How to Conduct a HubSpot Audit: The Complete Guide

With over 216,840 customers located across 135+ countries, HubSpot has set itself as a recognised customer relationship management (CRM) platform known for its robust capabilities that are especially beneficial for business-to-business (B2B) companies aiming for growth.

Proper utilisation of HubSpot allows businesses to enhance their growth in a manner that is both organised and measurable. The journey to achieving this begins with a critical first step: conducting a comprehensive audit of your HubSpot portal, data, and workflows. Conducting a thorough HubSpot audit is a vital step in this process, allowing you to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement within your HubSpot account.

Regular maintenance, including cleaning up and managing data, is necessary to keep HubSpot functioning smoothly. By performing a thorough audit, you can identify inefficiencies, update outdated workflows, and ensure your data is accurate and well-organised. This process not only improves the efficiency of your operations but also helps you achieve your business objectives more effectively.

This blog will walk you through the process of conducting a comprehensive HubSpot audit, exploring each of the key areas within the platform.

What Is HubSpot Audit?

A HubSpot audit is a thorough evaluation of your organisation’s HubSpot account to assess its current usage, data hygiene, and overall efficiency. It involves a detailed examination of various components, such as your CRM data, marketing campaigns, sales processes, and service activities.

The purpose of conducting a regular HubSpot portal audit is to pinpoint inefficiencies, uncover gaps in your strategy, and ensure that your team is using HubSpot’s features to their fullest potential. Whether it involves the Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, or the overall CRM Portal, an audit serves as a health check-up for your HubSpot ecosystem.

Key Elements of a HubSpot Audit

• Data Quality: Evaluate the cleanliness, accuracy, and usefulness of your data.
• Platform Usage: Reviews how effectively different teams are using HubSpot tools.
• Configuration: Checks settings, workflows, and configurations to ensure optimal performance.
• Compliance: Verifies that your usage complies with relevant regulations like GDPR.
• Performance Metrics: Assesses the effectiveness of your campaigns, sales processes, and service operations through key performance indicators (KPIs).

Why You Need to Conduct a HubSpot Audit

Conducting a HubSpot audit is important for several reasons. Whether you are new to using HubSpot or have been leveraging its capabilities for a while, regular audits can ensure that your marketing, sales, and service strategies are operating at peak efficiency. Here are some key reasons why a HubSpot audit is necessary:

1. Optimise System Performance:

   A HubSpot audit helps identify areas where the system may not be performing optimally. This includes finding outdated workflows, redundant lists, and unused properties that can slow down your system.

2. Data Accuracy and Cleanliness:

   Over time, your HubSpot database can become cluttered with incorrect or outdated information. A HubSpot website audit can help you clean up your data, ensuring that your contacts, companies, deals, and tickets are accurate and up-to-date.

3. Improve User Adoption:

   An audit helps identify user-related issues, such as underutilised features or incorrect usage patterns. By addressing these issues, you can improve overall user adoption and effectiveness.

4. Enhance Reporting and Analytics:

   Accurate and relevant data is crucial for effective reporting and analytics. An audit ensures that your reports are based on the correct data, providing more accurate insights to guide your decision-making.

5. Maximise ROI:

   By optimising your HubSpot instance, you ensure that you are getting the maximum return on your investment. This includes making sure you are using all the features you are paying for and that they are set up correctly to deliver value.

6. Ensure Best Practices:

   HubSpot frequently updates its platform with new features and best practices. Doing a detailed HubSpot website audit helps you stay current with these updates and ensures that your processes adhere to the latest industry standards.

7. Align Marketing and Sales:

   A HubSpot site audit can help align your marketing and sales processes, ensuring that both teams are working together efficiently. This alignment is crucial for creating a seamless customer journey and improving overall conversion rates.

8. Identify Training Needs:

   An audit can uncover gaps in your team's knowledge and skills. Identifying these gaps allows you to provide targeted training, ensuring that your team is proficient in using HubSpot's tools and features.

Read our next blog in our HubSpot audit series to learn why regular HubSpot audits are important for maximising your marketing effectiveness and ROI!

Benefits of HubSpot Audit

Conducting a HubSpot audit provides a number of benefits that can significantly impact your customer relationship management (CRM) and overall business strategy. Below are some of the key benefits:

1. Enhanced Performance:

   It helps identify and eliminate bottlenecks in your processes, making your HubSpot instance more efficient and streamlined. It also helps to remove redundant and outdated elements that can slow down your system performance.

2. Improved Data Quality:

   It ensures your data is accurate, up-to-date, and relevant, reducing errors in your marketing and sales campaigns. It helps to clean data and allows for more precise segmentation, leading to targeted and effective marketing efforts.

