Hunter Burin | January 16, 2024 | HubSpot
If your team has data in your HubSpot that’s messy and not up to date, it may be time for a deep clean. When you have been working in any CRM for a while, it’s easy for the data it houses to become unreliable or hard to sort through. People leave their jobs, contacts become unengaged, and companies dissolve. With all of the additional tools that Hubspot offers on top of their CRM, your account can become unwieldy and confusing if your team doesn’t have data hygiene rules in place.
So, how do we make sure we don’t get to that point? The answer – it takes dedicated time and resources along with some standards. Let’s walk through some tasks for your team to do and rules to follow to ensure your data doesn’t get out of hand.
Here are some tips to follow to ensure your data is staying clean:
Each tool your team utilizes in HubSpot should have a naming convention drafted up for it. Naming conventions help you find relevant assets when you are searching for them. They also help your team know what has already been created.
Below are some rules that our team here at Evenbound likes to follow when setting up naming conventions for our customers:
Because HubSpot offers so many different tools, it’s easy to get lost in each of them. This is why we recommend documenting things outside of the tool as well. When setting clients up on the Sales Hub, our team first meets with them to write out their sales process in a clean document. This ensures that everyone is on the same page, and if anyone has questions, they can refer to the document. You can also take this sheet and build it out as a playbook in HubSpot so your team can easily access it when using the tool.
It’s important not only to document processes, but current automations as well. Pulling all of your workflows together into a separate sheet with information on what triggers them and the actions they take is not just a good way to document them, but it reduces redundancy as well. Keeping this sheet up to date will be an excellent resource for your team to check if their particular automation exists before they create a new workflow doing the same thing. Trust us – making a sheet of automations before you get to 100+ workflows, running simultaneously with no insights, will ensure that doesn’t happen.
HubSpot automatically flags potentially duplicate contacts and companies in your account every day. If you’re adding the correct unique identifiers to your records (email addresses for contacts and company domains for companies), you shouldn’t have to worry too much about duplicates. However, there are always some that can slip through the cracks. Set some time aside each month to go through HubSpot’s flagged contact and company duplicates and merge what needs to be combined in your account.
When working in HubSpot for an extended period, it’s easy to keep adding things and never remove old assets. If you never remove unused tools, they will take up the same space as your active tools, which can start to cause a mess. Set aside time each month to go through your lists, workflows, forms, and more, and remove what isn’t being used to ensure things are up to date.
Folders are an organizer’s best friend in HubSpot. Most tools in Hubspot have a folder system and should be used to categorize your assets throughout the platform. You can even create sub-folders if you want to segment everything further. Everything should live in a relevant folder, whether it’s templates, forms, workflows, lists, or files.
We get it – ensuring your data doesn’t get messy in HubSpot is not easy. Putting rules in place is essential; however, they don’t always get followed by everyone in your account. If you are drowning in data, here are some quick tips to clean it up.
As we have mentioned throughout this article, it’s very easy for your data to spiral out of control. If you are overwhelmed with the amount of information in your account and need a partner to help you clean it up, the Evenbound team is happy to step in. We have cleaned up many HubSpot portals, each with its unique issues. If you’d like to learn more about how our team can help you, book a call with us today!
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