Inherited marketing systems
That is the deadlock a new VP of Marketing, a merged company, or a tired ops team inherits — and it is the only thing I work on: marketing operations across the automation platform, the CRM, and the connectors between them.
Why it stays broken
By seam, not by vendor
| Stack | The deadlock | What I build |
|---|---|---|
| HubSpot (Marketing + Sales Hub) | Duplicates minted by imports and workflows; no bulk merge anywhere in the platform; lifecycle stages nobody agreed on; attribution that flatters the last touch. | Guarded merge executor, lifecycle rebuild, an import standard that stops the bleeding, closed-loop revenue reporting. |
| Marketo → Salesforce | Sync errors piling up in the queue; lead-to-account matching broken; program status and campaign membership out of step; an MQL definition that drifts between the two systems. | Sync-error triage and re-queue runbook, matching rules without another paid tool, program-to-campaign reconciliation, one MQL definition enforced on both sides. |
| Pardot (Account Engagement) → Salesforce | Connector-user permissions nobody documented; prospect and lead duplication across business units; scoring rebuilt three times; campaign influence never trusted. | Connector audit, business-unit-safe dedupe and assignment rules, one scoring model with a documented decay, a campaign-influence rebuild with evidence. |
| Eloqua → Salesforce / Dynamics | Integration-user field mappings drifted after an org merge; contact washing never done; program canvases nobody can read. | Field-mapping reconciliation with before/after diffs, a contact-hygiene executor, canvas documentation and a retirement plan. |
| HubSpot ↔ Dynamics 365 | Two “sources of truth”; the native connector’s one-way rules silently overwrite; lead routing rebuilt in both places. | An ownership map per field, a connector-rule audit, a single routing layer with a runbook. |
| Braze / Klaviyo → CRM or warehouse | Event and profile duplication from multiple SDKs; audiences that can’t be reconciled to CRM revenue. | Identity-resolution rules, an event-schema standard, a reverse-ETL spine into the CRM. |
How the work runs
Read-only. Evidence exported from your systems, not screenshots. Object counts, surplus rates, duplicate provenance, broken handoffs, workflow and import history, the integration map.
What you see: A scored findings deck and a recorded walkthrough.
What a fix actually requires — the route the platform gives you, the guards it needs, the order it has to run in — with options and costs.
What you see: A scope memo you can take to the CFO. If the answer is “don’t”, that is in the memo too.
Nothing runs at scale until it has run small: 0 → 1 → 10 → 250. The workflow is off between gates. Every batch is authorised by you. Every irreversible action has a captured before-state.
What you see: A gate log with the numbers at each step, and a review list for everything the guards refused.
Your team is in the room. Sessions are recorded and transcribed; the documentation is written as the work is done, not afterwards.
What you see: Recordings, a runbook, and staff who can operate the thing without me.
Cleaning without closing the source is bailing a boat. The engagement ends with the upstream rule — an import standard, a sync contract, an ownership map — that stops the problem recurring.
What you see: A written standard, adopted, with the evidence that earned it.
Two rules on every engagement. Nothing irreversible runs without a captured before-state and your explicit authorisation. Every engagement leaves recordings and a runbook. The documentation is not a deliverable; it is how the work is done.
Proof
A B2B research firm inherited a company object in the low six figures, over a third of it surplus, and no bulk merge in the platform. The fix was a guarded custom-code executor with twelve guards and a gated rollout — and five things the platform does on merge that its documentation doesn’t say. Read the field account →
The Inherited Systems Audit is read-only, USD $4,500 up to 100k records, and credited in full against any fix within 30 days. If you don’t need one, I’ll say so on the first call.
See the four engagements →Send a brief →