Apollo is a powerful sales intelligence and engagement platform that integrates with HubSpot to provide enriched data on your contacts and companies. By syncing Apollo with HubSpot, you can access valuable insights directly within HubSpot, enabling your sales and marketing teams to have more personalized, relevant interactions with prospects and customers.
However, if you have duplicate contacts or companies in HubSpot, integrating with Apollo can mirror those duplicates, leading to several issues:
Fortunately, by proactively identifying and merging duplicate records in HubSpot before enabling the Apollo integration, you can avoid these issues and ensure clean, consistent data across both platforms.
In this step-by-step tutorial, we'll share a playbook for avoiding duplicates when integrating Apollo with HubSpot. We'll cover:
By following this guide, you can maximize the value of your Apollo + HubSpot integration while maintaining high-quality, deduplicated data across your tech stack. Let's dive in!
Koalify is a native HubSpot deduplication app that makes it simple to create custom duplicate rules to continuously identify and merge duplicate records in HubSpot automatically.
Before integrating Apollo with HubSpot, the first step is to set up duplicate rules in Koalify to catch and merge existing duplicates and prevent new ones from being synced to Apollo. Here's how:
In your HubSpot account, navigate to Settings > Integrations > Connected Apps.
Find Koalify in the list of apps and click "Edit Duplicate Rules."
Create 2 new rules for Contact records. Here's 2 examples of what your duplicate rules might look like:
Identify duplicate records based on matching First and Last Names
→ Rule Name: First and Last name
→ Match Filters:
→ First Name matches property First Name AND
→ Last Name matches property Last Name
Identify duplicate records based on matching Phone Numbers
→ Rule Name: Phone Number
→ Match Filters:
→ Phone Number matches property Phone Number
💡 Important integration detail: Pushing a contact from Apollo will also push its account (company) to HubSpot if it’s not already there, overriding your account push setting.
To avoid these new companies creating duplicate records in HubSpot it’s a good idea to add an additional duplicate rule for company records.
Identify duplicate company records based on matching Company Names
→ Rule Name: Company Name
→ Match Filters:
→ Company Name matches property Company Name
Now that you have duplicate rules set up in Koalify, you'll want to do a bulk merge of any existing duplicates in HubSpot before integrating with Apollo. This will ensure you're starting with clean, deduplicated data (and able to maintain it on an ongoing basis).
A good starting point to identify how many duplicate records you have for a specific set of rules is to create a filtered list using a dedicated contact view in HubSpot.
Use the following filters to create a view of Koalify duplicates using your First and Last Name and Phone Number duplicate rules:
→ Koalify Number of Duplicates is greater than 0 AND:
→ “Koalify Duplicate Rules” is any of “First and Last Name” or “Phone Number”
→ “Record source detail 1” is equal to any of “apollo integration”
From this view, you can now open each contact record and quickly identify duplicate causes and merge records using the Koalify CRM card in the right hand sidebar.
With three clicks, your team can review and merge duplicates quickly and confidently.
The easiest way to bulk merge duplicates is to use HubSpot workflows to automate the process.
Here's how it works:
In your HubSpot account, navigate to Automation > Workflows.
Click "Create workflow" and select "Contact-based."
Set the enrollment trigger to:
→ "Koalify Number of Duplicates" is greater than 0 AND
→ “Koalify Duplicate Rules” is any of “First and Last Name” or “Phone Number”
💡 This will automatically enroll any contacts identified as duplicates by your Koalify rules that were created by the Apollo integration.
Action 1: Koalify “Merge Duplicate Contact”
This will merge the duplicate Contact into its designated Primary Duplicate ID. By default, the workflow action will use the 'Koalify Primary Duplicate ID' to merge into. This property can be adjusted in your Koalify settings.
By bulk merging existing duplicates before integrating Apollo, you'll ensure that you're syncing clean, deduplicated data from HubSpot to Apollo. This will avoid creating duplicate records in Apollo and any associated issues or charges with enriching the same contact multiple times.
To monitor duplicates created by the Apollo integration on an ongoing basis, you can add a dedicated report to a Zero Duplicates dashboard in HubSpot.
Build a single object report using these details:
📀 Data sources of "Contacts"
📊 Use the Horizontal Bar chart type:
→ Displaying: Create Date
→ Measured by: Count of Contacts
→ Filter: “Koalify Number of Duplicates” is greater than 0 AND
→ “Original record source detail 1” is equal to any of “Apollo Integration”
<aside>
→ Use custom rules to identify duplicates in HubSpot
→ Automatically merge duplicates with HubSpot workflows
→ Quickly merge sensitive records manually with Koalify CRM cards