HubSpot is a robust platform that can bring all your processes together in a seamless fashion. As your business starts to grow and change, so should your HubSpot strategy and execution. Assessment is a critical part of any strategy and your portal should be one piece of the whole that your stakeholders should continually evaluate. A portal audit can help companies better understand how they are actually using HubSpot and what they are doing well and not so well.
What’s surprising about HubSpot audits is how many people don’t optimize HubSpot. Easy things – basic blocking and tackling – aren’t actively looked at by most companies. It’s no secret that the less you optimize HubSpot the less effective it will be. To that end, we thought it would be helpful to identify the items we look at in our HubSpot audits and the patterns we found. If you’re seeing these same patterns within your HubSpot portal, it may be time to dive deeper into your Growth Stack.
1. What Your HubSpot User Adoption Looks Like at This Moment
As the saying goes, teamwork makes the dream work. The same is true of your HubSpot users. Your HubSpot portal is meant to enable teams so they can focus on doing what they do best and not be bogged down by antiquated processes. We’ve often seen clients that have activated users with limited or no activity!
Understanding who is actively using HubSpot and in what ways can be very telling in whether your team is fully embracing your portal, where you need to streamline, and/ or if you need to give your teams a refresh in processes.
We better understand your user adoption by:
- Checking who is logging into your portal
- Seeing who is in the tool and actively using the platform
- Looking at your team structure and reviewing your partitioning
- Investigating areas of concern we’ve identified, such as who’s never logged in, mismatched permissions, and more
Pro Tip for Enterprise Users: Enterprise users have the ability to log-in and validate what permissions users have and what they have access to. Don’t have enterprise? Our onboarding team can help talk through your options.
2. HubSpot Automation and Logic Audit
Automation in HubSpot is like the cherry on top of a sundae. Automation can help your customers progress through your funnel seamlessly, if it is set up and used correctly. HubSpot automation can help your team keep things moving forward without skipping a beat. We want to know if your automations are setting up your team to execute your strategy effectively.
Our portal audit reviews how your portal facilitates:
- Lead management
- Business processes and the alignment to what is in HubSpot
- Missed opportunities for automation
Pro Tip: HubSpot enables you to set up automation that carries throughout your buyer’s journey. One way to do this is by editing HubSpot Lifecycle stages, so you can tailor those properties to fit your processes. Read more on how to do that here.
3. Identifying Additional Opportunities to Leverage HubSpot Tools
HubSpot is a powerful tool when used properly. Most clients have barely scratched the surface when it comes to using tools in their HubSpot instance, and you could be missing out on some key opportunities to streamline your team’s productivity (talk about FOMO). In order to see if your processes need a power boost, we check into the following:
- Current HubSpot tool utilization
- Opportunities for increasing tool usage
- Business process potential for streamlining and automating
Pro Tip: Double check your subscription level in your portal under “Account and Billing Info” to see what tools are available to you. Also, take note of who is in a paid vs. non-paid seat and how active they are! You may want to shuffle users around based on their activity.
4. Checking Your HubSpot Data Management at a High Level
This is where we pop the hood on your data to ensure everything is in working order. Clean data is the foundation of any successful HubSpot instance, and maintaining your data should be an ongoing effort that needs to be monitored. Data drives decisions, big or small, in your business, so it is important to make sure your records are organized across the board. When we review your data, we check into your:
- Object properties
- Data input and gathering
- Data segmentation
- Current data management
Pro Tip: Utilizing saved views and filters can help you more easily segment your data for quick insights.
Asset Analysis by Individual Hub
Each hub brings together an array of assets to execute your day-to-day processes within your portal. Having your assets well organized and accounted for allows your team to do their jobs well. What we’ve learned from our clients is that not everyone sticks to the same process when it comes to creating assets. Having clearly documented processes and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) can help bring alignment across your users. Not following a concise naming convention can make it harder for your team to find what they need to execute their tasks properly. Here’s a quick run-down of the different types of assets we take into account at a high level:
- All hubs: Overview of naming conventions and folder structures
- Marketing: CTAS, emails, forms, campaigns, workflows, landing pages, blog, social media, and ads
- Sales: Templates, tasks, snippets, files, emails, sequences, pipelines, and deals
- Service: Knowledge base articles, automations, ticketing, ticket pipeline, surveys, and chat
Pro Tip: Once you have reviewed your assets, document how they should be created, named, and organized in your portal. Here is a template to help get you started.
Integration Health Check: How Healthy Are Your HubSpot Integrations?
One of the benefits of HubSpot is the vast opportunity to integrate other existing tools within your tech stack into the platform. Some clients may not even be fully aware of what type of integration they have set up and how or where that data is being used within their HubSpot portal. If your integrations aren’t up to snuff, you may need to review your connections where available. We identify how your integrations function by reviewing your:
- Connected Marketplace integrations
- Errors or notifications
- Data flow for installed apps
Pro Tip:Make sure you understand the data flow between your connected apps and your HubSpot portal so that the data you are expecting to see is being brought over properly.
Maximize Your HubSpot Investment with a HubSpot Portal Audit
HubSpot is very powerful and sometimes you may not know where to start. Starting a conversation about these different HubSpot elements with your CRM administrator can help your and your team identify opportunities to improve your HubSpot portal so you can continue to optimize and grow your business.
Need some help? Our onboarding team can complete your audit or even help you strategize and even implement ways to take your portal to the next level.
