A CRM built by two companies, maintained by neither
Two companies had been operating out of a single HubSpot account for years. Then the business divided: one was acquired, the other continued independently. The CRM had to be split and cleaned up without breaking the remaining company's operations.
The CRM had never been architected. It had been accumulated. Two companies' worth of properties, workflows, lists, and forms layered on top of each other with no naming conventions and no documentation.
Properties tied to the departing company's products were everywhere. There was no clean boundary between what belonged to which entity.
The data model itself was wrong. Properties that belonged on company records were stored on contacts. Deal-level data like number of licences, products selected, and contract terms were also on contacts. The contact object had become a catch-all.
The database was full of records that no longer represented anything real. Hundreds of contacts had no job title. A large portion showed no activity in over five years. Deals sat in active pipelines for months without a single update.
The cleanup
Before splitting anything, we audited every custom property, workflow, list, and form. We mapped which assets belonged to the departing company, which to the remaining one, and which were shared.
Then we restructured. Contact-level properties describing accounts were migrated to company records. Deal-specific data moved to deals. Properties tied to the acquired company's products were archived or removed.
Stale contacts were flagged for review and archived where appropriate. Dead deals were closed out with proper dispositions so the pipeline reflected reality.
We documented the new data architecture: what lives where, what each property means, who owns it.
A champion who made it stick
This project worked because there was a strong internal champion who took ownership from day one. They didn't just approve decisions from a distance. They got their hands dirty.
They reviewed lists line by line, cleaned up properties alongside us, pushed back on teams who wanted to keep legacy clutter, and made sure the new structure was understood and adopted across departments.
That's the difference between a cleanup that holds and one that reverts within six months. External consultants can audit, restructure, and document. But without someone inside who owns the result and enforces it day to day, the debt comes back.
The real lesson
Nobody plans to build a messy CRM. It happens gradually, especially when two organizations share a system without shared governance.
Properties get created for one-off needs. Data lands on whichever object is easiest. Contacts pile up because deleting feels riskier than keeping.
The fix is methodical: audit what exists, decide what belongs where, move it, clean the rest, and document everything so it doesn't happen again. It's not glamorous work. But it's the work that makes everything else possible.