You have HubSpot - great. But what happens if it isn’t completely fit for purpose anymore? As you’re told every time you get a CRM, 50% of all CRM implementations fail within 2 to 3 years.
Why is this?
The truth is people see CRM as a one-size-fits-all operation. They think that because they have the functionality within the software to do what it needs to, it will run in that way. However, people forget that it’s not the software that makes CRM implementations fail:
It’s people. As our Commercial Director, Jack Williams, who has over 10 years of HubSpot CRM experience at Axon Garside puts it:
-The initial outset for some software or technology and so on is not the true cost of this. It's the implementation. It's the finding of the people to maintain it. It's optimising it, improving it, taking the time to look at it-
When new people join, or existing colleagues have their own way of working, they use the software in their own way. Ultimately, this leads to misalignment of data across the software and no standardisation in the way HubSpot is used.
This is where an audit comes in handy. In this article, we outline our 58-stage HubSpot audit process, broken into 12 categories, to uncover the pitfalls in the ways you’re using HubSpot and how you can begin optimising your portal for your business.
This is the exact audit we use when creating a strategy roadmap for all of our HubSpot CRM clients, including:
You should break your HubSpot audit process down into 12 categories:
Auditing all these categories may seem daunting at first, but we have broken this down into specific items to look at and review to make this task more manageable. For each audit item, you should be able to rate your portals performance as:
This will help you set priorities for your HubSpot optimisation project and see an immediate impact. However, it's important to be completely transparent and honest with your feedback. If there’s even a little snag that’s disrupting the workflow of your colleagues, this needs to be looked into and actioned.
The first category dives into your contact and company records to ensure that you’re making the most of the data at your fingertips. This makes sure your data is properly enriched, that you’re making the most of your HubSpot data limits and that the associations between the two are correct.
This is a review of the total number of companies stored in the CRM.
This ensures that company records are accurate, up-to-date, and free from duplicates. It helps identify whether companies are being properly created, maintained, and segmented for reporting, sales, and marketing purposes within HubSpot.
A check of all contact records in the CRM to assess completeness and data hygiene.
This includes verifying contact details, removing duplicates, and ensuring segmentation is properly applied. Having an accurate contact database helps improve marketing campaigns, sales outreach, and customer relationship management.
Are contact records properly segmented and tagged?
Do contacts have complete details such as email and phone number?
Are old or inactive contacts being cleaned from the database?
An audit of marketing contacts to determine if they are correctly classified.
This ensures that only relevant contacts are marked for marketing, preventing unnecessary costs for email send limits. A proper review helps maintain compliance with email marketing regulations and enhances overall campaign performance.
A check of the number of custom properties created for companies. This helps determine whether key data points are being effectively captured, whether unnecessary fields are cluttering the CRM and whether properties are being standardised to improve reporting and segmentation.
An analysis of the number of custom properties used for contacts.
This ensures that relevant data points are captured efficiently, avoiding unnecessary or redundant fields that may clutter the system. Proper structuring of contact properties allows for better segmentation and streamlined automation.
A review of whether associations between contacts, companies, and deals are being used correctly.
Proper associations ensure that relationships between different objects in HubSpot are accurately maintained, helping to improve reporting, automation, and sales team visibility.
This category dives into how your sales team is managing deal properties within your HubSpot portal.
It will help you identify pipelines that need updating, any inefficiencies within your sales process and the questions you need to ask to rectify these.
A review of the total number of deal records in your CRM helps identify duplicate or incomplete entries that may affect reporting accuracy and pipeline efficiency.
This audit item ensures that deal records are properly enriched and merged prevents clutter and improves forecasting for your sales team.
Understanding how many pipelines exist in your HubSpot CRM ensures that your deals and sales pipelines are structured correctly.
Having unnecessary pipelines can create confusion and make reporting more difficult. We see this often with portals having multiple pipelines for different financial years that, truthfully, isn’t necessary. Regularly reviewing them helps keep your sales pipeline efficient and functional.
Active pipelines should reflect ongoing deal processes.
