HubSpot Audit:

The primary goals of a HubSpot audit are to:

1. Analyze account and usage 
2. Assessing whether usage, KPIs and business goals are in sync
3. Understanding if key tools in HubSpot are being underleveraged
4. Checking in on the logistics of your account 
5. Walking away with actionable steps 

At the end of your HubSpot audit, you’ll have an actionable list for optimizing your HubSpot performance. Be warned, depending on how frequently you conduct HubSpot audits, your list of action items will range from simple quick-wins, like turning on HubSpot snippets, to more time-consuming tactics like cleaning up workflows, or reworking your content strategy.

There are lots of reasons to perform a HubSpot audit, apart from if you simply just haven’t done one in a while. For example:

• You’re inheriting a HubSpot account and you’re unsure what automation your predecessor set up
• Your company’s growth goals have changed, or there is a change in the company strategy
• The company is about to release a new product offering or announced a new target market
• Your sales and or marketing team are not hitting their KPIs 
• You notice data leaks, like not being able to see attribute leads to content sources
• You’ve found discrepancies in your reporting and are wondering if there are more
• You find yourself working for the tool instead of your tool working for you

Additionally, HubSpot is an innovation machine. The company frequently announces product improvements and new releases, which are always very exciting and help HubSpot remain the powerhouse tool it is. But, if you fall behind on the updates, you’re at risk of decreasing your leverage of the platform you’re paying for. To stay on top of the many factors that can contribute to a messy HubSpot portal, quarterly or bi-annual audits are recommended. 

There are lots of ways to go about your HubSpot audit, and the tactics involved to optimize your portal will range from low lift items (like cleaning up HubSpot contacts) to more involved processes (like reorganizing workflows, or updating your entire content strategy.) Before diving in, consider the following steps:

1. Get key stakeholders’ buy-in: Start by asking department heads what their quarterly or annual goals are. You want to make sure there is accurate input from leadership across each department of your organization so you can align sales, marketing, customer service, MarketingOps, and management with high level business objectives. 
2. Align to KPIs and goals: In order to be most effective during your audit, remember to keep connecting your audit back to your broader KPIs which will help you from falling down the rabbit hole of ‘what if’s’ and ‘nice to haves’ that HubSpot can offer. Is your service team looking to handle more tickets per rep? Are your salespeople needing to automate some of their outreach?
3. Be real about how much you can handle: Ask yourself what resources you have at your disposal. HubSpot portal audits can get very granular, so if you wind up pulling a list of 10,000 tasks, and there are only two people on your marketing team, it’s simply unrealistic to expect you can tackle everything in a week, or even a month. If you have a larger team, you can be more tactical, and delegate out tasks with specific timelines attached to them to tackle all of the needs for your audit at once. 

Below, we’ll cover what a comprehensive audit looks like, so regardless of what your organization’s goals are or how big your organization is, you’ll know which areas to check, and how to deploy next-step actions. 

Below is a process for a comprehensive HubSpot audit, bucketed into categories to help you cherry pick which items best serve your KPIs. 

Functionality & Settings

In your setting tab in HubSpot, check the following options routinely to ensure your HubSpot is clean, and those who need access to HubSpot updates have it, and those who don’t are removed:

• Turn on access to allow HubSpot support: So when you speak with a HubSpot representative or Chatbot about issues with your account, they can quickly view your pages and provide better support.
• Check who is signed up for notifications: Especially on key touchpoints, like form submissions, to ensure no leads are slipping through the cracks.
• Look to see who has admin access: Are the appropriate roles assigned for current and former employees and contractors?
• Check your account details: Particularly your billing details and renewal settings. Does everything look right? Are you on track to keep your subscription active so you don’t lose access to your information when you need it most? 
• Protect your account: Have you set up 2FA to decrease the risk of an intruder gaining access to your account?
• Rotate API keys: For increased security against third-party apps and rotating developers, it’s best practice to rotate your API keys every six months.   
• Check your social accounts: Are any of the connections expiring soon? Are personal accounts removed from your professional portal to avoid accidental cross-posting?

Additionally, if your organization works within the EU market, you have obligations for protecting and collecting personal data. If this is the case for you, it is wise to check in on your GDPR functionality within the HubSpot settings as well. Is it turned on? 