3. Increased User Adoption:

   It makes the system easier to use and helps users adapt more quickly by identifying underutilised features and providing necessary training.

4. Enhanced Reporting and Analytics:

   It ensures your reports are based on reliable and clean data, providing more accurate and actionable insights. It helps to tailor your reports to better reflect your business objectives and KPIs, leading to more informed decision-making.

5. Maximised ROI:

   A HubSpot portal audit ensures you are making the most out of your investment in HubSpot by utilising its features to their fullest extent, resulting in efficiency gains. Moreover, streamlined processes save time and resources, contributing to higher ROI.

6. Best Practice Adherence:

   It keeps your processes aligned with the latest industry standards and HubSpot updates, ensuring compliance with relevant regulations, such as GDPR, through proper data management practices.

7. Better Marketing and Sales Alignment:

   Best of all, it facilitates better coordination between marketing and sales teams, leading to a more cohesive strategy and a seamless customer journey. This helps provide a consistent and engaging experience for your customers, from initial contact to closing a sale.

8. Training and Development:

   It identifies areas where your team may need additional training or support, empowering users to leverage HubSpot's capabilities effectively.

9. Strategic Alignment:

   It aligns your HubSpot processes with your broader business goals and objectives, helping you track progress and adjust strategies as needed to meet your targets.

What Is Included in a HubSpot Audit?

A HubSpot audit encompasses several elements, which may vary depending on the specific HubSpot tool in use. Generally, key areas include:

• Account Setup and Configuration: This includes user permissions, integration settings, account defaults, and overall system configuration.
• Data Quality and Management: For data, this involves reviewing contacts, companies, deals, tickets, and ensuring data cleanliness, removing duplicates, and updating outdated information.
• CRM Customisations: In CRM, this includes tasks, custom properties, contact views, deal stages, and workflows.
• Marketing Hub: In the Marketing Hub, you need to review buyer personas, blogs, campaigns, forms, landing pages, emails, CTAs, and marketing workflows.
• Sales Hub: The Sales Hub includes tools like emails, sequences, tasks, deal pipelines, and sales-specific workflows.
• Service Hub: For the Service Hub, focus on reviewing tickets, customer feedback, knowledge base articles, service workflows, and automation for customer support.
• Content and SEO: The HubSpot website audit involves analysing target blog posts, website pages, SEO settings, content strategy, and alignment with overall branding and messaging.
• Analytics and Reporting: Evaluate dashboards, custom reports, and analytics settings to ensure they accurately reflect key business metrics and goals.
• User Adoption and Training: Identify areas for training, user engagement with the software, and underutilised features to improve overall user adoption.
• Compliance and Security: Ensure data handling procedures, privacy settings, and security measures comply with regulations like GDPR or CCPA, protecting your business from risks.

HubSpot Audit: Marketing Hub

Conducting a Marketing Hub audit involves ensuring that all marketing activities are optimised for lead generation and nurturing. Key steps to perform a HubSpot Marketing Hub Audit include:

1. Campaign Review

   • Analysis: Evaluate past and ongoing campaigns for effectiveness by reviewing metrics such as open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), conversion rates, and return on investment (ROI).
   • Recommendations: Provide actionable insights to improve future campaigns.

2. Contact Segmentation

   • Evaluation: Assess current segmentation strategies to ensure they are effectively targeting the right audience.
   • Improvement: Suggest ways to improve segmentation using criteria like behaviour, demographics, and engagement levels.

3. Email Marketing

   • Performance Metrics: Audit emails performance metrics like open rates, CTRs, bounce rates, and overall deliverability.
   • Content Review: Evaluate the content and design of your emails for relevance and engagement.
   • A/B Testing: Review A/B test results to identify what works and what doesn’t

4. Content Strategy

   • SEO Analysis: Conduct a thorough SEO audit of your blog posts, landing pages, and other content.
   • Engagement Metrics: Evaluate metrics like time on page, bounce rate, and social shares.
   • Content Gaps: Identify content gaps and opportunities for new content based on audience needs and SEO.

5. Social Media

   • Integration Check: Ensure social media accounts are properly integrated with HubSpot.
   • Performance Metrics: Analyse social media metrics like engagement rates, follower growth, and referral traffic.
   • Content Review: Assess the performance and relevance of your social media content.

6. Workflows and Automation

   • Workflow Logic: Ensure workflows are logical and effectively guide leads through the funnel.
   • Automation: Check that automated tasks and processes are functioning as intended and eliminate redundancies.
   Read our latest blog to discover the most frequent HubSpot audit mistakes and learn how to avoid them for a smoother, more efficient portal.

