The Acquisition Duplicate Mess
After acquiring a 12-person analytics firm, Corvus Software merged both teams into one HubSpot account. The combined CRM has 24,000 contacts and 3,100 companies. An audit found 18% duplicate contacts and 22% duplicate companies; the company domain property is blank on 40% of company records. Region is a free-text property with 14 variants for six actual territories, and industry has 31 values for what sales treats as nine segments. A workflow sets lifecycle stage to SQL whenever any form is submitted, so 6,800 contacts are marked SQL while sales insists only about 900 are genuinely sales-qualified. Owner is blank on 35% of contacts. The acquired team used a different lifecycle model and refuses to adopt the parent's stages until “the data is clean.” The CMO wants reporting by region and segment next month. The sales ops admin has 20 hours per week and no budget for a data vendor.
1. Prioritize the cleanup work. Which data problem would you fix first, and which would you defer despite executive pressure? Explain the dependency chain.
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Fix company duplicates and domain first because most reporting and enrichment depend on a reliable company record. Without a domain, region and industry rollups are unreliable and contact dedupe may merge people into the wrong company. Second, assign owners because unowned records cannot be worked or measured. Third, correct lifecycle stages because 6,800 SQLs poison sales trust and funnel reporting. Defer cosmetic industry standardization until the company backbone is stable, even if the CMO is asking for segment reporting; you can deliver a provisional mapping. The dependency chain is company identity → ownership → lifecycle truth → segment reporting. Region is urgent because the CMO needs it next month, so standardize it in parallel with company dedupe, not after. Do not start with contacts; company-level fixes reduce contact duplicates as a side effect.
2. Design a lifecycle-stage model and enrollment rule that sales will trust. Include how to handle the existing 6,800 SQLs and what role form submissions should play.
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Define lifecycle stages with observable criteria, not one form fill. Lead: known contact with no qualified fit. MQL: fits the ICP and has meaningful intent, such as a webinar attendee or content download plus fit. SQL: a rep has accepted the lead after a qualification call with need, authority, timeline, and budget range confirmed. Form submissions should at most create or update a Lead or MQL score; they should not set SQL. For the existing 6,800 SQLs, do not mass-reset blindly. Segment: keep SQL where there is an open deal, recent qualified activity, or rep acceptance; downgrade the rest to MQL with a note. Communicate the reset and give sales a one-week review window. Then enforce SQL only through rep acceptance or a workflow with explicit qualification properties.
3. How would you standardize region and industry without a vendor and still deliver CMO reporting next month?
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Create two controlled picklists: Region with six values and Industry with nine values. Build a mapping table from the 14 region variants and 31 industry variants; use bulk imports to update records in batches and leave unmatched records as 'Unassigned' rather than guessing. For company records without a domain, use country or city or owner input to assign region, and flag the rest for review. Do not wait for perfect data: publish the CMO report with a data-quality footnote showing percent assigned and unassigned. Use workflows to default region from country where possible and to require the picklist on new company creation. Review weekly with the acquired team so their definitions are represented. This delivers reporting next month while creating a clean, auditable path for the remaining records.