CASE STUDY
25,000 company records.
Half of them junk.
A CRM he was ready to cancel.
How Ecom Diversify rescued a HubSpot it was weeks from quitting – and got data it could finally trust.
WHAT OUR CUSTOMER SAYS
In his own words – the owner of Ecom Diversify, on what it was like before, during, and after:
"This is far and away the best experience I've ever had with someone trying to clean up my HubSpot account."
Owner, Ecom Diversify
THE SITUATION
Years of bad data. Nobody cleaning the inputs.
Ecom Diversify helps brands and Amazon-native sellers expand beyond Amazon – into big-box online retail like Home Depot, Lowe's, Wayfair, Target and Best Buy. Channel onboarding end to end: item builds, content, portal submissions, listing and campaign management.
The HubSpot underneath ran on years of accumulated mess. The company side was the worst: around 25,000 company records in a portal less than four years old.
Duplicate companies stacked on duplicates. Dead and parked domains. "Contacts" who weren't real people. Deals left open for two or three years. A lead object so full of junk it was unusable.
The deeper frustration: he was paying for HubSpot's AI features and couldn't use a single one. The data underneath couldn't be trusted.
"It was a HUGE mess. Duplicates stacked on duplicates, dead and parked domains, fake 'contacts' who weren't real people, deals open for two or three years that nobody was going to close."
Owner, Ecom Diversify
WHAT WAS BROKEN
Four problems feeding each other.
Duplicates that multiplied
A broken workflow quietly created duplicate companies for years. Clean a chunk, and new ones appeared that hadn't been there before. Roughly 4,500 clusters of two – plus bigger ones.
Contacts that weren't real
Integrations and warm-up tools dumped in thousands of records. Fake people. Role-based and generic emails. No reliable way to tell a real contact from noise.
Email that went nowhere
Send 5,000, and roughly 4,000 bounced. Dead addresses. People who'd left their company. Low engagement, and a sender reputation sinking with every blast.
AI he paid for but couldn't use
HubSpot's AI features were there from day one – and useless on data this dirty. He was paying every month for tools he couldn't touch.
The Root Cause
Nobody had ever cleaned the inputs. Consultants brought in to grow sales had wired up integrations and cold-outreach tooling that poured in records he didn't control. Kill one integration, come back two weeks later, and another ~10,000 contacts had landed. And one custom workflow had been silently creating duplicate companies for years – never audited.
"When I finally killed one of those integrations, I came back a couple weeks later and another ~10,000 contacts had landed. I take 100% of the blame for blindly trusting people with what should have been the single source of truth for my business."
Owner, Ecom Diversify
WHY INTERNAL FIXES FAILED
He tried everything. Including building it himself.
Cleaning it by hand? He paid a team member to stay up all night classifying contacts – roughly 500 at a time, checking each website manually. About $200 a day. No real progress. A bleed that would have bankrupted him eventually.
Other vendors? They sold a platform. A login, a library of tutorial videos, a workflow to build, reports to learn how to action. "But that's not what I hired you for."
Building it himself? He's technical – he started his own lead-classifier in Replit. Couldn't finish it while running a business.
By the time he found Sellestial, he was within weeks of cancelling HubSpot outright – right after HubSpot told him he couldn't cancel before his contract ended. He'd dabbled with at least seven other CRMs. None made him feel any better.
"I was within a couple weeks of cancelling HubSpot outright. I was paying every month for a tool I couldn't use. Your post landed at exactly the right moment. I decided I'll trust one more consultant to act – and if it doesn't work this time..."
Owner, Ecom Diversify
What He Needed
- A team that does the work for you – not another tool to learn and run
- Output he could trust and question: "how did you decide this is a real company?"
- The upstream cause fixed – not just the symptoms swept
THE SOLUTION
A scoped cleanup, run for him – not handed over.
Ecom Diversify came to be rescued, not trained. So we ran it as a scoped project: audit first, then automated pipelines that cleaned, validated, enriched and de-duplicated the data – then a clean portal handed back.
Data Audit
Mapped the real state of the portal. Around 24,000 companies – most missing domains, industry, and employee counts. The audit was the first time anyone could see how bad it actually was.
Contact Cleaner
Standardized names. Flagged role-based and generic emails. Validated every address with Kickbox. Filled job titles, locations and LinkedIn profiles, then standardized the rest.
Company Cleanup
Cleared dead and parked domains. Found real domains for companies that had none. Removed closed-down companies. Enriched employee counts and locations.