Similarly to the former audit point, if too many are inactive, it indicates an outdated setup that isn’t optimal for sales effectiveness. Again, regularly assessing pipeline activity helps maintain a clear and structured sales process.
This step is an overview of the deal stages within your HubSpot portal, and whether the stages that have been set are relevant to your sales reporting.
The structure of your deal stages should match your sales process without being too complicated. A well-defined deal stage setup provides a clear view of pipeline health and helps with forecasting accuracy.
This HubSpot audit item explores how your internal sales team are managing individual deals.
Well-maintained deals ensure that outdated deals don’t clog your pipeline. Regular cleansing of deals improves CRM hygiene and keeps sales reporting accurate.
Ensuring that deals are associated with the right contacts and companies enables a single view of the customer.
Without these links, sales teams may lack crucial context about deal progression, leading to data silos based on a lack of association.
Custom objects are HubSpot objects created by users who need to track data that doesn’t fit into standard CRM categories. They're ideal for businesses with more complex processes or requirements that go beyond the standard ‘out-of-the-box’ setup.
But with added flexibility comes added responsibility. This section helps you assess whether your custom objects are being used effectively — and whether they’re still necessary.
Custom objects allow businesses to manage unique data outside of standard HubSpot objects (deals, contacts, companies, and tickets).
If your organisation uses custom objects, they should be correctly structured to support business operations and enriched appropriately.
Custom objects should have well-defined associations with standard objects like deals, contacts, and companies.
This ensures that data flows smoothly and relationships between different CRM elements are clearly established.
Landing pages are valuable resources to ensure that your marketing efforts are working and that you’re converting visitors, into leads and, finally, into customers.
Our fourth category ensures that your landing page and forms are structured correctly. We also ensure that you’re capturing all the correct information in order to follow up and chase these leads in an efficient manner.
Reviewing the total number of forms in your CRM helps eliminate unnecessary or duplicate forms that may clutter your system.
Every form should serve a specific purpose, contributing to lead capture. They should be placed on individual pages to ensure you can track effectiveness at lead generation.
Not all forms in your CRM may be actively used.
Identifying active versus inactive forms ensures your portal remains organised and prevents outdated forms from being used accidentally.
Forms can be integrated with workflows to ensure that captured leads are nurtured, routed correctly, and followed up in a timely manner.
A lack of automation may lead to missed opportunities or contacts ‘falling out the funnel’.
A consistent naming convention for forms makes it easier to search, manage, and edit them.
Without a structured approach, finding and maintaining forms can become challenging.
Form submission notifications should be routed to the right sales and marketing team members to ensure timely follow-up.
Without proper notifications, leads may go unnoticed, missing out on nurturing qualified B2B leads and affecting revenue.
Reviewing the total number of landing pages in your portal helps identify outdated or unpublished pages that may no longer serve a purpose.
Cleaning up inactive pages ensures your CRM remains efficient and reduces clutter. It also improves SEO rankings, with Google seeing new updates to your sitemap and marking your website as staying relevant and up-to-date.
Forms on websites or landing pages should be strategically placed to capture leads efficiently.
If they are scattered across different locations or not collecting the right data, this can impact lead generation quality.
Lists are an item within HubSpot CRM which often grows out of control.
Managing the sheer number of data within your CRM and organising them into neatly segmented lists is hard, but this section helps you get these lists organised and back on track - without going over your HubSpot limit.
Lists play a crucial role in segmentation, automation, and reporting.
However, having too many lists, especially outdated ones, can make CRM management difficult, hence why it has a place in HubSpot audit.
Static lists contain contacts that don’t update automatically with form fills or ongoing lead generation.
Regularly reviewing them ensures that old lists are removed, preventing unnecessary data storage and confusion.
Consistent naming conventions for lists make it easier to manage and locate specific segments.
A structured approach ensures lists are easily identifiable for any of your team that need to access them.
Static lists can be linked to workflows for automation.
