How To Perform A HubSpot Audit: A No BS Guide

HubSpot is one of the most powerful tools for managing your marketing, sales, and service efforts. From automated emails and website chatbots to sales sequences and playbooks–there’s a lot for growing companies to use.

However, to keep your HubSpot instance working like a well-oiled machine, it’s essential to perform regular audits.

A HubSpot audit allows you to identify areas for improvement, clean up your data, optimize workflows, and ensure that your CRM is aligned with your current business goals. 

Think of an audit like an annual checkup at the doctor that assesses the overall health of your HubSpot instance.

So, if you’re ready to unlock the full potential of your sales, marketing and service efforts, let’s dive into the steps for conducting a comprehensive audit to help you make the most of the platform.

What Is A HubSpot Audit?

A HubSpot audit is a comprehensive review of your HubSpot account to ensure that everything—from your contacts and properties to your workflows and reports—is functioning optimally. 

This process will help you keep your system organized, find any gaps in your setup, and ensure that your HubSpot tools work as efficiently as possible for your team.

When you conduct an audit, you focus on several key components. These include your Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and CRM. By addressing each of these, you can expect cleaner data, improved workflows, and a HubSpot environment that supports your business goals.

A HubSpot audit isn’t just a quick glance. It’s a data-driven deep dive that shows where your strategy is strong and where it needs improvement. You’ll examine workflows, data, reporting, lifecycle stages, SEO, landing pages, CTAs, and more.

Typical outcomes that you can expect:

• Data Cleanliness: Ensure your data is accurate and up-to-date.
• Improved Workflows: Simplify processes to save time.
• Streamlined Communication: Make sure all messages and notifications are clear.
• CRM Efficiency: Enhance overall performance and productivity.

It’s not a guessing game—it’s an in-depth look at how you can make impactful changes.

This checkup helps you align your HubSpot tools effectively, ensuring they work together for better results. It leads to a more efficient and effective use of your HubSpot portal.

Why Do A HubSpot Audit?

As a central hub for your business operations, keeping it running smoothly is essential.

As your company grows, it can take time to maintain data cleanliness, proper reporting and automation. Regular audits are crucial to optimize CRM performance. They help identify weak spots and ensure data quality.

For example, we often work with fast-growing SaaS companies that have big goals for customer growth. But as they grow and scale, they end up collecting a lot of outdated data, processes and automations. That’s when we can help by providing a check-up and building a roadmap to streamline their processes.

Regular audits help clean unnecessary or incorrect data, which ensures accurate reporting. Reporting errors can cause misunderstandings, making it difficult to make informed decisions. Sometimes, the data might be correct but the reporting tool may have issues.

By conducting regular audits, you ensure that your HubSpot CRM is functioning at its best and aligned with your overall business strategy.

Benefits Of A Regular HubSpot Audit

A regular HubSpot audit offers enhanced contact management and improves data quality. It’s essential for keeping your contact lists clean and up-to-date. 

This means you can avoid duplicate entries and incorrect data, making sure your team has access to reliable information.

• Improved Contact Management: Duplicate or incomplete records clutter your database and reduce efficiency. Audits help keep your contact records clean and organized.
• Enhanced Campaign Performance: By optimizing workflows and automation, you can improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and lead nurturing.
• Better Reporting and Analytics: An audit ensures you track the right metrics, giving you the insights needed for data-driven decisions.
• Cost Savings: Identifying unused features or redundant workflows helps cut unnecessary costs.

Taking the time for a HubSpot audit leads to a more organized, effective system that supports your business goals.

How Often Should I Conduct A HubSpot Audit?

The frequency of your HubSpot audits can depend on a few key factors, such as the size of your contact database and website and how extensively you use HubSpot.

For example, you can perform a quarterly audit if you handle high volumes of data or run multiple campaigns. Alternatively, an annual makes sense for smaller setups with fewer campaigns.

Conducting regular audits helps in keeping your data clean. This ensures that your campaigns are meeting the necessary standards and allows you to establish effective tracking measures.

Regular checks help identify inconsistencies, outdated information, or areas where performance can improve. Keeping track ensures that your marketing efforts align with your business goals.

Make audits a routine to maintain efficiency and enhance growth potential. This approach helps you stay proactive in managing your marketing and sales processes.

