Maintaining a clean, efficient CRM is a vital — and often overlooked — piece of any successful B2B marketing strategy. Yet, the bigger and more complex it becomes, the harder it can be to keep it in tip-top shape. Finding the budget or capacity as you grow can be nearly impossible.
Knowing when you need a HubSpot audit allows you to incorporate audits into your marketing plan, turning what would otherwise be infrequent and massive audits into more manageable routine maintenance.
A HubSpot partner like LAIRE has the expertise to help you get the most out of your CRM to better meet your business goals.
Reasons You'll Want a HubSpot Audit Right Now
1. Unaudited CRMs Aren't Trustworthy
A messy CRM includes contacts that have not engaged with you for a long time. Keeping them on your CRM doesn't increase your chances of reviving them. What it does do is muddy your marketing data.
Similarly, obsolete landing pages, workflows, and forms clog the pipeline and bog down team processes. You don't know your real open rates or lead-to-close ratio. As a result, you can't say if you're making a "data-driven decision".
2. Clutter Leads to Repeat Entries
Finding duplicate workflows, forms, contacts, and more after you begin loading a new one is a waste of your team's time — and a drain on your B2B marketing budget. It's a surefire sign you need a HubSpot audit.
It's very likely you have multiple team members duplicating each other's work. The entries may be just different enough that at a glance they look unique. Not only does this create extra work; it creates disjointed information. Some contact information is on this one and the rest is on the other. Once again, none of it is reliable.
3. It Feels Like You Should Get More Out of the Day
Outdated workflows, forms, and sequences generate workarounds for you and your team. The longer these stay in place, the more "normal" the workarounds feel. But they:
- Destroy productivity
- Encourage manual processes HubSpot could otherwise automate
- Make it harder to find what you need when you need it
Your team ends up chasing shadows instead of sending marketing-qualified leads (MQL) over to Sales through effective inbound marketing strategies and marketing-sales alignment.
You may even feel like HubSpot isn't working for your business and you made a huge mistake investing in it.
If you and your team often feel overwhelmed by how much you have to manage or you get this feeling that your team isn't as productive as it could be, a portal audit can be a game changer for marketing performance.
Benefits of Cleaning Your HubSpot Portal
At this point, it's easy to see the benefits. This one marketing audit can increase:
- Marketing budget efficiency
- Data reliability
- Team performance
- Marketing-Sales alignment
- Marketing performance
- Management and team morale
You all feel good about what your marketing strategy can achieve. The proof is in the enhanced performance.
Top Tips from a HubSpot Agency for Conducting a Successful Audit
1. Create a HubSpot Audit Plan
Don't let the magnitude of what needs to be done overwhelm you. Start with these six items to begin feeling the difference a HubSpot audit makes:
- Lists
- Workflows
- Forms
- Sequences
- Landing pages
- Properties
2. Limit Lists
People love lists, so it's no surprise that HubSpot users often overuse them. But in practice, people stop using them or never use them. The lists stay there with no purpose. This creates clutter, and ironically, more lists.
Go to Contacts > Lists. View the "Used In" column. If you see 0, delete it. Next work your way down lists from fewer "used in" to greater. You can safely delete ones with few uses. Deleting lists doesn't delete contacts.
Bonus Tip: The risk of deleting a list someone actually needed doesn't outweigh the value of deleting lists that have barely been used. So delete away -- within reason.
3. Don't Let Workflows Manage You
HubSpot workflows improve team efficiency by streamlining and automating. But they can wreak havoc if you forget what your workflows are doing.
Some may now be obsolete or need updates. Review them during your portal audit to make those decisions
Go to Marketing > Workflows > Export a spreadsheet at the top right to start cleaning them up.
In a column, state each purpose as you go down the line. Then decide which to delete from the spreadsheet to track decisions and avoid deleting one you need.
Bonus Tip: The best way to keep your workflows from taking on a life of their own is to do a big, comprehensive audit. Then you or your HubSpot partner should audit new ones monthly. The latter will now be a much smaller task. Also, limit who can create workflows and lists or create an approval process, so you'll have less to audit.
4. Get Your Team Involved With Sequences
Sequences are individualized. Have each team member review their own and state if it can be archived on a shared spreadsheet.
They can then take that action, or you can.
5. Don't Keep Outdated Forms
When you first get HubSpot, it's exciting to create new forms. But as you progress, you realize you don't need all of them.
Go to Marketing > Lead Capture > Forms > Export at top right.
On the spreadsheet, note the "number of views", "submissions", and "created date". Develop some criteria to decide what you no longer need. For example, if a form has 0 submissions and isn't connected to any pages, that's probably an automatic delete.
Remember: Be sure the form isn't connected to any active landing pages to avoid a user experience issue.
Going forward, after a successful or canceled event, make it a habit to archive related forms. That way, they can still be used as templates for future forms by pulling them up from the archive. Chances are you never will. But the decision feels easier when you perform your HubSpot audit.
6. Review Form Performance
Also, take this HubSpot audit opportunity to review how your forms perform. Use HubSpot analytics tools here.
Are the CTAs still performing? Or do you need to test and improve them again? Identify any friction on the form that could reduce its submission rate.
Don't get bogged down in trying to fix them now. Make a note of them as an item to address based on audit results.
7. Get Rid of Outdated Landing Pages
Landing pages serve a purpose. When it no longer exists, unpublish and archive it. Then delete the form connected to it. When archiving a landing page, don't forget to redirect the link.
8. Identify Duplicates
Duplicate contacts can become a nightmare for your data. Go to Contact > Actions > Manage Duplicates to pull up possible matches. Review each one to see if it is truly a match. Merge contacts from the same company or two versions of one contact.
Cleaning up your portal can reduce this occurrence going forward. But let's face it, duplicates happen no matter how pristine your HubSpot agency has your portal.
So either you or your HubSpot Solution Partner should perform this task monthly to keep your data clean and team efficient.
9. Cleanup Remaining Contacts
Once you've removed duplicates, review the contacts remaining to see how the team is managing them:
- Are team members adding proper tags for lifecycle stages (Subscriber, Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), Opportunity, Evangelist, or Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)?
- Do they all have an assigned owner?
- Are disengaged contacts being purged? If not, you'll start purging them during your audit.
10. Save Properties Review for End of Your Marketing Audit
Properties can only be deleted if they're not linked, so saving this for near the end reduces the likelihood of it being tied to something. If it is still connected, you'll need to double back to see if those forms should have been deleted or if you just need to remove the link to this property.
Go to Settings > Properties > Export All Properties.
Look for similar names. It can take a little more time to review these, so take your time here. You'll be glad you saved it for last.
Going forward: Without an approval process, you're likely to end up with slight variations created by different people and named different things. Put one in place.
11. Audit Your Naming Rules
A clearly defined naming convention significantly reduces duplicate work and the amount of time you have to spend auditing your portal in the future.
If you don't currently have a standard, look at how people already name things. As management, you just need to bring these naming functions together and then ensure people use them going forward.
12. Work With a HubSpot Partner
The importance of auditing HubSpot is evident. Portal clutter destroys team morale, productivity, and marketing performance. It's impossible to know if the portal data is reliable.
But if you've been using HubSpot for a few years, you may already feel overwhelmed by the task. You understand how vital this is, but you have limited resources for a comprehensive audit.
At LAIRE, we're inbound experts and your HubSpot partner. We can help you get the most out of your marketing strategy and portal.