HubSpot Audit: Sales Hub

The Sales Hub audit focuses on optimising the sales process for higher conversion rates and efficiency. Key steps to perform a HubSpot Sales Hub Audit include:

1. Pipeline Configuration

   • Review: Ensure that your sales pipelines are configured to align with your sales processes.
   • Optimisation: Identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the current pipeline configuration.

2. Deal Management

   • Data Accuracy: Review deal stages and properties for accuracy and completeness.
   • Deal Flow: Assess the flow of deals through the pipeline to identify drop-off points or areas needing improvement.

3. Sales Reporting

   • Report Evaluation: Evaluate the effectiveness of sales reports and the accuracy of forecasting tools.
   • KPI Alignment: Ensure that sales KPIs align with broader business goals and objectives.

4. Email Sequences

   • Performance Metrics: Audit performance metrics such as response rates, open rates, and follow-up effectiveness.
   • Content Relevance: Review email content for relevance and engagement.

5. Integration Check

   • Tool Compatibility: Verify that the Sales Hub integrates seamlessly with other tools and platforms in your tech stack.
   • Data Flow: Ensure that data flows smoothly between Sales Hub and other integrated tools.

HubSpot Portal Audit: Service Hub

For the Service Hub, the audit aims to streamline customer support and enhance satisfaction. Key steps to perform a HubSpot Service Hub Audit include:

1. Ticketing System

   • Efficiency: Evaluate the efficiency of the ticketing process, including response times and resolution rates.
   • Automation: Assess the effectiveness of automation in managing tickets and reducing manual effort.

2. Customer Feedback

   • Collection Methods: Analyse feedback collection methods, like surveys and forms, for effectiveness.
   • Insights: Evaluate the insights gathered from feedback and how they’re being utilised to improve services.

3. Knowledge Base

   • Content Quality: Review the quality and relevance of the knowledge base content.
   • Accessibility: Ensure that the knowledge base is easily accessible and user-friendly.

4. Reporting

   • Service Metrics: Ensure that service metrics reflect true performance indicators such as customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), and average resolution time.
   • Data Accuracy: Check the accuracy and reliability of service reports.

5. Automation

   • Workflow Evaluation: Assess the logic and effectiveness of automated workflows within the Service Hub.
   • Efficiency Gains: Identify areas where automation can reduce manual effort and improve service delivery.

HubSpot CRM Portal Audit

A HubSpot CRM audit ensures the overall health and usability of your HubSpot environment. Key steps to perform a HubSpot CRM Audit include:

1. Data Cleanliness

   • Database Review: Conduct a thorough review of your CRM database to identify and remove duplicates, outdated records, and incomplete entries.
   • Standardisation: Ensure data format consistency across all records (e.g., dates, names, addresses).

2. User Roles and Permissions

   • Access Control: Review user roles and permissions to ensure staff have appropriate access levels based on their roles within the organisation.
   • Security: Identify any potential security risks due to improper access settings.

3. Properties and Custom Fields

   • Relevance: Ensure that all properties and custom fields are necessary and align with your data collection and reporting needs.
   • Optimisation: Remove or consolidate redundant and unused properties to streamline data entry and reporting.

4. Integrations

   • Integration Health: Check the health and functionality of integrations with other tools and platforms to ensure seamless data flow.
   • Testing: Conduct tests to verify that integrations are working as intended and that there are no data syncing issues.

5. Dashboards and Reports

   • Relevance and Accuracy: Review dashboards and reports to make sure they provide relevant, accurate, and actionable insights.
   • Customisation: Customise reports and dashboards to align with your current business objectives and KPIs.

6. User Adoption

   • Usage Patterns: Analyse how different team members are using the CRM. Identify areas where further training may be needed.
   • Satisfaction: Gather feedback from users to understand how they feel about the CRM and any challenges they face.

7. Compliance

   • Regulatory Review: Ensure that your data management practices comply with relevant regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and others.
   • Consent Management: Verify that consent management processes are in place and functioning correctly.

Unlock Your HubSpot Potential with ScaleStation

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Conclusion

Conducting a HubSpot audit is an essential practice for any organisation using the platform, offering myriad benefits from optimising performance to ensuring compliance and data integrity. By carefully auditing each of the key areas — Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and the CRM Portal — organisations can drive enhanced efficiency, better strategic alignment, and, ultimately, more significant business results.

By following this detailed walkthrough, you can systematically review and enhance your HubSpot operations, ensuring your organisation is leveraging the full potential of this robust platform. Regular audits will help not only optimise the current setup but also adapt to new business needs and regulatory requirements, paving the way for sustained growth and success.