Morning — find and prioritise high‑risk duplicate candidates (90–120 minutes)
Start by exporting or filtering the smallest, highest‑risk slice of records: recent pipeline contacts, billing contacts, and any records in open opportunities. If you’re in Fareham, Hampshire or elsewhere on the South Coast, focus on the records your small team touches daily — those are the ones that break automations fastest.
Use a short, consistent scoring rule: exact email match (high), phone or postcode match (medium), fuzzy company name or shared billing address (low). Practical checks: HubSpot saved lists or duplicates tool, Salesforce duplicate reports or matching rules, Marketo/Pardot segmentation and an export to a spreadsheet for quick fuzzy checks.
Midday — create a non‑destructive "merge preview" layer and a human review queue (90–150 minutes)
Choose one staging method: add a CRM flag/property (eg. "merge_preview_candidate") or extract candidates to a staging sheet and add proposed master IDs. The staging sheet approach works well where you need to show proposed field-level choices; a CRM flag is quicker when you can build review lists and task queues. Include lightweight provenance fields on every proposal: who proposed it, source (import|form|manual), timestamp and a confidence score.
Suggested staging columns for a sheet or CRM proposal:
- proposed_master_id, proposed_merge_fields (short notes), proposer, source, confidence (0–100), original_values_snapshot
This gives reviewers a compact view and a simple audit trail. For platform examples: in HubSpot use a property and a saved list for review; in Salesforce create a temporary checkbox or a Merge Proposal custom object; use list segmentation in Marketo/Pardot to keep automated sends off candidates while they wait review. For field mapping patterns and local CRM optimisation help see our CRM optimisation page.
Afternoon — run no‑op simulations, gate automations, commit in small batches and keep rollback steps ready (90–180 minutes)
Before you change anything, generate a no‑op simulation: an export that lists each proposed merge and the exact field-level outcome (which value will be kept). Review a random sample with the owner of each record. When you commit, pause downstream automations by using a short‑lived gate property (eg. set "do_not_automate=true" or switch off a workflow) so merges don’t retrigger sends, assignments or external syncs.
Commit in small batches (10–50 merges), keep before/after snapshots, and verify the most critical automations (billing, SLA timers, lead assignment) after each batch. Rollback plan: keep the pre-merge export, restore via import or platform restore tools, and document a 15–30 minute owner who can unpick a batch if needed. HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo and Pardot all behave slightly differently — treat merges as write operations that can trigger workflows and external syncs, and use the same gate+snapshot pattern regardless of platform.
If you’d like a hand running this one‑day plan for CRM data cleanup or marketing automation support on the South Coast, Optira can help run the stages and hand the finished audit back to your team.