Marie Kondo Your HubSpot CRM Data: Part 2 - Deep Clean Time

Welcome back to our series dedicated to helping you establish and maintain a healthy HubSpot CRM. If you missed our first instalment, where we discussed setting your team up for success by optimising your contact and company set up in HubSpot, you can catch up here. 

In this article, we're ready to roll up our sleeves and delve into the clean-up of your existing data. 

While cleaning up after years of neglect is an arduous, time-consuming process, the benefits of undertaking this task are far-reaching and can significantly transform your business operations: 

• Enhanced Decision-Making: With clean and accurate data, your decision-making process becomes more informed and precise, leading to better business outcomes. 
• Increased Operational Efficiency: Clean data reduces the time and effort wasted on outdated, irrelevant, or duplicate records, boosting your team's productivity. 
• Better Personalisation and Segmentation: A well-maintained database allows for more accurate segmentation and personalisation in your marketing efforts. 
• Optimised Reporting: Clean data makes for reliable reports and analytics, providing clear insights and helping you measure your progress accurately. 

Let’s get started. 

Say Goodbye to Duplicates 

A good starting point in your CRM clean-up journey is addressing duplicate company and contact records.  

HubSpot, equipped with a robust AI-powered feature, can automatically detect similar companies and contact records, delivering them in an easily accessible report for your review. 

However, this process is not a simple one-click task, necessitating a keen eye for detail. Unravelling incorrectly merged records can be arduous, so it's essential to merge records only when you are confident they represent the same entity or individual.  

Here are a few nuances to be mindful of during this process: 

1. Nearly Identical Records: HubSpot's AI, while advanced, is not infallible. It might associate two companies with similar names that are, in fact, entirely separate entities (e.g. 'Frank's Golf Carts Ltd' and 'Frank's Golf Tours Australia'). These distinct entities should remain as individual records. 
2. Parent/Child Companies: Occasionally, companies operate as separate entities but have a parent-child relationship. In most instances, these companies should be kept distinct. However, you can capture this information using HubSpot's parent-child company feature. 
3. Same Contact, Different Corporate Emails: It might seem logical to merge records of the same person with an email at two separate companies. However, doing so could cause associated activity records between the two firms to become entangled. We generally advise maintaining distinct contact records for each company when an employee has transitioned to a new organisation. 
4. Same Company, Multiple Domains: Some companies operate with multiple website domains, which can confuse HubSpot’s duplicate feature. Verifying they belong to the same company may require some detective work. 
    

By approaching the process with care and attention to detail, you can effectively purge your CRM of duplicate records and ensure the integrity of your data. 

Trash the Junk  

Next, we will toss any irrelevant or spammy records infiltrating your CRM.  If your CRM maintenance hasn't been a top priority, low-quality records or spam have likely crept in, perhaps from a hasty mass import or via unchecked website forms.  Review your imports to identify low-quality batches and delete any associated records with no business value or history to root out the culprits.  

Next, to speed things up, hopefully, we can identify some common characteristics of low-quality records. Consider a spot check of your oldest contacts to come up with criteria. What common traits do poor-quality contacts or companies share? Did they all flood in through one form? Do they have public-domain emails? Have their email addresses bounced? Is their IP address country somewhere outside your geographical target (e.g., India or Poland)?  

By analysing these trends, you can craft robust lists to audit and delete poor-quality contacts and companies from your database. Some handy fields to filter by are 'last activity date', 'create date', 'a number of email bounces', 'invalid email addresses', or looking for keywords in the email field like 'test' or 'ABC'. For companies, consider removing those with no associated contacts or activity. 

Contacts and companies can be restored in most instances for 90 days, so if you make a mistake, it's not the end of the world.  

The Reward: A Rich, Reliable Database  

Sure, this task may seem like a huge amount effort, but the reward is a rich, accurate, and reliable data trove in your HubSpot CRM. This clean, relevant data empowers your team to harness the full potential of HubSpot, setting the stage for more effective and targeted campaigns, which we'll cover in future blogs.  

Next, we'll look at enriching your existing HubSpot data to advance your marketing, sales, and customer success.