But if they are no longer relevant, they can clutter your CRM and impact processing efficiency. This impacts the efficiency of your automation and leads to data enrichment problems down the line.
Active lists dynamically update based on predefined filters. This means that any contact that enters your CRM that meets that criterion will be enlisted.
Reviewing these lists ensures that your segmentation remains accurate and doesn’t include unnecessary filters.
Similar to lists, the number of automated workflows can get out of hand. With the sheer power of automation, you can do practically anything with HubSpot’s automation function.
However, people will set up workflows without thinking if it’s the most efficient way of conducting business. Our sixth category will help you gauge how organised and effective your workflows really are, and how you can improve their management.
A large number of workflows can make automation difficult to manage.
Regularly auditing them helps identify redundant, outdated, or unnecessary workflows that may be causing inefficiencies.
Active workflows should contribute to automation efficiency.
Unnecessary active workflows can increase CRM costs and impact system performance if you go over your workflow limit. It can also limit the amount of workflow you can create that will impact your business’s bottom line immediately.
Workflows that duplicate efforts or conflict with each other can create confusion and inefficiencies. Identifying overlaps ensures automation is effective.
Workflow descriptions provide context for automation processes, making it easier for team members to manage them.
A lack of descriptions can make identifying specific workflows difficult at a glance.
HubSpot automatically flags unused workflows within your automation panel.
Unused workflows clutter your automation setup so archiving or deleting them improves organisation.
Similarly, HubSpot flags workflows that haven't been updated in a while or may not be functioning correctly.
Reviewing these helps maintain automation reliability.
No HubSpot audit is complete without reviewing the state of reporting and dashboards.
With data reporting affecting decision-making, having a clear and concise data dashboard is the difference between your business over and underachieving. This category takes aim at your reporting setup, and how effective it is at showing you the data you need to know.
A high number of dashboards can make reporting cluttered and lead you to run out of dashboard space in your HubSpot portal.
Reviewing them helps ensure only the most relevant dashboards are maintained.
Custom reports should provide meaningful data insights. If too many exist, they can make reporting inefficient and difficult to manage.
Moreover, HubSpot portals only have a limited number of custom reports you can create. By having those reports that don’t contribute anything to meaningful data visualisation, you’re only clogging up your reporting dashboard.
Duplicated reports add unnecessary complexity and can be replaced by filtered versions to streamline reporting, reducing HubSpot license costs.
This category takes a more general approach to looking at the data within your CRM.
It helps you get a better understanding at seeing who owns certain contacts, companies and deals within your CRM. This gives you better visibility on how these objects are being routed to specific people and overall highlights inefficiencies within your sales process.
Data quality directly impacts CRM effectiveness.
Duplicate records, outdated contacts, and bounced contacts can disrupt workflows and reporting. Regular HubSpot audits help maintain a clean and accurate database.
Contacts without a phone number hinder sales outreach. Ensuring phone numbers are consistently captured enables follow-up efficiency.
Similarly to missing phone numbers, emails are crucial for marketing and sales communications. Contacts missing email addresses indicated unenriched and incomplete data collection.
Unassigned contacts may lead to lost opportunities. Every contact should have a contact owner for more effective follow-ups.
Likewise, company records without assigned owners may lack follow-up or engagement.
Assigning ownership helps ensure follow-ups and account monitoring are executed properly
Arguably most importantly, unassigned deals may result in lost revenue. Every deal should have an owner responsible for progressing it through the pipeline and managing its associations.
Old, uncontacted, or unengaged data can clutter the CRM and impact segmentation efforts. Identifying and cleansing stagnant data improves CRM efficiency.
One way to counteract this is by running a re-engagement marketing campaign. This will help you identify contacts that are not only still reachable but also engaged in your marketing content and offer.
A well-structured database improves CRM usability and ensures data is easy to manage. Poor structuring can lead to inefficiencies and reporting issues.
Custom views help teams quickly access relevant data without manual filtering. These views can be accessed in your contacts dashboard.
Reviewing these ensures the right views exist for different business needs.
Association types define how contacts, companies, and deals are linked within HubSpot.
