TABLE OF CONTENTS
Reasons to Audit Your Portal Now | Audit Benefits | Tips for a Successful Audit
Maintaining a clean, efficient customer relationship management (CRM) platform 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 them into your marketing plan, turning what would otherwise be infrequent and massive reviews 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.
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 tell whether you're making a “data-driven decision.”
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.
Outdated workflows, forms, and sequences generate workarounds for you and your team.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:
Your team ends up chasing shadows instead of sending marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) 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 feel that your team isn't as productive as it could be, a portal audit can be a game changer for marketing performance.
At this point, it's easy to see the benefits of keeping your CRM squeaky clean. This one marketing audit can increase:
You all feel good about what your marketing strategy can achieve. The proof is in the enhanced performance.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 the 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.
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.
Also, take this HubSpot audit opportunity to review how your forms perform. Use HubSpot analytics tools here.
Are the calls to action (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.
Landing pages serve a purpose. When this purpose no longer exists, unpublish the page and archive it. Then, delete the form connected to it. When archiving a landing page, don't forget to redirect the link.
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.
Either you or your HubSpot Solution Partner should perform this task monthly to keep your data clean and team efficient.
Once you've removed duplicates, review the contacts remaining to see how the team is managing them:
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.
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.
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.
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.