Clean and Deduplicate Your Rights-Holder Contacts

A rights-holder contact list accretes junk fast: three variants of the same producer because one entry used a Gmail and another a corporate domain, two rows for the same agent because someone typed ”&” where the other used “and”, phantom contacts that left the company two years ago. When you need to email the right people about a rights expiry next week, that junk costs you hours — or worse, you email the wrong person.

This tutorial walks through the cleanup you can do in 20 minutes with a spreadsheet and no plugins. It’s the prerequisite step for every other contacts workflow. Pair it with the Contacts Master List template, which ships with the helper columns ready to go.

Step 1: Consolidate Your Sources

Before you dedupe anything, get every contact into one sheet. Common sources:

• The old Airtable or Notion base someone started in 2023.
• Your CRM export (HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.).
• Personal address books of whoever’s been doing rights-holder outreach.
• Email signatures — do a quick scan of sent mail in the last six months.

Paste everything into a single sheet with these columns: Name | Company | Role | Email | Phone | Last Contact | Source. The Source column is gold later when you need to know which system to update.

Step 2: Build a Normalized Key

Exact-match dedupe catches maybe half of the duplicates. The other half look identical to a human but differ by case, whitespace, or punctuation. Add a helper column with this formula:

=LOWER(TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2&"|"&D2, " ", ""), ".", ""), "&", "and")))

This concatenates Name and Email, lowercases, strips spaces and dots, and normalizes ”&” to “and”. john.smith@acme.com and John Smith <john.smith@acme.com> collapse to the same key.

Step 3: Flag Duplicates

Next to your key column, add:

=IF(COUNTIF(H:H, H2)>1, "DUPE", "")

Apply conditional formatting: red fill where the column equals “DUPE”. Sort by the key column and you’ll see dupes cluster together. Review each pair — the older row usually has better data for some fields, the newer row for others. Merge manually.

Step 4: Sweep Stale Contacts

For every contact, check Last Contact. If it’s > 18 months old, flag as stale. Before deleting, verify via LinkedIn or a company lookup that the person is still at that role. The pattern to watch for: person’s current company doesn’t match what you have on file. Those contacts aren’t dupes, but they’re wrong — update the row, don’t delete it.

Common Issues

• Multiple emails per contact. Producers often have personal + corporate addresses. Keep both — put the personal in a secondary Email column, don’t overwrite.
• Role drift. A contact may have changed roles at the same company. Preserve the old role in a note column; don’t lose the history.
• Shared mailboxes. legal@studio.com is not a person. Tag these as “mailbox” in your Role column and don’t merge them with individuals.

Download the Template

The Contacts Master List ships with the normalized-key formula and COUNTIF flag pre-populated. Paste in your consolidated contacts and the dedupe flags appear instantly.