Proper setup ensures accurate data relationships and reporting.
Notification settings ensure that the right team members receive updates on leads, deals, and CRM activities. Poorly configured settings may lead to missed opportunities.
Taking aim at applications that are integrated into your portal, category nine looks at your native integrations with HubSpot.
We look at whether they’re still relevant and needed or whether there’s any spring cleaning or upkeep needed to keep your data enriched.
CRM integrations connect HubSpot with other tools and systems.
Reviewing these ensures that only relevant integrations are in place and functioning correctly. It also enables you to review your existing tech stack, saving you money on software and technology costs.
Native HubSpot integrations should function without issues.
Any errors in these integrations may disrupt automation and data syncing. Regularly auditing these integrations means your business doesn’t suffer any data gaps within your CRM.
Non-native integrations (custom API connections, third-party tools) require proper setup to ensure data accuracy and efficiency. Misconfigured integrations can lead to data silos and issues with usability as you’ll have to manually fix the integration yourself.
Native HubSpot integrations offer a more seamless experience with built-in functionality. Replacing non-native integrations can reduce complexity and technical maintenance.
This is an important part of the HubSpot audit to ensure that there is an ease of data functionality that runs that you don’t have to manage and upkeep using code.
Step 10 of our HubSpot audit looks into your inbound marketing performance.
This isn’t necessarily to judge the success of your marketing activity, but more so to understand the nuances between your marketing and data - to see if there’s scope to clean up the CRM. Our audit will help you identify those contacts that need cleansing in the database and subscriptions that need removing amongst other things.
Subscription types in HubSpot determine how contacts receive marketing emails. A review ensures that only relevant subscriptions exist and that contacts are assigned correctly according to GDPR.
HubSpot offers GDPR-compliant settings to help businesses manage consent and data privacy.
For EU-based countries, ensuring these settings are enabled helps maintain compliance and avoid legal risks further down the road.
Analysing email performance metrics helps determine whether marketing emails are engaging and effective.
Poor performance may indicate issues with content, targeting, or list hygiene, hence why you need to audit all of your email marketing results.
High unsubscribe rates can indicate poor audience targeting, email frequency issues, or lack of value in email content. Reviewing unsubscribes by type helps refine email strategy.
This very brief section dives into your settings.
It makes sure that all your branding and native HubSpot settings are set up correctly and that you’re not missing the fundamental steps in setting up your HubSpot portal.
Native HubSpot settings include branding, company details, and system preferences. Ensuring these are fully configured helps maintain consistency across your HubSpot portal.
The final stage of the HubSpot Audit tackles external system integrations you have connected to your portal.
This includes critical business systems, like an ERP, or other external platforms used by other departments. Aside from ensuring these are set up to complement each other and sync data between the two systems, we also look at if you can consolidate these systems within HubSpot effectively.
HubSpot often connects with other business systems like CMS platforms, Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERP), and, potentially, other CRM tools. Reviewing integrations ensures a well-structured tech stack.
Each integration should serve a clear purpose and contribute to your business’ efficiency. If an integration is redundant or poorly configured, it may be causing inefficiencies.
Furthermore, as an all-in-one business solution, HubSpot can often house a lot of your tech stack under its roof. It may be worth considering whether you can consolidate technology costs within HubSpot.
Completing a HubSpot audit can be a chore, but a very rewarding one once the spring cleaning is complete. However, as mentioned in the introduction to this article, a lot of businesses see CRM setup as a one-time thing and therefore don’t complete this step.
If you find yourself in this situation, then don’t worry. Although an audit can help you identify the challenges within your system and give you the roadmap to remedy those issues, there may be more widespread problems when it comes to user adoption of HubSpot and how your business’ processes mould into your instance.
Our ‘5 Steps to HubSpot Implementation’ guide is a proven playbook for setting up your HubSpot portal successfully and is the same guiding principle we used to receive our HubSpot Impact Award in 2024. Read the full guide and ‘reimplement’ your HubSpot portal successfully today.