Over the course of doing countless HubSpot audits, we've seen and learned a lot about how businesses use HubSpot. We've seen good, bad, ugly and a couple of instances where I'd love to meet the person who set things up and talk over a beer (or in a psychologist's office?) to understand HOW DID THIS EVEN HAPPEN? 

If you're curious how your HubSpot usage and challenges compare to others, read on for our insights and takeaways from our most recent 50 HubSpot audits (keep in mind, we specialize in B2B service, manufacturing and tech companies).   

Let's dive in. 

Common Challenges 

While there are different quirks with every HubSpot portal we audit, there are a few common challenges we tend to see:  

Data Quality Issues 

No surprise here; bad data is the big one and it's often the main reason why businesses come to us. When data quality is lacking, everything from campaign segmentation to sales and forecast reporting suffers. 

Within the data quality bucket, here are a few usual suspects:   

  • Hard-bounces and unsubscribed contacts: We often find a high number of marketing contacts with hard-bounced emails or who've unsubscribed from all emails. Allowing these to accumulate not only clutters your contacts and skews your data but also can hike up your subscription costs. Regular pruning is a must to keep your data accurate and usable.
     
  • Incomplete and duplicate data: Missing contact properties like first/last names and duplicate records, are frequent issues. Incomplete data can severely limit how well you can personalize your outreach and segment your audience, and duplicates can further clutter your dataset and inflate your subscription costs when not managed. 

Confusing and/or Neglected Deal Pipelines 

Another core area impacting other aspects of HubSpot is deals and deal pipelines. If these stages are out of whack or the deals aren't being carefully updated, it's impossible to reliably report on revenue, pipeline or forecast.  

Here are some common red flags we see:  

  • Stages don't align with steps in the buying process: Rather than having each stage in the deal pipeline reflect a measurable and distinctive buyer action, often these stages are ambiguous, not mutually exclusive and/or more of a project management tool for the sales team than a representative pipeline.
     
  • Pipelines are way (WAY) too overengineered: I don't care how complex the sales cycle is – a pipeline should not have dozens of stages and substages and paragraph-long stage names.
     
  • Deals are incomplete or out of date: Sometimes we find many deals are missing close dates or amounts, or they're surpassing their close date in large numbers; any combination of these hampers your ability to use HubSpot for revenue or forecast reporting.  

Underutilization of HubSpot Tools 

In many instances, whoever has the most (or any) HubSpot experience is knighted the HubSpot person for that company, but they don't have the time, inclination or technical experience to take advantage of the deep functionality HubSpot offers.  

A few features we typically see being underused include:  

  • Workflows and automation: Despite the powerful automation tools HubSpot offers, many businesses aren't using them to their full potential. Simple follow-up automation might be in place, but more complex and strategic workflows are often missing, which leaves a ton of opportunity on the table.
     
  • Lead scoring and personas: Many businesses haven't implemented lead scoring frameworks or aren't effectively using the personas tool for audience segmentation. One of HubSpot's key benefits is the ability to use data to tailor messaging to your segments, so we recommend leveraging the tools that enable this.
     
  • AI features. HubSpot has been investing heavily in new AI-enabled features, and while this will likely change, as of now we often find businesses have yet to opt in or incorporate them into their operations.  

Organization and Standardization 

Businesses tend to have the best intentions when it comes to maintaining a clean, organized HubSpot environment, but then things start to slide. While doing cleanup and organization seems like a small thing that can be addressed later, eventually this becomes a big hairy mess that makes HubSpot hard to navigate.  

Here's where our audits find this can get off track:  

  • No standard naming conventions: Without standard naming conventions, list, file and workflow libraries can get messy fast. We often see many static lists or lists used for one-off purposes, leading to inefficiency and clutter, while the workflows lack descriptions, folders or naming conventions to help users understand what's what. 
     
  • Underused folders and descriptions: Folders are your friend – they make it very easy to find everything vs. scrolling through pages. Same with descriptions; they take the guesswork out of combing through reports and workflows (and the AI assistant is good at doing this for you!)
     
  • Campaign tool not being used: HubSpot's campaigns tool is built to organize and track all assets and performance data related to a campaign, but this tool tends to be underused or ignored altogether.  

Resources to Help 

If some or all of the issues here sound familiar, you're not alone. The good news is these are very addressable problems – especially if you have help from a HubSpot technical consulting expert who can shortcut the process of optimizing and extending the platform for you.    

For tips on how to address many of the issues above, here are some helpful articles we've written:   

 

Interested in having your HubSpot audited? We're happy to help.