Setting Goals And Preparing For Your HubSpot Audit

Before diving into the audit, it’s crucial to set clear objectives. Knowing what you want to achieve helps keep the audit focused on areas with the biggest impact.

Without proper goals, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with data and miss opportunities for positive changes.

Goal setting examples:

• Increase Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rates: Aim to boost the percentage of leads that convert to paying customers.
• Optimize Sales Pipeline to Reduce Bottlenecks: Streamline processes to improve efficiency and flow within your sales operations.

Setting goals sets the foundation for a successful audit. It helps you focus on what’s important and ensures you get the most out of your efforts.

Step-By-Step HubSpot Audit Process

Let’s dive into a step-by-step process to understand better your HubSpot usage and how to improve it.

1. Discovery Process and Deep Dive into HubSpot

Start by gathering all relevant information about how your team uses HubSpot. Explore everything from user interactions to tool adoption to get a clear picture. 

Create a checklist to track tasks and maintain order. Assign roles to team members to ensure accountability. This organization helps keep everyone on the same page and ensures nothing is overlooked during the audit process.

This process involves reviewing team configurations, permissions, and current workflows. 

Check all connected apps and integrations for alignment with your system. This step helps identify gaps and opportunities for optimization.

HubSpot Marketing Hub Audit

Review key settings like team permissions and notifications. This ensures your team has access to the features they need.

• Audit Marketing Settings: Check user permissions, team settings, and notification preferences to ensure everyone has the correct access.
• Lead Generation Optimization: Review and update landing pages, forms, and CTAs for effectiveness. Make sure they align with your audience’s needs and capture quality leads.
• Email Marketing Efficiency: Evaluate your email templates, automations, and segmentation. Remove outdated emails, and check that all templates reflect your brand.
• SEO and Website Performance: Assess website analytics, SEO configurations, and content performance. Optimize key pages for SEO to attract the right audience.
• Marketing & Sales Alignment: Review lead handoff processes to ensure a smooth transition from marketing to sales. Check CRM integrations for data accuracy.
• Reporting and Analytics: Ensure dashboards track essential KPIs, such as lead conversion rates and campaign ROI, so you have a clear view of your progress.

SEO and website performance are vital. Review analytics, SEO configurations, and optimize content for better search visibility. Check that marketing and sales align by auditing lead handoff, CRM integrations, and shared data quality. 

Finally, ensure your dashboards correctly track key performance indicators (KPIs) for improvement.

HubSpot Sales Hub Audit

Begin with sales settings. Check team settings, notifications, and permissions to align with your sales goals.

Optimizing your sales tools will help your team work more efficiently and close more deals.

• Sales Settings and Configuration: Verify team settings, notifications, and permissions to ensure they support your sales processes.
• Sales Process Evaluation: Check that deal stages and pipelines align with your sales process and that automation moves deals smoothly through each stage.
• Sales Tool Usage: Review the adoption of HubSpot’s sales tools, like forecast, tasks, email sequences, templates and playbooks. Identify any areas where your team might benefit from additional training.
• Content and Collateral Check: Confirm that your sales collateral is current, relevant, and easily accessible to the team.
• Sales Reporting and Analytics: Evaluate dashboards and reports to track metrics like deal progression and close rates accurately.

Review sales reporting and analytics by checking dashboards for accuracy in metrics like win rates and conversion rates.

For example, one client we worked with didn’t have visibility into how their outbound sales campaigns were performing. We helped set up their sequences correctly and track sales outcomes like warm conversations, meetings booked and opportunities created. This improvement led to 18.1% conversion from email to meetings booked.

HubSpot Service Hub Audit

Audit service settings by reviewing ticket setup, properties, and notifications. This ensures your support team works efficiently.

• Service Settings Audit: Check team settings, ticket properties, and notification preferences.
• Customer Support Process: Assess ticket pipelines and response times. Ensure automation rules are routing tickets to the right team members.
• Knowledge Base Effectiveness: Review the relevance, organization, and accessibility of your knowledge base articles.
• Customer Feedback Collection: Confirm that customer satisfaction metrics are in place, and that feedback is being used to improve service.

Review how you collect customer feedback. Ensure workflows capture satisfaction metrics effectively to make informed decisions.

