When and How to Audit Your HubSpot Portal

Keeping a CRM clean is an essential part of running a seamless process throughout all departments of a company. That’s the big difference RevOps can make at an organization!

Depending on the size of your portal and company, you might need to create a more aggressive plan to tackle all areas of HubSpot. In this blog, we will show you when and how to do a full audit of your HubSpot account and help you keep your CRM clean, organized, and operating efficiently.

Why Should I Audit My HubSpot CRM?

If you are creating Lists, Workflows, Forms, and leads are being generated on a daily basis, you are a candidate for a full HubSpot CRM audit.

Yes, that basically means if you use your portal you can benefit from an audit!

CRMs can get really messy over time and accumulate bad data which will impact your bottom line eventually. Can you imagine if all your contact records have missing information? Or if you have hundreds of workflows running in the background and nobody on your team can justify why they exist? Or you have multiple old forms and lists that don’t serve a purpose anymore and are just piling up in your HubSpot?

A messy CRM can cause a few problems:

You can’t trust your data!
Your team will have a hard time locating things in HubSpot
Several team members might do the same work multiple times, not knowing that it was already created (i.e. creating a new property with a slightly different name because one person did not know what to search for to begin with)
You might waste time and resources working on projects that never seem to be completed or have the expected results

Auditing Your HubSpot Portal

If you’re convinced that is never too late to clean your CRM, you might want to start looking at these areas:

Lists
Workflows
Sequences
Forms
Landing Pages
Properties

You can obviously include any other item you consider relevant such as files, templates, documents, knowledge base articles, etc, but the above items are a good starting point.

**Note: the items below are suggestions of how to get started. Auditing a CRM can become pretty complex and time-consuming depending on the size of your portal.

Lists

Lists are one of the most overused tools in HubSpot. Users often create a new list for any reason and leave it saved in the portal for eternity, which can easily add up to thousands of unneeded lists.

To start cleaning, navigate to Contacts > Lists, and sort by the “Used in” column on the right. The lists that say 0 are not being used in any workflow or scheduled emails. Start by looking at those lists and decide if you want to delete them.

Remember, deleting a list does not delete the contacts, so don’t be scared!

That should help start minimizing your lists.

Later, you can return to the lists in use to see if they can also be deleted. For example, if the list is connected to a scheduled email, you can delete it after the email is sent. Or, after you audit your workflows, if any workflow that has an active list as the enrollment trigger is going to be deleted, you can delete the list after addressing the workflow.

Workflows

Workflows can cause some serious damage in your database if automatic actions are occurring and you are not very sure why they are happening.

If you have a large number of workflows (“large” will vary depending on how big is your company, but let’s say more than 50 is a lot), do a full audit, then continue checking on them every month to see if anything has changed.

**Pro tip: limit the permissions to create workflows in your portal to the smallest number of users as possible.

To start cleaning your workflows, navigate to Marketing > Workflows, then click Export on top right. This will give you a spreadsheet with all your workflows’ names, create date, name of who created it and last updated it, number of enrollments and more.

export HubSpot workflow

From there, add a new column on the far right of the spreadsheet for comments. Click on every single one of the workflows and note in the spreadsheet what this workflow does and why. If you don’t know, ping the team member that does know, and also look for possible errors. For example, an error would be a workflow that is set to create a task for a user that doesn’t work at the company anymore. You either switch that to this person’s replacement or turn off this workflow.

After going through all workflows, you will be able to identify any patterns and anything that is deprecated. In the columns of your exported spreadsheet , you can sort by workflows that have no enrollments and see if those can be deleted, or sort by any columns that make sense to you, such as Created By.

This sorting method usually helps people to turn off a big part of their workflows and to identify any major inconsistencies in your data caused by mass updates.

Sequences

Very similar to the workflows, this sales team automation tool might have deprecated emails and rules.

A good way to audit those items is by the owner. Since sequences are a more personalized communication and each one of your sales team members have their own sequences, create a spreadsheet with the names of the sequences and the names of the owners. From there, have the team comment on your spreadsheet with notes about what can be archived and why.

Forms

After using HubSpot for a while, you might have a number of forms that are not in use anymore. Maybe your company hosted several events, which result in the creation of forms for registration, then soon after the event, the form is deprecated. This is just one example of how easy it is to accumulate unused forms in HubSpot.