MarketingOps

MarketingOps in HubSpot is an essential component to ensure your marketing and sales teams are running efficiently, and your processes are working to support your marketing strategy. A few key areas that help improve your processes, and automation within HubSpot include:

• Fill out personas: Filling out your personas allows you to categorize, segment, and target personas with more effective messaging.
• Update your definitions for MQL, SQL, et al: The definition of what an opportunity, prospect, SQL, MQL and opportunity will vary from organization to organization. They might also evolve as the number of leads pour in from your inbound efforts. 
• Update lead scoring model: Determine first what the best lead scoring model is for you, then tag each contact with their current lifecycle.
• Check deals pipeline and deals automation: Setting up a workflow for tasks helps the sales team reaffirm they are following up with leads when necessary. Working through deals automation can be done in Settings > Objects > Deals > Pipeline.
• Check marketing and sales handoff process: Are your sales reps getting the most relevant and qualified leads possible? Check in on your lead scoring and lead rotation automation to ensure the right candidates are going to the right representative to expedite and improve the sales process.
• Check your workflows: Do your workflows have errors? Are the correct personas assigned to the correct workflows? Are workflows triggering as you intended? 
• Check on integrations: HubSpot’s App Marketplace has thousands of integrations business users can take advantage of. Adding and syncing tools like Gmail to better track sales communication, or Google Search Console for more robust analytics are only a couple of integrations you can add for a more end-to-end understanding of your leads, prospects and customers. 

Contact and Company Cleanup

HubSpot only charges users for the ‘marketing contacts’ within a system, meaning those who are opted-in for your marketing emails or ads (as opposed to unsubscribed contacts). But, just because you aren’t paying for each unsubscribed contact doesn’t mean there aren’t other worries to consider with a messy list.

For example, exceeding contact limits, or accidentally sending messaging to those who have opted out and decreasing your email sending reputation should be top concerns for your organization. For that reason, regularly looking at your contact and company lists will help keep everything continually organized.

• Clean up contacts by creating active lists: For bounced contacts, unsubscribed contacts, and uninterested contacts, you can create unique, active lists and mass delete these contacts more efficiently. For uninterested contacts, you can choose your definition of what this means. For example, if a prospect has been in your database for over a year, but hasn’t opened a marketing email, they might not be interested. Before deleting uninterested contacts, you can create a re-engagement workflow to give one last attempt to engage contacts. If they still don’t respond to your reengagement flow, reduce operational expenses by clearing them out of your system.
• Handle duplicate contacts and companies: Your HubSpot might also have a slew of duplicate contacts and companies as multiple members of your team import lists from various platforms. Take time to merge contacts and companies, ensuring one person is assigned to each, to keep your system clean. Note: You can’t merge accounts with the Salesforce integration turned on, so you’ll need to temporarily remove the integration while going through the clean up process.

After getting your list to a point where contacts are as tidy and as lean as possible, start adding the correct information to improve each contact’s value:

• Set custom properties: When target markets or business priorities change, so should the properties of your HubSpot contacts. By defining the custom properties that mean the most to you and your team, you can ensure manual data entry is uniform, streamlined and still provides the value everyone needs to help nurture leads and prospects through the buyer’s journey. 
• Create custom contacts, company and deal views: Custom views like viewing only contacts assigned to you, all contacts you have access to, contacts that haven’t been worked, or a list of contacts that need to be called, are only a few options to help your sales and marketing team stay productive every day.

Spot Check Lists

While you’re working through your lists, it’s also important to do a clean up of all lists you’ve aggregated (or inherited) over the years:

1. Identify and archive unused lists
2. Organize active lists
3. Update lists with new buyer persona info
4. Identify missing lists that would be helpful for creating smart content or target emails

Revisit Workflows and Sequences 

Do you have hundreds of workflows in your HubSpot account? If so, you’re not alone. But, without review of existing workflows, your contacts could be getting bombarded by emails that you didn’t even know existed (especially if you’re inheriting a HubSpot account.) 

It’s important to understand when your leads, prospects, and customers are getting sent marketing and sales collateral so you don’t bombard them with too many messages, and so the materials that go out to them are all hyper-specific to their use cases. 

Other items to consider as next steps:

1. Cleanup or turn on snippets and templates
2. Create workflows that tag contacts based on updated personas
3. Are your workflows created with the best assets, and segmented based on personas or is there room for optimization? 
4. Are your naming conventions on workflows, lists, landing pages, forms, and CTAs consistent and easy to understand? 

Another area to check in on is the “conversations” tab in HubSpot, which is a hugely underleveraged tool in HubSpot, but incredibly powerful for 1 to many ABM marketing strategies.

