Expand Your Growth Potential with a HubSpot Audit

Chris Grimmett on April 05, 2022

The streamlined workflows, the custom automation, the expansive capacity of the contact database, HubSpot looked like it would solve almost every pain point your organization was feeling. But now, months or maybe even years later, it feels like it isn’t quite delivering the value you’d hoped. You can’t target the specific audiences you want, you can’t report on the things you need to optimize your marketing efforts and it’s tough to find the documents and images you need within a sea of files.

I can tell you with absolute certainty that all those capabilities you were first attracted to are still completely possible in your HubSpot portal. The problem is that after months or years of gathering data and sending emails, your portal can get pretty messy. And to get the full potential of your HubSpot account, you need things to be organized so the system can work properly.

So how do you realize all the value still available in HubSpot? With a HubSpot audit. The audit process exposes areas where data is falling through the cracks, build a strategy for keeping a clean and effective portal, organize your contacts and set up your workflows to power inbound marketing. Once all this is established, you’ll see marketing opportunities and your potential for growth start to expand.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First let’s talk about how your portal gets messy, how to do an audit and how to keep things organized moving forward.

How Does A Portal Get “Messy?”

If you’re anything like me, by the end of the week it looks like a horde of goblins ran through your house with a tornado machine, carelessly flinging shoes, jackets, books, papers and the TV remote in all the spots they do not belong. That is to say, the house is a mess.

Unless you’re Marie Kondo, you probably experience a similar thing each week (although likely not to this extent). It’s because when you’re focusing on juggling work, life and personal wellness, you don’t always have time to hang up your jacket or put your shoes in the closet. The same goes for your HubSpot portal. It’s easy to let things build up and stay disorganized when your main focus is running and growing your business.

That being said, the easy way is almost never the right way. There are a few common practices that will lead to a messy HubSpot portal:

  • Not having a system or processes in place to keep things organized. Convenience will always win out over organization unless you establish a “right” way to do things. Standards and naming conventions ensure every team member is using the portal the same way, which keeps it more organized in the long term.
  • There is no one to own the organization of your portal. Your marketing team is constantly trying to manage their day-to-day activities and not thinking about the structure of your Hubspot portal. Having a single person who’s responsible for ensuring processes are followed and items are organized can help keep things cleaner more consistently.
  • A lack of organization shows in your portal in a few ways. Templates and lists without titles, unpublished and unnamed web pages and landing pages, duplicate contacts, no folder organization, backlogs of old emails—these are all examples of a lack of structure that can quickly get out of hand and should be on your audit checklist.

What Problems Can It Cause?

When your portal gets a little crowded with old or disorganized information, it can make it really difficult for the HubSpot CRM to execute some of its key capabilities. For example, list segmentation and marketing automation both rely on data. If you’re not keeping track of specific contact properties that you want to target — like lifecycle stages, lead sources or company size — then HubSpot won’t have information to pull for your marketing campaign. So you’ll either end up with inaccurate information or no results at all, making it difficult to reach your business goals.

Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is that without organized data, you can’t report properly. That means all of your metrics from the number of qualified leads to conversion rates to revenue attribution will all be inaccurate. If you don’t have accurate reports, then you really can’t measure your brand value or track your growth.

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Why Do You Need an Audit?

A HubSpot portal audit can solve all the problems I just mentioned. It shows you where the clutter is in your dashboards so you can create a plan to clean up those areas and organize your information. This allows you to leverage important data in your HubSpot marketing campaigns.

Your data is one of your brand’s most valuable assets. It informs all of your major decisions and your HubSpot account gives you control over how you use it. Your data is your marketing foundation. Without it, you might end up building your brand on quicksand instead of steady ground.

When Do You Need an Audit?

Sometimes it can be hard to tell when you need some organization in your HubSpot account. You spend so much time working in it that you can’t see the forest for the trees. That’s why I recommend you do an audit at least once a year, ideally every six months.

Treat your audits like spring cleaning for your marketing. It’s a chance to get everything in order, restore organization and optimize workflows based on the changes in your brand. For example, what if you changed your sales process in the last six months but didn’t update your HubSpot? The audit is a chance to delete the old methods and establish new ones that better promote growth.

