Just as houses need cleaning or repairs from time to time, HubSpot portals require audits from time to time to keep them functioning optimally. That’s because HubSpot portals can become naturally untidy for various reasons.
A HubSpot audit, which involves six specific tenets, examines the account’s operation and the extant marketing processes of the business to ensure that everything is in order. A HubSpot account audit is beneficial because it helps minimize direct costs, as well as streamline work through organization.
This post discusses the various factors that determine whether your HubSpot portal needs an audit.
The essence of a HubSpot portal audit
A HubSpot audit ensures that:
- Your portal is set up for your success
- Friction along the buyer’s journey is reduced
- Your team is saved lots of headaches
- Your business saves time and money
- You don’t make business decisions based on inaccurate data
Now, let’s dive into the factors that determine whether a HubSpot account needs auditing.
1. Things are working perfectly
Yes, I said it. Your HubSpot account deserves an audit even if things are working very well. You don’t need to wait for all hell to break loose before attempting to put things in order. Just like you can do a spring cleaning on your home, your portal also deserves a purge to make sure it sparks joy.
As smoothly as your portal functions in its daily operations, you still need to check in on your workflows, update your system preferences, observe whether your SQLs, MQLs, et al are still aligned with your marketing strategy, as well as removing bits and pieces you no longer use.
This ensures that your HubSpot portal keeps functioning without disturbance.
Just like getting your hair trimmed, or your nails clipped, routine maintenance of HubSpot helps to keep everything growing better and performing efficiently and helps you reduce the risk of breakdowns that can occur with a largely unkempt portal.
2. A shoddy contact list
Another hint that your HubSpot portal is due for an audit is an untidy contact list.
As you carry on your business, you typically collect contacts. However, in time, you find that not all of your contacts are engaging with your content. Moreover, some of them might even lack relevant data such as their company name or may have not opted into any communication from you.
If this is your case, then you need an audit ASAP to purge the inactive, unengaged, and noncompliant contacts! Without routine maintenance of your contacts, you can run into several issues:
- The inactive contacts will cause you to pay more since HubSpot charges you based on how many contacts you have.
- If you have unengaged contacts, your email sender reputation will plummet because they won’t interact with your emails and some emails might bounce
- Without quality data, you risk making poor business decisions rooted in inaccuracies.
If you find your business dealing with an unclean contact database, then your portal is due for an audit.
3. Some time has passed
If you’ve had a HubSpot account for a while, maybe a couple of years or more, you’re due for an audit.
It’s natural for portals to get clogged up over time. However, even if there are no signs of mishap, it’s still important for you to run an audit. You might not have much to fix or clean, but running across a portal that has been in play for a while and doesn’t need an audit is like running across a home without a morsel of dust.
It does not have to be time-consuming or resource-intensive, but we suggest you do your own audit at least twice a year.
4. Opportunities are slipping through the cracks
If you find golden moments for marketing and sales slithering away from you for no good reason, that’s a sign. It’s a solid indicator that your HubSpot portal needs an audit.
Your portal should be working for you; not you for it.
If your automation isn’t alerting you when you need a nudge; if your data is leading you astray; if your dashboards are less dash and more bored… it is time.
Are the leads being assigned to the right person on the sales team at the right time in the buyer’s journey? Can you report on the handoff between marketing and sales? Do you know where your funnel is leaking? Do you know what subject lines, blogs, landing pages, and marketing materials are working best?
If you don't have clear visibility into these, then you're missing opportunities.
An audit will help you sift the data you have in your account and make sure it is working for your marketing strategy. It will reveal the errors that are causing your business to lose opportunities.
5. You can’t tell what’s working
If your team is tearing their hair out due to a lack of order in your HubSpot account, that’s proof that you need to have an audit. When we talk of disarray in your business, here are some examples:
- Inability to locate files and other assets in your portal due to poor naming conventions, etc
- Dormant lists, workflows, and sequences
- Uncertainty as to how leads find your site
- Uncertainty of the status of your leads
- Poor tracking of KPIs
- Duplicating tasks because you’re unaware that they have been created
- Wasting resources on unfruitful projects
These are symptoms that there’s disorganization in your portal. A reevaluation and correction are necessary.
6. Changes in team members
The last time you moved to a new home or office, what did you do first? A thorough clean-out, eh?!
That should be the case with a HubSpot account whenever new members join (or even old members leave, for that matter) your marketing or sales teams.
For example, if you just started working at a new company, and the former marketing head left, you're stuck trying to reverse engineer their workflows, lists, etc. The problem is, many times naming conventions aren't easy to decipher and if you continue to add automation to the system, without fully understanding what triggers are already set, you can unintentionally spam your contacts, repeat work, and lose momentum.
An audit also serves to dispose of whatever debris the previous members of your team left in their wake.
Some audits are straightforward and can be done internally. You can use our HubSpot Audit Guide as a roadmap for your self-service audit. But, sometimes, especially if it has been a while (or you have never done one before at all) - audits can be quite demanding and require professional intervention. That’s why the MTR team, a passionate crew of HubSpot experts, is here for you. We’ll take care of your audit so you don’t have to.
Contact us now!
