No one wants a messy HubSpot CRM portal. When it’s unorganized, your sales team can have trouble locating the information they need on their prospects and customers. Likewise, your marketing team can’t pull out the lead data they need to refine their campaigns. Both teams may be so overwhelmed that they decide to get up from their desks and take a long walk. Just kidding – we hope.
Cleaning your portal, and keeping it clean, can make it more functional, boosting the productivity of your sales and marketing departments. And when they’re both operating at maximum efficiency your business can grow. To achieve just that, here’s our advice on how to maintain a clean HubSpot CRM portal.
Delete Unnecessary Contacts
Removing contacts from your portal may seem like a scary idea. What if you need them for a future email campaign? What if they seemed like a good lead at the time? While these are valid concerns, the more useless data you have, the more your teams and reporting get bogged down. You don’t want to spend unneeded time fishing through rows and rows of contact information.
Similarly, you don’t want your campaigns to suffer or your sales team to follow up on dead leads. That’s why you should make it a point to clean out your data, targeting these contacts specifically regularly:
- Hard bounces
- Have unsubscribed
- Haven’t interacted with your content in a year or more
- Haven’t visited your site in over a year
- Duplicate contacts (merge them to determine who is the primary contact)
Fix Your Data Formatting
A typical data inconsistency that makes your portal look sloppy is formatting issues. Often, this is the result of several team members entering data by hand and using their preferred method of formatting. It can also happen when your leads enter their information into your forms. Not everyone writes their email or phone number the same way, but you should consider every lead that comes through.
The best approach to handling this problem is to determine how your company will uniformly format information, then updating new data when it’s ready. Here are common issues to look for and address:
- Proper case for first and last names - i.e., Becky Beckett, not Becky beckett
- Phone number formatting, which has several options to choose from:
- 111-111-1111
- (111)-111-1111
- 1111111111
- Mailing address - if you send direct mail, make sure your records have full two-part zip codes and addresses
Standardize Your Fields
Multiple fields trying to describe the same thing with different words won’t do any favors for you. For example, if you have two prospects who have the same title but listed differently, such as CMO and Chief Marketing Officer, they won’t be on the same list when you filter by job title.
Likewise, if you have SaaS and Service-as-a-Software both listed under industry, they also may not be featured on the same segmented lists. That’s why you should focus on consolidating and standardizing similar fields to make your data easier to search and use in campaigns.
You can do this by ensuring your form fields have standardized language and eliminating opportunities for leads to write in their information. Once you notice a consistent problem, you should manually update this data and stay aware of it moving forward.
Associate Companies to Contacts
As your HubSpot portal grows, your data may start to become disconnected, which can result in disorganization. A lot of the time that happens when users forget to associate contacts with companies.
Not only does this make your account seem messier, but it also hinders sales executives from finding the right person within a company to contact. It can also make personalizing marketing campaigns harder. Because of this, you should continuously work to ensure the proper associations are in place.
Keep Deals Updated
Has your boss ever asked someone from your sales team when the next deal is closing, only to have silence in response? Unorganized deals can cause this, but taking simple actions can prevent it from happening. You should be:
- Moving them through their lifecycle stages when appropriate
- Updating the close date when you are confident it’s near
- Update the deal amount when you have enough relevant information to back it up
- Keep your contacts and companies updated and associated with one another
If you haven’t already done this, you can go back and update the necessary deals. However, it’s best practice to keep deals updated to ensure a clean portal regularly.
Use Automated Workflows
If you use HubSpot CRM along with HubSpot Marketing Hub, you can utilize the marketing automation’s workflow tools to help keep your data consistent and clean. Automation like this can significantly reduce the amount of manual data entry, which is a common cause of inconsistent data and errors. Some examples of workflows you can create:
- Assign New Leads to Sales
- Create Task for HubSpot Owners for Last Activity Date Greater than 60 days (or whatever time frame you prefer)
- Update Status of Contacted Leads - i.e., mark them as in progress
- Update Lifecycle Stage as Lead Status Changes
- Examples: subscriber, lead, opportunity, SQL, MQL, customer, other
- Create Notification When a Lead Visits Pricing Page
Schedule Regular Audits
To make sure your portal never goes too out of control, you should aim to do a full HubSpot audit at least once a year. If you have the time and resources to do more, you should consider it. If you can’t, it’s understandable because a full audit can involve quite a lot of heavy lifting. Everything mentioned above should be included in a full audit, but here are other items to check off your list:
- Look at the sales tools you’re using and not using
- Review sales enablement content to discover high and low performing offers
- Examine your forms, how they’re performing, and if your fields make sense
- See which landing pages and web pages are helping convert leads and which aren’t
- Look at your contacts and see if they need to be cleaned
- Make sure your conversion funnel still makes sense for your company
For more information, check out this blog.
Get Help from an Expert
If you need additional help cleaning your HubSpot CRM portal, or want to undergo an audit done by an expert, you’re in luck. We’ve conducted numerous audits for clients from various industries. After each, we were able to help provide recommendations to optimize their HubSpot portal. We know first hand that a clean portal is a happy portal. To learn more about how we can make your portal shine, reach out today.