A few other indicators that might signal it’s time for an audit include:

  • When your lists, files or emails have more than one page of stored items.
  • When you make a major change in your marketing strategy.
  • Before your HubSpot contract is up for renewal. (You want to make sure you know which parts of HubSpot you’re using most so you don’t pay for Hubs you don’t need.)

If you keep up with organizing your portal, then adding new team members and HubSpot users will be a breeze. Everyone will know exactly which processes to follow and where to find what they need so they can be more productive in their role.

How To Perform an Audit

Audits can be used no matter what portion of the HubSpot platform you use. The Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, all of them can be audited to improve their function for your business.

Before you start, there are a few things you might need to determine to help you evaluate your existing data.

  • Do you have the information you need to target unique audiences? For example, if you sell homes in Vermont, do you collect contacts’ location information in a standardized format so you can target Vermont residents?
  • What are the biggest pieces of value for your business and do you have the data to support their growth?
  • What strategic data points can help you better target your buyer personas and grow your brand?

With these answers in mind, you can move on to the actual audit with a plan for optimizing your portal for growth.

Review Your Data

At Lone Fir Creative, we start with a tool called InCycle that helps us parse through contact data. It can pull out things like your number of active subscribers, number of unsubscribes, how many emails hard bounced and how many contacts are inactive. Plus it can tell you if there are missing fields within a contact record and break down the report by field.

This process provides a nice granular look at how you interact with leads. It indicates if your contact database needs a good scrub or just minor adjustments.

Evaluate Use

Next, you’ll want to evaluate how much and how well you’re using each HubSpot tool. In the CRM, you might look at how often you used list segmentation, custom properties or integrations with other software. In the Marketing Hub you might look at how many emails you sent, how often you posted to your blog or how much you utilized lead scoring. For the Sales Hub, you can see if your sales team is tracking deals or scheduling meetings through HubSpot.

The list goes on, but you see what I mean. Each Hub has unique capabilities and you want to take stock of which ones you’re using the most.

Find Improvements

To wrap up your audit, you can use the data and information you found to identify how to improve your HubSpot use. Likely, there will be a few tools that are clearly not being utilized — like social media messaging or team notifications — or a few areas where you could improve your contact properties. Other areas, however, might be more subtle and require a closer look like your website or blog SEO opportunities.

The idea in this final stage is to figure out what you need to do to keep growing with HubSpot. What processes do you need to improve to grab that extra conversion? Make that extra sale? Boost those open rates by another percentage point? Find those opportunities and resolve to do what it takes to start capitalizing on them.

What Comes Next?

Now that you know the why and how behind a HubSpot audit, it’s time to take action. Use the information in this blog to take stock of what’s in your portal and organize it into something more useful.

With a clean HubSpot portal, you can create segmented lists, personalize your marketing campaigns and target specific audiences because you have the data to support those functions. Automation is now a huge opportunity across all Hubs because you identified missing data and made adjustments to start collecting what the system needs.

You can also start reporting on things that you didn’t have the ability to track before. For example, how many of those Vermont residents bought a house last month? With more accurate reporting, you can track and plan growth for your brand by setting informed goals.

All of this is great and means great things for your brand, but it’s not the most important post-audit task. The most important thing is to keep your portal clean. Now that you’ve gone through all the effort to clean up your HubSpot account and make use of all the data you’ve collected, create processes to keep things in order. This will serve you well in the long run and make your next audit much simpler.

Let Us Help!

Lone Fir Creative is in the growth business. We aim to help all of our clients create meaningful growth and HubSpot audits is just one of the ways we accomplish this mission. We have extensive experience performing audits for businesses in a variety of industries, so we have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t.

So if you’re not keen to take on this huge task alone, reach out to us. We do audits every day and would be happy to comb through your HubSpot and tell you where there are opportunities for improvement.

Chris Grimmett
Chris Grimmett
Chris has spent his career both with one simple goal in mind: to do all the good he can, in all the ways he can, for every person (or organization) he can. His focus is in helping individuals and organizations find their voice and accomplish their goals. His diverse background in education, digital marketing, sales, and social work provide a unique perspective and experience in methods for growth and problem solving no matter the setting.

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If you are a brand looking to improve your brand awareness, create predictable revenue streams, expand profit, etc. — we’ll do it. Get in touch.