Cons to deleting all contacts and starting over?

[KBond]

We recently began cleaning up and pulling in contacts from a separate CRM system. Our older contacts in HubSpot are outdated. Manually updating the contact list would take longer than I'm willing or able to spend, so I'm thinking about deleting all the contacts in HubSpot and just importing new data from the CRM. 

My fear is that:

1 - I'll lose historical data that I need to reference

2 - it could affect the CRM we pull from (I think the HS data should not be affected within our CRM, but I want to verify)

3 - it will skew all my carefully created reporting in an unexpected way

Has anyone else done this? Was there a negative or unexpected result?

[boblodie]

I would like to do the same.  How do I delete an entire contact file???

[MFrankJohnson]

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Q: Cons to deleting all contacts and starting over?

Short A: Just like things around the house, somehow you don't need them until after you throw them away. (head shaking)

Longer A:

You can always hire guys to clean-up your stuff. Depending on the size of your portal (i.e., # of contacts), it may be well worth the cost to have someone take a look. If not, then the question becomes, "why use HubSpot if your data is worthless?"

Just a thought.

 

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Please tag @MFrankJohnson if you'd like me to respond.

[bradmin · Accepted solution]

Hi, @KBond. You'll want to review the section on deleting contacts from the Contacts user guide. There are a lot of reasons to not delete, especially as you'd lose any of the analytics associated with those contacts. Old form conversions and the like would be gone forever, even if you were to recreate the records from your CRM. Your reporting, as well as any active integrations, will be impacted, as well. 

This is less costly if you have unengaged records you're looking to delete, but if there are records which are even slightly meaningful to your organization, it is strongly recommended to not delete.