When a sports betting platform describes their CRM challenge as “list erosion,” they’re usually dealing with more than unsubscribes.

When Covers reached out to Hypha, they had a frustrating mystery on their hands. The sports betting platform, which manages multiple websites providing betting tips and odds aggregation, was experiencing what they called “list erosion”—contacts were disappearing from their HubSpot CRM at rates that didn’t match their other data sources.

For a business built on email marketing to sports betting enthusiasts, vanishing contacts meant vanishing opportunities.

Covers’ CRM Issue at a Glance

• Problem: Contacts disappearing from HubSpot without explanation
• Cause: Flawed deletion logic in a workflow
• Solution: CRM audit, workflow correction, contact restoration
• Result: Thousands of contacts recovered, future loss prevented

The Invisible Problem

Covers had invested in HubSpot Marketing Hub to power their email campaigns to sports betting audiences across their website portfolio. The system was functional, integrated with their AWS-based sites through custom connections, and handling form submissions effectively.

But something was wrong. Contacts were disappearing faster than they should have been. The team suspected issues with their email performance, but the real problem ran deeper—and was completely invisible to normal operations.

They brought Hypha in for what they expected to be a one-month CRM audit. The scope quickly expanded when we uncovered the extent of the issue.

Detective Work in Real Time

The investigation began with standard CRM analysis: examining contact lists, reviewing segmentation, and analyzing email performance data. Covers wanted to understand why certain emails weren’t performing and organize their unengaged contact lists more effectively.

But during the audit process, something unusual happened. Our director of client services registered for a Covers account using his personal email to better understand their lead capture process. Within minutes, his contact record vanished from HubSpot entirely.

That single disappearing contact became the key to solving the mystery.

“If you’re experiencing unexplained list performance issues, declining email engagement, or data that doesn’t align with your expectations, you might have hidden workflow problems affecting your CRM.”

The Breakthrough Discovery

The immediate deletion of our team member’s contact record revealed that this wasn’t an integration issue or a gradual list degradation—it was an active workflow systematically removing contacts that should have remained in the system.

By tracing the history of the contact record, we discovered it had been created correctly through the AWS integration. The contact existed, then suddenly didn’t. The deletion was happening inside HubSpot, not in the data transfer.

A further look revealed the culprit: a workflow with a flawed enrollment trigger based on active list membership. Brand new accounts were being immediately flagged for deletion.

The workflow was designed to delete inactive contacts, those that had bounced, unsubscribed from marketing information, or had zero active subscriptions. But the workflow had a critical flaw in its logic. Instead of just identifying truly disengaged users, it was also catching new registrations before HubSpot could set their subscriptions.

The Technical Solution

Once we identified the problematic workflow, the solution involved several components:

• Workflow Correction: We updated the enrollment trigger to properly identify disengaged contacts without catching new registrations in the deletion process.
• Contact Restoration: We restored thousands of previously deleted contacts that had been erroneously removed by the flawed workflow.
• List Reorganization: We helped organize unengaged contact lists and improve segmentation to support better email targeting.
• Tracking Implementation: A senior developer installed additional tracking code to provide better visibility into contact behavior and list performance.

The work expanded from a one-month audit to a two-month engagement as the scope of the contact deletion issue became clear.

The Strategic Challenge We Couldn’t Solve

During the engagement, we identified a broader structural issue: Covers was operating on HubSpot’s legacy contact model, which contributed to their deletion workflow approach in the first place. We strongly recommended transitioning to a marketing/non-marketing contact setup that would have prevented the original issue.

As the engagement came to a close, Covers agreed with the recommendation but wanted more time to consider the implications of changing their account.

The Universal Problem

Hidden workflow issues represent one of the most dangerous categories of CRM problems—they operate silently, destroying valuable data without obvious symptoms until significant damage has occurred. Unlike integration failures or user errors, workflow issues can persist for months or years before detection.

HubSpot only allows you to restore deleted contacts from the last 90 days. The rogue workflow had been going on for much longer—about seven months. There were potentially thousands of additional contacts that shouldn’t have been deleted that we couldn’t restore.

Covers’ experience illustrates how critical it is to audit not just what your CRM is doing, but what it might be doing without your knowledge. The most destructive issues are often the ones you can’t see.

What This Means for Your Business

If you’re experiencing unexplained list performance issues, declining email engagement, or data that doesn’t align with your expectations, you might have hidden workflow problems affecting your CRM.

The solution requires detective work—systematic investigation of automation, workflows, and data flows to identify what’s happening behind the scenes. Sometimes the most valuable discovery is finding what’s broken that you didn’t know was broken.

Experiencing mysterious CRM data issues or unexplained list performance problems? Because the most dangerous problems are often the ones operating invisibly in your system.

Hypha specializes in CRM audits that uncover hidden issues affecting your marketing performance. Contact our team today to investigate what might be happening behind the scenes in your HubSpot instance.