CRM and Data Audit

Start with a contact and company clean-up by deduplicating contacts, updating lifecycle stages, and removing hard bounces.

• Contact and Company Clean-Up: Deduplicate contacts, update lifecycle stages, and remove hard bounces to keep data accurate.
• Lead Scoring Optimization: Review your lead scoring criteria to make sure it’s correctly identifying high-value leads.
• Property and Field Management: Organize properties, ensuring they are relevant and without redundancies.

Audit property and field management, making sure properties are well-organized and relevant, with no redundancy. This keeps your data clean and useful.

3. Identifying Common Issues In HubSpot Setups

In a HubSpot setup, several common issues can affect efficiency. One frequent problem is inaccurate contacts. These might be duplicates or contain incorrect details. To fix this, regularly clean and verify your contact database.

During your audit, be on the lookout for these common issues:

• Fake or Inaccurate Contacts: These can mislead your reports and clutter your lists. Regularly clean up duplicates and invalid data.
• Underutilized Features: Make sure you’re using HubSpot’s full range of tools, including lead scoring and automation options.
• Inconsistent Naming Conventions: To improve organization, establish a naming system for assets like emails, lists, and workflows.
• No Lead Scoring Model: Incorrect scoring can lead to poor targeting or missed opportunities. Make sure your criteria are well-defined and relevant.

Another issue is missing out on key features. HubSpot offers many advanced tools, but they often need to be more used. Explore options like SEO tools or automation features to boost your strategy.

Redundant workflows and automations may clutter your setup. Too many automations can slow down the system and make tracking difficult. Regularly review and streamline these processes to ensure they are effective.

After a HubSpot audit, you will receive a report of findings and recommendations. Identifying gaps in your setup will help you make actionable improvements. Tailored recommendations focus on boosting efficiency and lead generation. Address these issues to enhance your overall HubSpot performance.

4. Deploying Changes And Tracking Progress Post-Audit

Prioritize the changes that will make the most significant difference first. Focus on data cleanliness and automation adjustments. Updating these areas can significantly improve your system’s performance.

Make a list of key performance indicators (KPIs) to track. This can include metrics like conversion rates and response times. Monitoring these will help you understand how the changes impact your overall goals.

Consider setting up a schedule for regular audits. Depending on your business needs, plan to revisit the audit quarterly, bi-annually, or annually. This ensures continuous improvement and adaptation to new challenges or opportunities.

Best Practices Of A HubSpot Audit

These HubSpot audit best practices will ensure you’re on the right path and don’t miss any details.

Establish Campaign Goals

Start by setting clear goals for your data collection. Knowing what you want to achieve helps direct your audit. This makes it easier to identify areas that need improvement.

Track Performance with KPIs

Use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure success. KPIs offer a simple way to track what’s working and what’s not. They guide you in making data-driven decisions.

Clean Up Data

Go through your HubSpot portal and remove cluttered or unused data. Keeping your data clean increases efficiency and makes it easier to find what’s important. This can also enhance data processing speed.

Standardize Naming Conventions

Regularize naming conventions for files, reports, and data entries. Consistent naming makes it easier to navigate through your database. It also reduces confusion when pulling reports or sharing information.

Optimize Workflows and Integrations

Check your workflows and HubSpot integrations to streamline processes. Properly integrated tools can save you time and effort. They also make your system more reliable and easier to use.

Improve Internal Processes

Implement strategies to improve how you collect and manage data internally. Streamlined processes help you get the most from your data collection efforts. This creates a smoother workflow and can highlight new opportunities.

How Revenue Reveal Can Help

Conducting a HubSpot audit can streamline your processes and align your operations with your go-to-market strategy. Revenue Reveal plays a key role in this. It helps you make sure your HubSpot setup matches your business goals. This alignment ensures your sales and marketing functions are on the same page.

At Revenue Reveal, our HubSpot managed services offering takes a data-driven approach to empower your business. Focusing on your data can uncover valuable insights and spot new opportunities. You can make more informed decisions that boost your sales performance using these insights.

To leverage the full potential of a HubSpot audit with Revenue Reveal, it’s best to speak with an expert. An experienced professional can guide you through each step, ensuring everything is set up for success.

Frequently Asked Questions