How to Audit and Optimize Your HubSpot Account

Let’s be honest — no one likes to audit a CRM. Unfortunately, as your B2B company grows, more contacts are added, more employees join and leave your organization, and overall data piles up, an audit becomes a necessary evil. To help you get the most out of your investment, we’ll walk through an audit of our CRM of choice — HubSpot. Plus, explore ways to keep future audits to a minimum. Let’s dive in. 

How to Perform a HubSpot Audit

Research HubSpot Best Practices 

To get the most out of HubSpot, you have to understand how it can be maximized. HubSpot offers a wealth of articles, training, and other resources to help you use HubSpot. If you’re conducting an audit, it might be due to data issues — HubSpot has an article for that. Workflows not flowing or working? Try the HubSpot blog. If you’re hoping to find more general help, HubSpot Academy provides training on just about every area of HubSpot.

Review Your Account

Check Your HubSpot Subscription Plan

The first step is to review your HubSpot subscription plan to understand what tools and capabilities you have access to. Head to the right-top corner of your HubSpot portal and click on Account & Billing to find a complete list.

Explore Settings

Once you know what you should have access to, make sure your general settings are correct. Some of the settings we look at when conducting a HubSpot Audit include: 

• Account defaults are set up
• Website/landing page subdomain connected
• Email sending domain is connected & authenticated
• Email subscription types are built out
• Form settings are complete

Review Integrations

One of the coolest HubSpot features is the ability to integrate with so many other useful apps. Check out which apps integrate with HubSpot and see if any of your company’s tools are available. Then review any existing integrations and make sure they’re functioning properly. 

Contacts

Oh boy — contacts. One of the biggest chunks of data in any CRM. The first thing you should do is review the number of contacts as it impacts HubSpot pricing — don’t overpay for contacts you’re not using or duplicates. Then try to answer the following questions: 

• How many duplicates? 
• Are contacts associated with a company? 
• Do most contacts have a lifecycle stage? 
• Do most contacts have a persona? 

To get the most out of your contacts and keep them organized, associate companies, contacts, and deals together.

 

Companies

You can approach your HubSpot companies with the same questions as your contacts — how many companies do you have, are there any duplicates, and are companies associated with a contact?

Campaigns

Campaigns allow you to organize your strategic marketing efforts. To keep campaigns organized make sure they follow a naming convention and use your campaign for specific marketing initiatives, rather than routine efforts.

Landing Pages & Blogs

The same naming convention best practice applies to landing pages and blogs. A unified and organized naming convention allows your employees to quickly find the content they need, expediting everything from sales conversations to marketing campaigns. 

To do a comprehensive audit of your blogs and landing pages, you’ll need to understand how they are performing. HubSpot does offer data on performance, depending on your subscription. At Hivehouse, we also utilize tools like Semrush and Google Analytics to get an even wider picture of performance. Of course, like many things in marketing, how much data you can access is dependent on budget. 

Email

Email marketing is equal parts art and science so a technical audit can only help your email marketing performance so much. However, an audit will establish a foundation and confidence in the technical elements of HubSpot email allowing your creativity to flow without worry. Some best practices to keep in mind: 

• Avoid sending to unengaged users
• Don’t buy email lists
• Abide by CAN-SPAM laws
• Use subscription types so users can choose what information they receive 

Questions to ask to get the most from your HubSpot email: 

• Are emails sent on a regular cadence? 
• Is the unsubscribe rate low? 
• Is the spam rate low? 
• Are open rates in line with industry standards? 
• Are clickthrough rates in line with industry standards?
• Are email lists using paid lists? 

Unlike SEO-based performance with assets like blogs and landing pages, email marketing performance will be self-contained within HubSpot — making it easy to establish baseline performance. 

Forms

Forms are your go-to asset for lead information capture and as such they should be simple and heavily optimized. Some best practices: 

• Forms should be simple and straightforward, with minimal questions
• Stick to 1 column forms, with fields in order from “easiest” to “hardest”
• Avoid phone numbers if possible
• Use standard forms for similar offers. This reduces clutter and streamlines the process.

Then, test your forms! Make sure the information coming through is aligning with intent. 

Social Media

First, check which social accounts are connected to HubSpot and connect any that your company uses but are not currently connected in HubSpot. Then, review how each social media platform is performing. Are there any outliers? If so, determine what’s causing them. 

Connecting your social media accounts to HubSpot keeps all of your data and allows you to post all in one place. This helps marketing managers track macro data trends which can be leveraged to improve performance over time. 

Workflows

Start simple, which processes are being automated with workflows? Go through each step to ensure the workflow is functioning properly. Remove any workflows that are no longer necessary, add naming conventions to easily track, and avoid duplicate workflows, conflicting workflows, or workflows for processes that HubSpot does automatically. 

Once you have your workflows organized, start thinking about other processes that could be automated with HubSpot’s Workflow tool. 

Deals

Deals help you track ongoing transactions that your sales team is pursuing. To make sure that no wires get crossed and deals are closed, follow the following best practices:

• Use all of the deal stages in your process 
• Set standard names, in past tense
• Add in monetary value and anticipated close date for deals 
• Always associate deals with contacts and companies

As you review your deals, ask yourself the following questions: 

• How many pipelines are being used? 
• Is the important information filled out on the deal cards? 
• Is there pipeline automation? 
• Are deals associated with contacts/companies? 
• Are sales goals being used? 

Sequences

Sequences allow you to schedule and send pre-written emails to contacts. It can be a highly valuable tool, so to ensure that they are working smoothly follow these best practices: 

• Keep sequence enrollment manageable if it relies heavily on sales tasks 
• Incorporate automated activities as much as possible
• Make sure to use personalization tokens, Documents, meeting links, etc.

How to Make HubSpot Audits Less Painful

So as beneficial as auditing HubSpot is, it’s not exactly fun. So, outside of the best practices above, this is how you can keep your HubSpot audits efficient and minimal.

Make an Audit Plan

Outline an actionable plan for your audit. Depending on the age of your company HubSpot account, how large your organization is, and how much everyone uses HubSpot — audits can take a while. So, create an outline that breaks the audit into manageable pieces and assign stakeholders. 

Keep Your Team on the Same Page

Speaking of team members, ensure that your B2B company adopts HubSpot best practices and that everyone follows them. As we mentioned before, HubSpot has a wealth of training resources — enroll your employees in a training program before letting them loose into the vast wilderness of HubSpot. 

Audit HubSpot on a Regular Basis

Another way to keep each HubSpot as simple as possible is to do it regularly. Like cleaning your house, the more you do it, the easier it is each time. Apply this same philosophy to your HubSpot and instead of a clean house, you’ll have a streamlined CRM that keeps your entire company organized and on the same page. 

Let Hivehouse Audit Your HubSpot Account

HubSpot audits take time and expertise — hey, we have both! As a HubSpot Partner for over ten years, we’ve been helping B2B companies all over the U.S. audit and optimize their HubSpot. To supercharge your marketing, sales, and organization, learn more about how we can audit your HubSpot for you.