The auditing process in HubSpot can be a little challenging to understand and navigate, but have no worry we, at Poppy’s Tech Aid, are here to help. So let’s break it down the best practices when auditing HubSpot as well as how you can stay organized to get the most out of your audit.
Beginning with the basics, what is a HubSpot audit? A HubSpot audit is curating a review of a HubSpot account in order to see areas of improvement. This allows for businesses to study and establish a plan on how they want to improve the technical foundation of their account. I know some of you may be thinking, “Now what exactly would one see when performing an audit?” Great question! In the audit you will be able to review hubs, tools, workflows, and sequences that have been created through your account(s), in addition to things that can be cleaned up in order to optimize the account by identifying areas for improvement and refine technical foundation. Now the foundation has been laid it is time to start building upon it.
Some people may believe that the purpose of an audit on your HubSpot account may not be worthwhile, but in reality they are missing out on ways to streamline their business’s processes. The beauty of these audits allow you to see exactly what is holding your company back from reaching their full potential within these 7 categories; settings, teams, syncing, lead scoring, contacts, lists, and data.
Settings: within settings you are applying the base layer of how your want your account to look and plan an overview that will boost productivity
Teams: organizing your teams allows for effective communication in addition to knowing the progress they are all making
Syncing: want your company to perform like synchronized swimmers? Sync the contacts, companies, and lifecycle stages your business interacts with for easy access so that way no one is waiting upon anyone
Lead scoring: evaluates duplication of contact properties so you may go through a get rid of unnecessary repetition
Contacts: merging duplicate contacts and deleting inaccurate ones allows even more effective communication
Lists: will detect for duplicates or old lists that you no longer use in order to delete or archive them for a later time
Data: this will identify any issues with data, whether that be missing pieces or duplicate contacts or even missing information
Now tell me you don’t want something amazing like this doing the work for you so there is no sitting for hours on end just to finish a fraction of the work. HubSpot will thoroughly evaluate your current setup to ensure that your marketing, sales, and service processes are running accurately.
“Wow! That’s a lot! How will I stay organized? How will I not get confused and be all over the place?” Now that is a lovely question. When constructing an audit you would want to use an excel sheet to stay organized to identify gaps, redundancies, and areas of improvement. Here’s the breakdown:
1) Define Your Audit Goals
a) What do you want to audit?
i) Examples:
(1) Contact data cleanliness, marketing workflows & automation, email performance, CRM pipeline & deal stages, custom properties & tagging
2) Build Your Excel (or Google) Sheet with Key Tabs
a) Create tabs based on different audit areas
i) Examples:
(1) Contacts & Companies, Workflows & Automations, Emails & Campaigns, Sales Pipeline, Custom Properties & Tags
3) Label Your Columns
a) Each tab should have clear columns for structured analysis
i) Examples:
(1) Contacts & Companies Audit (a) Contact Name, Email, Lifecycle Stage, Lead Source, Last Activity Date, Status, Notes
(2) Workflows & Automations Audit (a) Workflow Name, Type, Active? (Yes/No), Last Modified, Triggered Actions, Notes
(3) Email & Campaign Performance Audit (a) Email Name, Campaign, Open Rate %, Click Rate %, Unsubscribes, Sent Date, Notes
From here there are two things you do want to keep consistent are maintaining a version control log to track the audit history and to update your audit sheet regularly in order to maintain a clean and optimized audit. Then you can customize whatever else your heart desires like color coding, conditioning format, or filters and pivot tables. But some things that are a must to be looked at during an audit are reviewing database health (making sure that sync settings of external tools are accurate), email management (making sure that the layout and sequences are inline), and hodgepodge (review reports & dashboards, 3rd party integration, opportunity management, sales enablement, flows, and use permissions). Since there are external tools that integrate into HubSpot it is important to include them into that audit as well.
Some of these tools are Salesforce, Mailchimp, Zapier, Slack, Shopify, Google Analytics, and various others. It is crucial to audit these systems along with HubSpot to ensure data consistency, accuracy, and efficiency. You do not want misaligned field mappings, duplicate records, or broken automations due to data soils, incorrect reporting, and inefficiencies across your marketing, sales, and customer support. Performing regular audits help identify these issues of sync errors, redundant workflows, outdated integrations, and compliance risks. Since it will ensure that your lead data flows are correctly reporting accurate business processes across the entire tech stack.
So the audit is done. What to do next? Your next step is a final audit presentation. When constructing a HubSpot audit presentation there should clearly convey key findings, actionable insights, and priorities recommendations without overwhelming the audience with unnecessary details. These finds should summarize the audit scope (the key findings and impact), tech stack overview (the connected tools and integration issues), findings by category (data quality, CRM health, reporting accuracy, etc.), and key metrics (using charts or graphs to illustrate inefficiencies). From there you break down your priorities into three sections, high, medium, and low. Your high priority section is critical issues, things that need to be addressed immediately, fixes that directly impact revenue, compliance, or system functionality. Your medium priority is optimization opportunities, improvements that enhance efficiency but are not as urgent, redundant workflows or outdated email segmentations are some examples. Lastly, your low priority section is the enhancements and nice-to-have, small improvements, that streamline processes that do not have an immediate impact. After establishing your businesses three tiers assign tasks and deadlines to the responsible teams for implementation. This is where the post audit process would begin and you start to chip away!
The post audit is really just implementing the recommendations. Once the audit presentation is over it is time to shift gears and focus on executing the recommendations, or the three tiers, with a roadmap. The assigned teams will need to follow a realistic timeline that has scheduled follow-up reviews to measure progress, regular check-ins to ensure that the high priority issues are resolved quickly, but the medium to low priority improvements are not being neglected and being incorporated into future optimization efforts.