Review Blog

To ensure you’re able to easily analyze your blog performance -- down to the individual page or post level -- make sure your content is tagged and organized in a way that enables you to find what you’re looking for quickly. For example: 

• Clean up blog tags to ensure they correspond with your campaigns
• Create content clusters to organize your content and boost SEO
• Create campaigns to quickly see all assets that are working together to reach a particular KPI
• When was the last time you checked in on your internal linking strategy? Is your cluster content linked to your pillar? Are you actively working on moving leads and prospects through the buyer’s journey with strong, visual CTAs?

Review Marketing Collateral & Files

Marketing is an iterative process, and not every tactic will remain a component of your marketing strategy forever. But, when starting and stopping new campaigns, the number of forms, CTAs, landing pages and emails that become unused can quickly clutter your system. A quick review of what’s in active in your HubSpot can help tidy up the CRM, and optimize the performance of your highest performing content:

• Archive unused assets 
• Cleanup files, and ensure all naming conventions are consistent and up-to-date
• Attribute CTAs to correct campaigns
• Delete unused CTAs
• Review forms and CTAs for optimization opportunities

Review Metrics

As you sort through each section of your CRM, ask questions about your current capabilities: Can you tie your actions and results back to the company goals? Can the data you’re aggregating be used cross-functionally? Is your business at the correct rate? Is your customer experience solid?

A Hubspot audit can help highlight where your reporting shortcomings are, and where you can improve to showcase your ROI more prominently:

• Check dashboards: Are they actionable and are they shared with and used by key stakeholders regularly?
• Check website performance and analytics: Are your content and SEO strategies generating the results you’re looking for?
• Check social performance: Are there posts scheduled in advance? How has performance increased over time?
• Review email performance: Are there ways you can improve, segmentation, and personalization? How are your open rates, delivery rates, and click through rates? 

It is not enough to audit HubSpot in a silo. Oftentimes, bad offline processes can also create a messy Hubspot Portal. And, no matter how many times you give your portal an audit, disorganized offline processes will continue to clutter your account time and time again. 

For example, let’s say you attend a trade show, and after the event you do a mass import of all the contacts you met at the event. Without looking at contacts who may already live in your HubSpot, and without de-duplicated these contacts after the import, you’re contributing to a cluttered account without even realizing it.  

When completing a comprehensive HubSpot audit, it’s vital to look holistically at your entire marketing strategy and processes, not just the tool, to find areas where disorganization may clutter your goals.

Once you’ve organized your account, and started analyzing the performance of assets and contacts that remain in your system, you can start to see the connection between your marketing efforts and KPIs more clearly. To continue painting this picture, take a deeper look at what’s converting, and what marketing gaps need to be filled. 

What’s Doing Well?

Think back to your KPIs. What problem are you trying to solve with your marketing? For example, if your goal is to increase the number of conversion from your website each month, ask questions like: 

• Are landing pages performing well? Should you add some PPC to a landing page to extend the reach? 
• Is there a particular social campaign that performed really well? Are there ways to re-run the campaign, or create new ideas based on the same subject matter?
• Have you deployed a highrise or skyscraper technique to help build backlinks and in turn your site’s domain authority?

Where Can You Improve? 

As painful as the process may feel, it’s important to look at places where your marketing campaigns are falling short, so you can make improvements to fill the gaps. For example:

• Are you producing a lot of website traffic but little to no one is converting? One way to optimize your content whether on a highly trafficked webpage, or a blog post is to incorporate more CTAs.
• Do you have a significant drop off from your site after a thank you page? Add additional resources or options within your thank you page to keep leads and prospects on your site.
• Are your landing pages stagnant? Are there opportunities to A/B test variations of your landing pages to increase conversions?
• Is your website traffic stagnant? This may be an indicator that you need to increase blogging frequency, your social media presence or optimizing the long-tailed keyword list you’ve previously generated.
• Are you taking advantage of Hubspot’s SEO software to help build your site’s authority on the topics most important to your organization?

If you have a group of teammates solely dedicated to the HubSpot Audit, great! 

Putting deadlines to each of your tasks, and holding members of your team accountable for getting everything done, should be no problem at all. If you want help frameworking the next steps, start by creating your Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant Timely (S.M.A.R.T.) goals. 

For those who are tackling the majority of the audit alone, you’ll still want to start your process by setting SMART goals, but the timeline for you to implement your tasks may come with a longer timeline. To avoid burnout, or feeling too overwhelmed by the process, try to set 10 hours aside each month to work through all of the items.

Still feeling overwhelmed?

See how MTR can assist throughout the audit process, as well as the strategic and tactical steps required to complete your audit’s action items.