HubSpot is a powerful tool that allows you to accomplish great things, but only when you take the time to utilize it fully. Only then will you be able to take advantage of its capabilities to help your company grow as a whole in a measurable, organized, and efficient manner.
In this article, we’ll provide a complete and full HubSpot audit guide to measure efficiency and gaps to successfully walk prospective customers through the lifecycle stages, shown below, to grow your company.
How To Self-Audit Your HubSpot Marketing Software
When it comes to evaluating the success of your marketing team, it’s important to take a comprehensive approach. One key component of this evaluation is examining the specific role your marketing team plays throughout the customer lifecycle. This typically entails overseeing the progression from subscriber status to lead status, and ultimately to the coveted status of Marketing Qualified Lead or MQL.
Understanding how your marketing team is performing in this regard requires a careful analysis of their processes and software. One useful tool for gaining insight into these areas is completing a comprehensive audit of your team’s HubSpot portal. This process can help you identify areas of optimization and potential gaps in your team’s strategy.
By taking the time to fully evaluate your marketing team’s role and processes, you can improve your ability to move prospects through the funnel and ultimately maximize your return on investment.
This can be down through four simple steps.
1. Make Sure All of Your Data is Entered
Even if it’s a lot of data, take the time to ensure it’s all entered into your HubSpot Portal. That means contacts, offline sources, and anything that has created leads but may not have been entered into the system yet.
This will allow you to organize better and prioritize since the information will already be in there. Plus, it will mean our data is projecting the correct numbers
2. Dig Into the Data
Now that all of the data you have is entered into your portal, it’s time to dig into it. This doesn’t mean looking at one or two charts – it’s time to really dig into it all.
When looking at the data, is it consistent or are there lulls? Do you see spikes in days or even weeks with little to no traffic? Or are your results consistently low? Take a minute to dig into the data that you see and try to answer what questions arise.
Overall, determining your conversion rate is the key to auditing. This is what tells you what is doing well and where you have gaps.
3. Identify Your Gaps
When reflecting on newly acquired information, take note of any unanswered questions. For example, if your website traffic is high but conversion rates remain low, refer to your lead conversion data.
Check the ‘Traffic Analytics’ report and select ‘Contact conversion rate’. From here identify if there is a gap in website traffic or lead conversions. Ask yourself if your website converts a healthy percentage of web traffic into leads.
According to HubSpot statistics, the average visit-to-lead conversion rate is 0.93%, which equals one lead per every hundred visitors. If your website traffic is high, but not converting into leads, there are effective strategies to fix this issue.
4. Create a Plan to Improve Your Results
Now that you’ve identified where the drop-off is with your leads, it’s important to make a plan to remedy these gaps. You can do this by creating S.M.A.R.T. goals. These are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely goals.
Ways to increase website traffic: increase blogging frequency, increase your social media presence and promotions, and start tracking and optimizing for relevant long-tailed keywords.
Ways to increase your website conversion rate: Add more CTA’s (call to action) to your five most visited pages, optimize your thank you pages for additional conversions, and A/B test a few of your landing pages.
All these things can help take you and your HubSpot portal to the next level, which in turn, gives you more leads and a higher conversion rate.
By completing these four steps, you’re able to narrow down where your gaps and areas of opportunity are. This then helps set you up for success in building your action plan to remedy these gaps and grow the first half of your funnel.
HubSpot CRM Best Practices
If you’re looking to optimize your sales funnel, finding gaps in the first half is only the first step. You also need to examine the latter half, which includes the Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) stage, the Opportunity stage, and ultimately the Customer stage. This is all handled by your sales team, which is why it’s crucial to evaluate their use of CRM software.
By devoting time to closely inspect the way your sales team leverages the HubSpot CRM software, you can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your current strategy. Armed with this information, you can make improvements that will help you reach more qualified leads faster and with greater efficiency than before.
Thanks to these enhancements, you can look forward to an optimized sales funnel that’s built to deliver results in an organized, streamlined way. With this newfound efficiency, you can be sure that your team is making the most of every opportunity to drive growth and achieve success.
1. Delete Contacts
This is important to make sure you don’t have any contacts taking up space that could be utilized for potential sales. Consider deleting contacts such as:
- Contacts who incorrect emails (hard bounces)
- Contacts who have not interacted with your content in one year
- Contacts who have not visited your website in one year
2. Merge Duplicate Contacts
This is where there may be two versions of the same contact. This could be due to a misspelling or the system not registering two contacts as duplicates.
When merging contacts, make sure to determine which contact will be the primary contact. The primary contact will be the one that stays in the system. By doing this you are clearing up room in your system allowing more contact space which could also save you money.
3. Clear Unwanted or Unused Contact Properties
As you may know, it’s easy to fall into the trap of creating contact properties in a frenzy, only to end up with a database that’s cluttered with meaningless information.
Luckily, there’s a solution to this predicament. By creating a workflow in your HubSpot portal and selecting the “clear contact property” action, you can effortlessly eliminate irrelevant contact properties from your records. It’s as simple as selecting the contact property you want to get rid of and then enrolling the relevant contacts in the workflow.