If that’s your case, start cleaning by navigating to Marketing > Lead Capture > Forms, then click Export on top right. From there, you will receive a spreadsheet containing the names of all forms plus information such as number of views, submissions, create date etc.

Depending on what you are looking to audit, you might benefit from adding an extra column to the spreadsheet noting how many pages the form is connected to. This information needs to be added manually as it won’t come out of the export.

HubSpot forms dashboard with the appears on column highlighted Forms with no submissions that are not connected to any page are big candidates for deletion, as well as forms obviously created for testing. Start with those, then analyze forms that are connected to pages and see if those pages can be archived. Which takes us to the next item.

Landing Pages

Landing Pages usually contain forms and can exist for something temporary like the registration for an event as mentioned above. If the event in question has passed, you can probably unpublish and archive the Landing Page and delete the form connected to it.

As you can see, the audit of Forms and Landing Page might cross each other so make sure to tackle both.

Aside from its association with forms, unpublish and archive any other landing page that is old and contains content that is not current. When archiving a page, make sure to redirect that link to a live page to avoid error 404.

Properties

As your company grows, several team members might have permission to create custom properties for different reasons. Not having a process for approving property creation might result in duplicated properties with slightly different names that contain the same type of data.

We recommend that you audit your properties after auditing all other areas of HubSpot, because in order to delete a property it needs to not be hooked to anything. For example, a form field is a property, so if you have a property called Ice Cream Flavor and this property is used in 10 different forms, you need to remove it from all those forms first.

To start auditing, navigate to Settings on top right of your portal, then click Properties on the left side panel. Click Export All properties on top right, and open the automatic download of a spreadsheet.

export all HubSpot properties

The spreadsheet will show you all properties related to all Objects (Contacts, Companies, Deals, Product, Tickets) in different tabs, plus information such as property name, type, internal name, user who created it, usages (like what forms, workflows, etc this is in connected to), and more.

Tackle one object at a time and look for properties that have very similar names and descriptions. This might involve digging a little deeper into HubSpot to understand the use cases and decide if anything can be removed.

You might want to transfer data from one property to another before deleting, transferring data via workflow or manually via export and import.

Manage Duplicates

Duplicated contacts and companies are almost certainly going to be a reality at some point for any growing database. To avoid bad data, create a routine of checking the deduping tool in HubSpot monthly.

Navigating to Contacts, click on Actions on top right then Manage Duplicates in the dropdown. This will take you to a screen that will show you suggestions of possible pairs of contacts and companies for you to merge or dismiss.

Check out this article to learn more about Managing Duplicates in HubSpot.

Establish a Naming Convention

As you go over your forms, lists, workflows and landing pages, you will be able to identify patterns that can help you create a naming convention. This is a very important step to keep all your work organized and easy to locate, also avoiding duplicated efforts for something that already exists.

For example, if you have 10 workflows created for your Sales process, create a folder called Sales, and add descriptive names to each one of those workflows. If something is associated with a campaign, add the campaign name to them. You won’t regret doing this in the long run as it will help any team member to understand your processes and campaigns and locate anything without back and forth communication.

Example:
Campaign name: Foundational Funnel
Form name: Foundational Funnel_Tofu form
Workflow name: Foundational Funnel_Tofu

Create a Data Health Dashboard

A data health dashboard is a great way to keep track of what needs to be cleaned and audited in HubSpot. Throughout this post, we explained how to start analyzing various areas of your portal, but keeping the data itself clean is also an essential part of having data you can trust and also having processes and operations that work seamlessly across all departments.

Navigating to Reports > Dashboards, create a new dashboard and name it Data Health. From there, create simple reports with a summary of count of contacts for the following filters:

Contacts with no Owner
Companies with no Owner
Contacts with No Activity
Deals with No Activity
Contacts with No Email
Contacts who unsubscribed from all email
Contacts whose Marketing Emails Bounced
Contacts with no Company Associated
Contacts with Lifecycle Stage Unknown
Plus any other item you consider relevant to your business

Overall, a data health dashboard will help you flag what needs to be cleaned and bring you insights. By checking your dashboard, you will find out how many contacts need to be assigned an owner, for example. Or you might see how many deals you have with no activity and maybe restart that conversation. If the number of bounces and unsubscribes is high, you might want to plan to delete some contacts from the CRM.

Conclusion

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If you need help to audit your HubSpot portal and clean your data, feel free to book a call below with a HubSpot expert: