Case studies / CRM rebuild
16,000 contacts, 22 pipelines, and a CRM nobody trusted. Here is how we rebuilt it.
Results from one engagement, in one market, at one point in time. They are not a guarantee of what another company will see.
The starting point
The client runs an established B2B SaaS marketplace that has served customers worldwide for more than ten years. Their HubSpot portal had grown with the business the whole time, and it showed.
- Around 10,000 contacts sat at Lifecycle Stage "Lead", most of them Gmail-sync ghosts and bulk trade-show imports, not real prospects.
- 22 separate deal pipelines, several created for individual trade shows and still used for list-building.
- Hundreds of duplicate contacts and companies, inconsistent domains, and company records with no names.
- A company type field that had been contaminated by uncontrolled write-back from an enrichment tool.
- Leadership could not get a pipeline report they believed.
The brief: make the CRM trustworthy, connect Apollo properly, and get outbound running on top of it, without breaking the automations the team already depended on.
What we did, in order
- 1. Audit
A full portal review with the MD's comments captured line by line. This surfaced the real rules of the business: deal stages, not lifecycle stages, drive the sales process, and company type is a five-class taxonomy, not a yes or no.
- 2. Data clean-up
Fuzzy-match deduplication across contacts and companies, with every merge batched for approval. Domain normalisation, 83 missing company names recovered, and a full 8,784-company backup before the type field was re-imported. 2,357 contaminated records were recovered with a "supplier wins" mapping rule.
- 3. Pipeline rebuild
3,203 deals from 22 pipelines consolidated into one Sales pipeline (3,038 after dedupe). Deals now represent qualified opportunities only. Pre-deal outreach moved to a 16-stage Lead Status board with a dedicated SDR view, so reps work from one screen.
- 4. Automation
Workflows for lead source failsafe, contact-to-company lead status sync, a buyer-intent qualification gate, demo-form routing with a HubSpot form replacing Calendly and Gravity Forms, and post-booking enrichment. Qualification stays manual-first because that is how the MD wanted it: workflows create tasks, they don't auto-promote.
- 5. Apollo integration
Apollo connected for contacts and accounts with auto-fill on and overwrite off, and HubSpot's native enrichment switched off so one system owns each field. An isolated sending domain keeps outbound away from the main brand domains.
- 6. First campaign
A warm re-engagement cohort of stale demo completers, narrowed to 60 verified companies and 94 verified contacts, run before any cold outbound. HubSpot-first, then Apollo.
What changed for the team
One pipeline, one truth
The weekly review starts with the number, not an argument about it.
Reps in one screen
The SDR board shows every pre-deal conversation and its stage.
Enrichment that adds, not overwrites
Clear field ownership between HubSpot and Apollo.
Nothing lost
Every batch backed up and approved before it ran. Old fields hidden, not deleted, so existing automations kept working.