. A contact that came in through an order, an import or a form without lead routing has no lead, and the link is simply not there.

Finding a contact

The list's filters and its search box reach every contact, page by page; the search finds a person by the start of a word of their name, their email addresses or their company, or by their phone number's digits — see Filters on the Contacts list. The console's search (the magnifying glass in the top bar) finds contacts too — by name, email, phone number or company name — and opens the person's page. Contacts appear in that search only for members who can manage data on the site, and only while the CRM is available to them.

The phone number and company name are kept on the record itself for that lookup, as this site last saved them; the values you see on a person's page are always your own site's.

Files

The Files card attaches assets from the media library to this record: contracts, quotes, a signed proposal, a photo of the site.

• Attach… opens the media browser. At a site you can pick from the site's own library and the workspace's shared one; at the organization hub only the shared library is offered, because a record there belongs to the workspace rather than to one site.
• A record holds up to 20 files.
• The ✕ beside a file removes the attachment. The file itself is untouched and stays in the library.

Files are stored by id, not by address. A file moved between folders keeps its attachment, and a private file is still served through the signed link that checks who is asking rather than through a public URL. A file deleted from the library is still listed, marked as no longer there, so an attachment never disappears without saying so.

Files are per site, like everything else on a person's record: an agency running two client brands has one contact document between them, and a contract one client filed is not the other client's to see. See what each site keeps to itself.

Attachments are readable and writable through the REST API as mediaIds.

Related

• CRM overview
• Import contacts and companies, Export and Bulk actions — many records at once
• Companies — the account a person works for
• Activities & the timeline — the history on the record page
• Email campaigns
• REST API — contacts — the same record, with its per-site profile, over the API