Need a workflow to delete associated companies and deals

[asgJim]

We imported all of our data from salesforce into hubspot and I'm in the process of cleaning it up so we're only marketing to the right contacts.  

However, we have external sales reps that sell deals for our company.  We do not want to market to to them.  

We can use the contact owner property to make a list and delete those contacts.  However, to keep our hubspot database clean, I'd like to remove the companies and assocaited deals for those contacts.  Any ideas or best practices for these situations?  

[MayPascaud]

@asgJim thanks for reaching out!

A few things come to mind in this situation:

First, if you are determining the contacts to be deleted by their HubSpot Owners - would it not be possible for you to do this for Deals and Companies as well? Indeed, if there are specific HubSpot Owners for the contacts that you do not want to market to, hypothetically those same HubSpot Owners should apply to their associated objects as well. Is this not the case?

If not, I do have a suggestion for determining which companies you'd like to delete, though Deals will be a little more difficult.

In terms of Companies, you can create a new Company property, of the "single checkbox" type, called "Companies to delete". Then, create a Workflow with the enrollment criteria of the list of contacts that need to be deleted. Add one action to the workflow: "Set Company property value `companies to be deleted` to `yes`" like so:

Then, simply go back to your Companies, create a new view for "Companies to be deletes is equal to yes", and bulk delete all of these companies.

In terms of Deals, this will be somewhat more difficult, since Workflows cannot edit Deal properties. If the number of Deals is manageable, you might want to just sort the Deals by their associated Companies, and then delete each deal associated with a company to be deleted.

If there is a large amount of deals and companies, I would suggest doing the following:

- Export a list of all companies being deleted (using the aforementioned Workflow)

- Export all of your deals, including the "associated company" column

- Copy the Company Name column from the first import, and paste it next to the Associated Company column in the second import

- Find the duplicates using the instructions in this article: http://spreadsheetpro.net/comparing-two-columns-unique-values/

- Remove the duplicates from the file. Delete all of the deals in your portal, and re-import the new file with the deals that you're looking to keep.

I know this is a bit of a convoluted solution; I apologize! Let me know if you have any questions on the above.

Best,

May

[YoelBen-Avraham]

My Client migrated data from Pipedrive where they mixed Lead Status and Pipeline Stages (for lack of a better solution until HubSpot !!!). After the dust settled I had hundreds of Contacts associated with 300 non-Deals. I took your advice - sort of - I created a Pipeline Stage called "On-Hold Depriortize" and wiped the Lifecycle Stage from all associated Contacts - reassigning them to a more appropriate Lifecycle Stage and Lead-Status. Then I went into the Deal Pipeline List, filtered everything except the non-Deals, and deleted them. Thanks for showing the way!

[asgJim]

@MayPascaud

Thanks for the reply.  Regarding your first comment, yes that is mostly true, the owner will be the same for the contact, company, and deal.

I think at this point I will probably just create the list views for each of those objects based on the owners and do a bulk delete.  

My issue is, these contacts and deals will keep coming into our system so I was hoping for a more automated way of continuously deleting them.  It sounds like that isn't really doable.  Thank you.

[MayPascaud · Accepted solution]

Hi @asgJim, I'm glad this was of some help. I actually didn't realize that you were hoping to prevent these contacts from being recreated in the future - in this case, perhaps setting up an inclusion list might be the best solution? Setting up a list of contacts that you want to be syncing with Salesforce would at least prevent the contacts who don't meet the list criteria from continually syncing with Salesforce in the future. Read more about this in this article. -May