Best Practice for Contact and Company Removal

[MHerrick]

We have a lot of contacts that come through that are tests, or incorrectly spelt. 

We also have a lot of companies created automatically because of the setting that creates companies from the emails domain. I want to keep this function on as I do not want to have to manually associate contacts to companies. I have asked hubspot and you cannot have one without the other currently. 

If there a best practice for removal of contacts and companies from hubspot? What should be considered when determining it is ok to remove contacts and companies in large numbers. 

[Lucila-Andimol]

Hi @MHerrick 

its important that you know what information is crucial for both Contacts and companies

and how do they fit on your ICP or TAM.

Once you define this process, you can leverage tools like Lead Scoring, lists and workflows 

to categorize this contacts and companies, then have a review instance and finally decide if is to keep or delete.

Hope this helps

[alexjones]

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@MHerricke hall passwrote:

We have a lot of contacts that come through that are tests, or incorrectly spelt. 

We also have a lot of companies created automatically because of the setting that creates companies from the emails domain. I want to keep this function on as I do not want to have to manually associate contacts to companies. I have asked hubspot and you cannot have one without the other currently. 

If there a best practice for removal of contacts and companies from hubspot? What should be considered when determining it is ok to remove contacts and companies in large numbers. 

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When it comes to removing contacts and companies from HubSpot, it’s essential to establish a clear process to ensure you maintain data integrity while cleaning up your database. Best practices include regularly reviewing and identifying duplicates, such as test contacts or incorrectly spelled entries, and setting criteria for removal like inactivity over a certain period or invalid email addresses.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @MHerrick,

Typically this would be considered as part of a deletion concept, and unfortunately there isn't a clear-cut answer on what exactly to delete and what to keep.

Generally, you'd have to come up with filter criteria that "catch" the types of record you want to delete.

For test email addresses, for example, you could consider the the following:

• Email contains any of + (for email addresses like john.doe+1@gmail.com, john.doe+2@gmail.com etc)
• Email hard bounce reason is known
• Invalid email is equal to any of True

For companies, I would look at records with the following criteria:

• Company domain name is unknown
• Review duplicates company (by company domain name) in duplicates tool or using integrations like Koalify
• Number of associated contacts is 0

If you have specific examples or more "symptoms", I can elaborate. There is unfortunately no "remove everything that's irrelevant" button, you first need to define what's relevant and what's not.

Best regards!