Your HubSpot Portal Audit: When and Where to Start?

We won’t lie — HubSpot portal audits can be time-consuming, especially if you’re trying to complete one alone. 

That’s why it’s important to know when it’s most critical to have one done and to have a plan for how you’ll accomplish it. 

When to Audit Your HubSpot Portal

Some clear signs that it’s time to audit your HubSpot portal are: 

• You’re new to HubSpot. If you start with good habits, you’ll have better luck sticking to them.
• You’ve noticed messy documents and data and are tired of it. 
• You’ve missed sales opportunities. Inefficient HubSpot ecosystems can confuse your sales team and result in missed or under-nurtured leads.
• You’re onboarding new team members. Help them start off on a good foot with HubSpot by ensuring your portal is clean, organized, and easy to navigate.
• You’re experiencing frequent technical issues, and you just can’t seem to figure out why.

Where to Start Your Audit

All successful HubSpot audits start in the same place: goals. 

Your business likely has goals related to business growth, sales, and marketing. If you don’t take a look at those goals, you can’t align your HubSpot usage with the strategy and tactics it will take to achieve them. 

Do you want to increase sales to existing customers? Go after new-logo prospects? Expand your products or services? Create partnerships? The options are endless. HubSpot can help you achieve your goals and meet your revenue goals, so long as you set up your HubSpot portal and strategy accordingly.

Key Tools to Audit in Your HubSpot Portal

You may choose to think about HubSpot portal audits the same way you think about looking under your car’s hood. A check engine light or some other signal likely prompted you to take a peek, you examine underneath to try and spot the issue(s), and from there you can figure out what needs to be done in order to get your car back up and running smoothly again. 

However, with a HubSpot portal audit, you won’t be looking for oil leaks or cracked hoses; you’ll be looking for things like duplicate contacts, outdated forms, and messy data.

Some long-time HubSpot users choose to audit all of the tools within all of their hubs (CRM, CMS, Sales, Marketing, Service, and/or Operations). But if you’re new to the process and want to maximize your time spent, you might just want to start with the top priorities. 

Top 5 Auditing Priorities

The following are the most common, and often the most important, tools to audit. They can deliver the most “bang for your buck” if you don’t have time for a more robust audit. 

01. Contacts and Lists

Do you have duplicate contacts? Are there contacts whose emails bounce every time? Are there contacts that aren’t relevant to or aren’t the right fit for your business and should be removed? A HubSpot audit can help you determine these bits of information, so your team can focus on the people and companies that matter most.

You should also use this methodology with any of your contact lists. Are there any that shouldn’t be there? Are there any that should stay but be sorted through? Avoid the clutter. You want your lists to be minimal but useful and strategic.

02. Workflows and Sequences

Workflows and sequences are two incredibly helpful automation tools. Workflows are used to nurture marketing leads (MQLs), while sequences are used to nurture sales leads (SQLs). But while these tools can be helpful, they can also become a nightmare if not properly used and maintained. 

Both can cause damage to your portal (and to your marketing and sales processes!) if automatic actions are happening and you’re not sure why. A HubSpot audit can clean these tools up and ensure a solid strategy is behind them.

03. Forms

Are you using standard forms, or do you have separate forms for every page on your website? Is that the most effective plan? Are you using the right fields and hidden fields?

Forms are critical conversion opportunities, so it’s important that they are built and can function right. Otherwise, you might not see the right leads (or any leads) come in, and you might not get the information you need to nurture them properly. 

04. Campaigns

Are you running any campaigns that need updating or are missing information? Are you not running any campaigns at all? This is something you’ll definitely want to analyze. 

If you create and monitor campaigns for particular marketing tasks, you can better keep your team aligned on growth goals and the roadmap to get there.

05. Properties

Properties are the fields that keep information on HubSpot records for objects like contacts, companies, deals, and more. There are default properties for each object type, but you may also create custom ones to store unique data that’s important to your business. 

Whichever you choose, it’s important to audit these properties and ensure you’re getting enough of the data you need. You also want to make sure you’re not overloading yourself or your customers with unnecessary data input.

Other Beneficial Tools to Include in Your HubSpot Audit

If you have the time and resources to conduct a full audit of your HubSpot portal, there are many other tools that you should look at. Here’s a broader list of what those tools are and the benefits of auditing them. 

Settings

Are your accounts, users, subscriptions, products, domain, and security settings set up properly? Are there cost-saving opportunities based on your subscription type and the number of contacts you have? 

Integrations

Have you connected other software with your HubSpot portal? Are those connections functioning properly?

Dashboards and Reports

What dashboards and reporting tools have you configured? Are they set up in a way that tracks the data you need and in a way that your team can understand that data?

Lead Classification, Attribution, and Scoring

Are you using HubSpot automation tools to monitor lifecycle stage and lead status? Are those tools set up correctly, or are you struggling to figure out where contacts came from, how they converted, and if they’re qualified? 

Templates

Do you use templates for sales, marketing, or service emails? Could you be using them? A HubSpot audit could help you prioritize the top templates you need and nail the content within them for long-term success. 

Files

Do you have outdated PDFs, photos, videos, logos, etc. that could be cleaned out of your HubSpot portal? 

Buyer Personas

You may have developed buyer personas, but have you incorporated them into your HubSpot ecosystem? Or do you have buyer personas in HubSpot that require some updating? 

CTAs

Are your CTAs updated? Could you use some new ones that better align with your business goals? CTAs encourage leads to convert, so it’s in your best interest to ensure they’re optimized.

Landing Pages

Are your landing pages connected with the appropriate forms, thank you pages, and thank you emails? Do they use best practices in terms of design, navigation, and user experience?

Blogs

Are you scheduling and publishing blogs correctly? Are they optimized for search engines? Are you using blog tags when relevant?

Social Media

Do you have your social media accounts connected to your HubSpot portal for the simple creation, scheduling, and publishing of posts? Are your social media analytics tools set up so that you can track data on your posts’ performance through HubSpot?

Email

How have your recent emails performed? Are there opportunities to improve open rates and click-through rates? HubSpot’s Email Health tool can provide insight here.

Paid

Are your paid media efforts tracked within HubSpot? Can you see data and evidence on paid leads converting to actualized revenue?

You Finished Your HubSpot Portal Audit. Now What?

So you’ve made it through your HubSpot portal audit. 

First of all, congrats! You just did the hard work to support your company’s growth — we promise it will pay off. 

But how? Well, now you need to plan how you’ll implement your findings and accomplish the tasks you need to. 

Our recommendation is to make a list, then prioritize items by two criteria:

1. Which items are going to support your growth goals the most? Always back to the goals…
2. Which items will provide “quick wins” or provide a good amount of benefit for a small amount of time spent? Taking care of some quick-win items can help you see success quickly, which is a nice pat on the back after you’ve just spent all this time conducting your audit.

Then get started working through that list. Or, if your team doesn’t have the expertise to do so themselves, get in touch with a HubSpot partner that can help you.

Need Help With Your HubSpot Portal Audit?

HubSpot portal audits are big projects, but they’re 100% worth it. You can’t resolve an issue or take advantage of a growth opportunity if you’re not aware of it. 

If you’re interested in conducting a HubSpot portal audit but are struggling to find the time, resources, and expertise to do so, we can help. Our HubSpot technical experts will hop into your portal and identify your strengths and weaknesses within it. From there, we can also work with you to implement the recommendations identified in the audit, empowering your team to make the most out of HubSpot now and into the future. 

Sound like a plan? Give us a call or schedule a meeting to discuss details.