After activating the workflow, you’ll have a clean slate for your contact property in just a matter of minutes. This is a quick and effective way to keep your HubSpot database organized and prevent confusion down the line. By taking the time to declutter your contact properties, you’ll make sure that your records remain relevant and useful over time.
4. Assign Your Contacts To Personas
If you have taken the time to build your buyers personas in HubSpot, you can assign contacts to certain personas. This helps you and your coworkers see what kind of persona they are and help them work better with them.
5. Properly Update Lifecycle Stages
By ensuring that contacts are updated with the correct lifecycle stage, it helps keep your system updated with their current status. That way if something were to happen or a previous contact comes to the forefront of your sales, you are prepared knowing where they are at.
This also helps keep your team organized so the same contact isn’t contacted more than once, especially if they aren’t interested or in the midst of the sale.
6. De-Duplicate Contact Properties
If you are facing complications regarding the management of contact properties, this important tip can be valuable and positively impact your productivity.
Reducing the number of duplicate or similar contact properties is an efficient way to declutter and tidy up your system. By eliminating redundant data, you’ll have an easier time navigating through your contacts, searching for necessary details, and avoiding confusion when trying to locate key information.
Reducing duplicate data also enhances the quality of your data and saves you time in the long run. Frequently updating your records with accurate information is more efficient when you avoid redundant data.
By simplifying your contact properties, you are more likely to have a streamlined workflow and an organized system, which leads to increased productivity and less frustration. Act on this tip and experience the positive changes it brings to your work!
7. Fix Data Formats
When data formats are off, reporting becomes nearly impossible. If you want to pull data on specific data points, but those data are formatted differently, you will get incomplete and inaccurate datasets.
Start by cleaning up some of these common formatting issues:
- The proper case for first and last names
- Phone number formatting
- Mailing address formatting
- Email address formatting
8. Update Your Contact Record View
One of the ways to make your contact view more effective is to update the contact properties you see in the “About this Contact Section.” HubSpot provides a default view for you, but you know what matters to your company the most.
You can easily update this by going into your settings and setting the properties your team sees on contact records in the “Contacts” portion of the settings.
9. Keep Your Deals Clean
Organization and efficiency are crucial to success. To ensure that your sales team is maximizing productivity, it’s important to make sure they are always updating the deal status in HubSpot. Not only does this keep information up-to-date; it also helps keep your system clean and trustworthy.
To further streamline your sales process, there are a few key things you should keep organized in your deals. These include moving deals through their stages in real-time, updating close dates, updating the amount of the deal and associating the appropriate contacts and companies with the deal.
By taking the time to go through your CRM, you can identify areas for improvement that will increase your sales efficiency internally and externally. When everything is organized and up-to-date, your sales team will be able to efficiently connect with SQL’s in an organized and timely manner. Simply take the time to organize and audit your CRM software now, and watch as your sales team thrives.
Comparison: HubSpot Sales Free, Starter, Professional, and Enterprise
Having efficient and effective sales tools can be the difference between success and failure. Just like owning a Ferrari, if you’re not using the full power of your software, you’re not maximizing your investment. This is particularly important when it comes to your CRM, as it is the backbone of your sales process. Not every company will have the same needs when it comes to their CRM, which is why it’s essential to choose wisely.
HubSpot offers a range of CRM Sales Software packages tailored to companies of all sizes and sales teams. For small companies with only a limited number of sales employees, the Sales Starter package is a perfect fit. However, for larger companies with a more extensive sales team, it may be necessary to explore other options.
We took the time to research and compare the different HubSpot CRM Sales Software packages to provide you with a comprehensive breakdown of what each option has to offer. This comparison covers everything from cost to scalability, so you can make informed decisions about which package aligns with your sales team’s unique needs. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to increase your sales productivity with the right CRM Sales Software package today.
HubSpot Starter Free is free to use. This gives all HubSpot users an introduction to the sales platform and full access to the basic functions of the CRM.
HubSpot Starter is $50 per month. With this package, you get 1 sales user and serves as one step up from the free.
HubSpot Sales Pro is $400 per month. This serves as the all included package for complex sales teams.
HubSpot Enterprise is $1,200 per month. With 10 users included this is one of the newest products HubSpot has to offer. This is the all-inclusive package.
For a full breakdown of Hubspots Pricing Check out our post dedicated to Hubspots plans and pricing
How Do I Get The Most Out of HubSpot?
By taking the time to assess precisely where your company is at and investigating ways to steadily improve, you can create a roadmap that will help you track your company’s growth. One way to optimize your company’s growth is by analyzing how you are utilizing your HubSpot portal.
Identifying the areas where you could improve or save money would enable you to optimize your portal’s functions, resulting in more and better-qualified leads, enabling your company to grow faster and more efficiently. It is crucial to prioritize regular HubSpot audits as these will give insights into where you are missing out on growth opportunities. With HubSpot’s varied benefits, consistent auditing is vital to unlocking the full potential of your company’s marketing and CRM software.