I’m working at a small company and we have a challenge with managing our leads. We are trying to import prospects from Apollo to HubSpot using Zapier automation. Currently, our process skips creating contacts and just adds deals to our sales pipeline.
This has resulted in many duplicate entries. I learned that if contacts or companies aren’t connected to the deals, it becomes really hard to deduplicate. We have been attempting to pinpoint duplicates by deal titles but it’s not effective.
Now, we face the problem of having hundreds of deals that lack connections to any contact or company records. I need help figuring out how to retroactively associate these existing deals with the correct contact or company profiles so we can utilize email addresses or domains for more accurate duplicate detection. Has anyone experienced a similar data cleanup task?
I’ve been through this exact mess with a CRM migration. Start with HubSpot’s API or Operations Hub if you’ve got it. Build a script that matches deals to contacts using email domains from your deal notes or properties - Apollo imports usually bury email data somewhere in there. Once you connect those dots, HubSpot’s deduplication actually works. Going forward, add a validation step to your Zapier workflow that checks for existing contacts before creating deals. We cleaned up 800+ orphaned deals this way and our pipeline accuracy got way better.
Been there! Had the exact same nightmare 6 months ago switching from manual entry to automated imports. Here’s what saved me: HubSpot’s duplicate management tool and custom properties. Set up a unique identifier property for your deals (Apollo ID works great), then bulk update to match those orphaned deals with existing contacts by email. HubSpot’s deduplication is pretty useless unless you’ve got proper contact-to-deal associations set up first. If you’re dealing with hundreds of records, hiring a freelancer for the initial cleanup is worth it to solidify your foundation. After that, fix your Zapier workflow to always create or find the contact before making the deal.
Been through this exact thing migrating from Salesforce to HubSpot last year. The cleanup sucks but it’s doable. Use HubSpot’s bulk association feature in their import tool - just make a spreadsheet with deal IDs and the matching contact emails or company domains, then import as associations. For the future, fix your Zapier workflow so it creates/updates contacts first (using email as the unique ID), then creates deals linked to those contacts. HubSpot’s deduplication will handle duplicates automatically. Took us two weeks for the initial cleanup but saved tons of manual work down the road. Back up your data first before you start associating everything.
oof, what a mess! but u can fix this. export all ur deals first, then use hubspot’s import tool to batch associate them with contacts and companies. match by email domain or company name. after that, set up workflows so zapier creates contacts first, then deals. that’ll prevent this headache down the road.
same thing happend to me last month. set up a hubspot workflow to automatically link those orphaned deals - trigger it when deals dont have contacts, then match them using company domains or email data from the deal properties. beats doing it manually and catches most of them without any extra work.