Company Deduplication
Resolved roughly 4,500 two-record clusters, then worked through the bigger ones. One company, one record.
Killed the upstream cause
Found the broken custom workflow that had been creating duplicate companies for years. Turned it off. Without that, every cleanup would have been temporary.
Deal & workflow hygiene
Standardized deal names. Went through each workflow together – what it did, whether he needed it, how it worked – and cleared the ones clogging the wheels.
THE RESULTS
The closest he's come to a clean CRM.
This wasn't one cleanup sprint. The upstream cause is gone, so the mess doesn't come back.
"I open HubSpot without dread. Reports that used to be meaningless actually mean something. I can hand a list to a sales rep without having to qualify it before the rep even qualifies the leads."
Owner, Ecom Diversify
IN PRACTICE
Two capabilities. Two examples.
What does fixing the inputs actually look like? Two illustrations from Ecom Diversify's cleanup.
The workflow that had been multiplying companies for years.
He knew something inside HubSpot was generating duplicate companies. Every time he cleaned a chunk, new duplicates appeared that hadn't been there before. He couldn't find what was doing it.
Years earlier, a consultant had built him an end-to-end process in workflows and custom code. It worked at the time, then went outdated fast. He stopped working with the consultant and got scared to touch any of it. So he left it running. And it clogged the wheels.
What we did
Traced the duplicate explosion to one broken custom workflow – setting company names and creating companies when it shouldn't. We sat with him, went through every workflow, explained what each one did, and turned off the one causing the damage. Then de-duplicated the ~4,500 clusters it had already produced.
"I knew something inside HubSpot was multiplying the problem. I couldn't find it on my own. You pinned it down and turned it off, and that was the moment I knew the cleanup would actually stick. If you don't kill the upstream cause, the cleanup is temporary."
Owner, Ecom Diversify
Why a 5,000-email blast brought back nothing.
He hired a commission-only rep to email contacts and research customers. Her lists barely engaged – while his own referrals and cold outreach did well. It made no sense.
The reason: more than half of every send hit bouncing contacts, dead emails, and people no longer at the company. Too much chaff, not enough wheat. She left when the commissions never came. He doesn't blame her.
After the cleanup
The list is real. Marketing email is viable again – he can send without blasting dead addresses and tanking his sender reputation. He can hand a rep a list they'll actually work.
"More than half of each send was going to bouncing contacts, dead emails, and no-longer-at-that-company people. I couldn't understand how my own outreach was doing well and hers wasn't. We realized the issue: there was so much chaff and not enough wheat."
Owner, Ecom Diversify
WHY IT WORKED
Work done for him. Methodology he could question.
He didn't need another tool. He needed a team that would log in, get into the weeds, and show their work.
"You logged in. You got into the weeds. You walked me through what you were doing on our calls. And the kicker – there was progress."
Owner, Ecom Diversify
Done for you, not handed over
Every earlier vendor sold a platform to learn and operate. Sellestial did the work and walked him through it on calls. He had too many tools to manage already.
A method he could trust
He could ask "how did you decide this is a real company?" or "why did you merge these two?" and get a real answer – not a black box. Every time he asked, he got one.
Fix the cause, not the symptom
Killing the duplicate-spawning workflow is why the cleanup held. Sweep the symptoms and the mess comes straight back.
"You explained your methodology in language that matched how I think about my own data, you weren't precious about showing your work, and the results held up to my own spot-checks. Every earlier attempt had asked me to take their word for it. You didn't."
Owner, Ecom Diversify
THE BIGGER PICTURE
The problem was never HubSpot.
"The data debt would have followed me wherever I migrated, because the problem wasn't HubSpot – it was that nobody had ever cleaned the inputs.
I'd have cancelled the portal, lost years of relationship history I'd never get back, and told myself I'd rebuild it right – which I never would have.
Meanwhile I'd have kept running campaigns on bad data and blamed the wrong things for why they weren't converting."
Owner, Ecom Diversify
ADVICE
Don't wait until you're ready to cancel.
"Don't try to do it yourself unless you really love the problem. I'm a pretty technical guy, I tried, and I still couldn't finish it while running a business.
Don't hire any old consultant who'll set you up with yet another platform to manage – you'll end up worse off. Find someone who'll do the work, show their methodology, and fix the upstream cause, not just sweep the symptoms.
And don't wait until you're ready to cancel HubSpot. By the time it's that bad, you've already burned years of relationship history you can't get back."
Owner, Ecom Diversify
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