Cornerstone Licensing Services: HubSpot 30-Day Cleanup & RevOps Transformation

Overview

Client Background

Cornerstone Licensing Services is a B2B company with a complex multi-company affiliate structure and long sales cycles that regularly extend six months or more. Deals frequently enter a "stasis" state while awaiting legal assessments, making accurate pipeline reporting a persistent challenge for leadership.

In March 2025, the company completed a migration from Microsoft Dynamics to HubSpot — their third CRM platform after prior use of Salesforce. The migration introduced significant data integrity issues, a cluttered property environment, and a series of broken or misconfigured processes that were quietly eroding trust in the platform.

The Problem

When MergeYourData engaged, the HubSpot portal had accumulated years of data debt compounded by three CRM migrations. Key stakeholders — John McKinney (Marketing), Christy (Head of Sales), and Joe (CTO) — each reported friction that traced back to foundational data and configuration problems.

Data Integrity Issues

• 19,000+ deals with no associated contact — orphaned and invisible to sales reps
• 4,000+ companies with no associated contact, breaking attribution and segmentation
• 160 stale deals representing $1.73M in pipeline with no meaningful last activity
• Duplicate contacts and companies across the database inflating record counts
• AMS 360 imported records of unknown value cluttering the contact database
• Bounced email segments preventing legitimate outreach to reachable contacts

Process & Configuration Failures

• No lead assignment workflow — inbound leads were falling through the cracks entirely
• Critical lead response gap: Marketing responding in 129 seconds; Sales taking 22.4 hours
• John McKinney appearing as meeting owner on meetings he did not attend (misconfigured sync)
• Email logging settings incorrectly configured, causing incomplete activity records
• Multiple redundant and conflicting workflows creating unpredictable automation behavior
• Seven inactive integrations still connected, including the legacy HubExpert migration app

Reporting & Attribution Gaps

• No UTM tracking on web forms — zero marketing attribution data flowing into HubSpot
• No board-level pipeline or ROI reporting capability
• Dynamics legacy custom fields polluting the property inventory with unused data
• Multi-company affiliate structure not documented, making segmentation unreliable

Our Approach

What We Did

MergeYourData executed a structured 30-day cleanup across four parallel workstreams: data repair, process automation, integration cleanup, and reporting infrastructure.

Phase 1: Audit & Diagnosis (Week 1)

We began by activating DataHub Pro and running a comprehensive portal audit to establish a clear baseline before making any changes. This included a full property inventory and usage analysis, record count analysis across contacts, companies, and deals, workflow audit of active and inactive automations, and a complete integration health assessment.

Root cause analysis identified the specific failure modes behind each reporting discrepancy. Notably, we traced John's meeting owner misattribution to a Calendly sync configuration issue and documented the multi-company affiliate naming structure that had been causing segmentation inconsistencies since the Dynamics migration. We delivered a written cleanup plan to the client and received sign-off before proceeding.

Phase 2: Data Cleanup — Contacts & Companies

Contact cleanup focused on three areas: deduplication, email validation, and unblocking bounced contacts. We ran deduplication across the contact database, used NeverBounce to validate email addresses at scale, and unblocked targeted segments of contacts that had been incorrectly marked as bounced. We set up a duplicate notification workflow for John to prevent recurrence going forward.

For company records, we merged duplicate companies, began enriching records with missing domain data, and set up a real-time duplication notification system. Domain standardization was scoped and planned in coordination with the client's internal team.

Phase 2: Data Cleanup — Deals & Associations

The 19,000+ orphaned deals were the highest-urgency item in the engagement. We built an association repair process to systematically connect deals to their corresponding contacts using available matching logic. Orphaned leads were routed according to assignment rules documented with Christy, the Head of Sales.

We also reviewed the 160 stale deals flagged in the audit — distinguishing legitimate "stasis" deals waiting on legal from genuinely dead pipeline — and prepared deal stage validation to ensure consistent stage hygiene going forward.

UTM Attribution Infrastructure

Cornerstone had no marketing attribution capability. We built the complete UTM tracking stack from scratch: custom properties for source, campaign, medium, and term were created and mapped to both HubSpot native forms and the client's Gravity Forms integration. We implemented UTM capture workflows to persist first-touch attribution through the funnel and built a separate "UTM at conversion" workflow to stamp attribution at the deal creation moment — enabling closed-loop ROI analysis for the first time.

Workflow & Automation Cleanup

We audited all active and inactive workflows, consolidated redundant automations, and deleted conflicting logic that had been causing unpredictable behavior. A new lead assignment workflow was built and deployed — directly addressing the 22.4-hour sales response gap by routing inbound leads to the correct owner automatically upon form submission or CRM entry.

Integration Cleanup

Seven inactive integrations were identified and removed from the portal, including the HubExpert migration app left over from the Dynamics-to-HubSpot migration, Calendly (reconfigured to fix John's meeting attribution), AgenceFuse, Relevance AI, Microsoft 365 file sync, and others. Email logging settings were corrected to ensure complete activity capture. The HubSpot meetings sync misconfiguration causing John's meeting owner issue was investigated and flagged for resolution with Joe's team.

Board Reporting Suite

With clean data in place, we built a comprehensive reporting library designed for board-level visibility and weekly sales operations. The suite includes over 13 reports and dashboards:

• Pipeline health dashboard
• Conversion funnel report (lead to closed-won)
• Lead response time report — tracking the Marketing vs. Sales gap
• Net-New Contracts Sent (week-over-week and trailing 90-day comparisons)
• Net-New Closed-Won (trailing 90 days vs. prior 90 days)
• Net-New Payments Received (week-over-week and trailing 90-day comparisons)
• Sales by Line Item This Year
• Pipeline close rate by rep (Suzanne and Christy individually)
• Call Outcomes — Inbound & Outbound (last week)
• Meetings Completed Last Week
• Marketing attribution/ROI report (in progress)

These reports give Cornerstone's leadership a real-time view of revenue performance and sales activity that was simply not possible before the engagement.

The Results

Results & Outcomes

The 30-day cleanup transformed Cornerstone's HubSpot instance from a liability into a functional revenue operations platform. Key outcomes included:

Deal Associations

19,000+ orphaned deals connected to contacts; pipeline visibility restored.

Company Data

4,000+ companies deduped and enriched; foundation for reliable segmentation.

Contact Health

Deduplication complete; NeverBounce validation running; bounce segments cleared.

Lead Routing

Automated assignment workflow deployed; inbound leads no longer falling through.

Marketing Attribution

Full UTM stack live on all forms; first-touch and conversion-touch attribution active.

Inactive Apps

7 unused integrations removed, including legacy migration tool.

Email Activity

Logging corrected; complete communication history now captured.

Board Reporting

13+ reports built covering pipeline, revenue, activity, and attribution.

Duplicate Prevention

Real-time duplication notifications live for ongoing data hygiene.