External Identities

An External Identity is a record from an external system — a user ID, a project ID, a team ID — that needs to be mapped to an entity inside SalesDash.

External identities are the bridge between provider data and your SalesDash configuration. They are why SalesDash can receive data from multiple external systems simultaneously without confusing one system's users with another's.

Why they exist

External systems have their own IDs for everything — users, teams, projects. For example, LeadDesk agent "12345" or a Teamleader project "project-abc". SalesDash cannot assume these IDs correspond to any internal entity, or that they mean the same thing across two different systems.

Instead, every time a provider encounters a new user, team, or project in the external system, it creates an external identity: "provider X has an entity with external ID Y." An implementer then links that external identity to the correct internal entity in SalesDash.

Only data belonging to linked external identities is counted in metrics.

Types of external identities

Providers create external identities for several entity types. Each type can only be linked to the matching entity type in SalesDash:

• Agents — the most common type; maps an external user to a SalesDash agent
• Teams — maps an external team to a SalesDash team
• Projects — maps an external project or account to a SalesDash project
• Propositions — maps an external product or deal type to a SalesDash proposition

Agent identities must be linked to agents, team identities to teams, and project identities to projects. The entity must already exist in SalesDash before you can link an identity to it.

Linking external identities

Unlinked external identities appear at Providers → Unlinked External Identities.

Create the target entities first — agents under Data → Agents, teams under Data → Teams, projects under Data → Projects — then return to the unlinked external identities list to assign them. You can filter the list by provider or entity type, and search by external name or ID.

Ignored external identities

Ignoring an external identity has no functional effect — unlinked and ignored identities behave identically, and neither contributes to metrics. Marking an identity as ignored is purely a housekeeping tool to keep the unlinked identities list clean. Use it for entries you have consciously decided not to map — a test account, a deactivated employee, an internal bot — so they stop appearing in the list. Ignored identities are hidden from the default view but can be surfaced by disabling the "ignored" filter.

Multiple identities per entity

An entity can have multiple external identities linked to it. The most common case is one identity per provider — a sales rep who uses both a CRM and a power dialer will have an external identity from each system, both linked to the same agent. But a single provider can also produce multiple identities for the same entity; for example, if an agent appears under different user accounts or roles within the same external system. Data from all linked identities is attributed to the same entity and counted together in metrics.