Since becoming a HubSpot Solutions Partner over 12 years ago, the team at Square 2 has been in hundreds of HubSpot instances. Not only have we onboarded over 350 HubSpot customers on our own, but we’ve evaluated close to 1,000 portals over the years.
All this means is we’ve seen it all and we’re very good at quickly identifying issues, sharing recommendations to remediate those issues and working with clients to actively resolve issues so that their HubSpot portals are clean and working perfectly.
Over that time, we’ve noticed six areas where most companies should be paying more attention to avoid issues down the road.
When we do audits, we look at 13 areas within a client portal. But for the sake of this article, we’ve identified the top six areas that should be audited regularly.
Here’s what you should be looking at when you get an audit.
Clean data is what you are working toward. If your data isn’t accurate, comprehensive, complete and current, it’s going to be very hard to execute any campaigns and use any of the analytical tools to make data-driven decisions.
On top of that, your data should be logically segmented so that your marketing team designs highly personalized and targeted campaigns. Your data should be rich enough to help your sales team deliver even more personalized sales experiences.
When we do data audits, we’re looking to make sure the company records and the contact records are aligned correctly. We’re ensuring that:
While database audits are frequently overlooked or categorized with a lower priority, we recommend they’re prioritized because without clean and accurate data, we can almost guarantee underperforming marketing campaigns and a weak sales effort.
If you want to see how your database looks to trained HubSpot experts, click here.
Your company’s website is the cornerstone of your marketing and sales efforts. Think about it like a retail store for your company. If it’s messy, missing products on the shelves, poorly lit or insufficiently staffed, people are going to walk out and never come back.
That is exactly what happens with many company websites. Prospects stop by and after a poor experience they never return.
Your website experience has to be amazing on mobile devices and desktop devices. It has to be lightning-fast. It has to tell a story in under 10 seconds. It has to suck the visitors in, offer them educational content and easily move them through the site like it was an attraction at Disney World.
It has to do all this at the same time. If it doesn’t, you’re going to lose potential customers and never even know it.
When you audit your website, make sure it loads super-fast and is optimized for both mobile and desktop devices. Make sure it’s easy to navigate and easy to find information on the site. Also, make sure it’s full of educational content, and don’t bury that stuff in a resources section.
You want to make sure the site is secure and that it’s optimized for your most important keywords.
If you want to see how your site stacks up, click here.
Your marketing has one main objective – generate leads. This means your lead capture efforts must be top-notch, too.
We’re looking at landing pages, not website pages. We’re looking at your forms and the CTAs (calls-to-action) that send people to those pages and forms. Last but definitely not least, you have to audit how your lead-nurturing emails are performing.
Those are the emails you automatically send to people when they convert on your website. These are critical to keeping the hot lead warm and continuing the conversation while they’re offsite. These are going to work hard to get those people back on the site later.
The audit in this area should look at visitor numbers and conversion numbers on your most important landing pages. The CTAs should be showing impressions and clicks. The forms should show the conversion percentage, and the lead-nurturing emails should show open rates and click-through rates. The audit would uncover any issues in these areas along with recommendations for improvements.
To have us look at your lead capture performance, click here.
Once marketing tees up the lead, sales has to pick it up and continue the highly advisory and educational experience, auditing the sales process and looking at conversion rates through the process. Looking at the time it’s taking to move people through the process and evaluating the content being shared during that process is going to uncover interesting insights.
This process should be visible in HubSpot, and the deal stages should represent each of the steps in the sales process. This unlocks data about the conversion rates and the time it takes for prospects to move through each stage.
In many cases, these audits uncover that a company might not need more leads but might need to deliver a better experience so that fewer prospects fall out of the process at each stage.
If you can improve the conversion rate at each stage of the sales process, you get a compounding effect that could improve revenue without you needing more leads.
To have us audit your sales process, click here.
If you’re leaning into your HubSpot tech stack, you should be using a lead-scoring model to help your reps know which leads and opportunities represent the best opportunities. But lots of times we see old models using outdated data or models that were built by people with only limited experience.
It’s worth looking at lead-scoring models at least a few times a year, so including it in our audit gives us a perspective on where your company might have been and where it needs to go to get an upgraded lead-scoring model installed.
Lead scoring should include not only demographic data like company size and/or industry but also intent data. What pages have they visited? How many times have they come back to your website? How engaged are they with the content you’re sending out?
If this is done correctly, you’ll be sending reps leads who fit your target persona but are also engaged in active cycles to fix the challenges that your products or services are designed to fix.
To have one of our lead-scoring experts peek under the hood at your lead-scoring model, click here.
Finally, it’s worth auditing your dashboards and reports. People often ask for reports and dashboards to be created and never use them. This creates a ton of confusion and waste in your reports module.
In addition, the accuracy of these dashboards is also worth looking at. If people doubt the data that makes up the dashboards, why have them? Instead, rework them, redesign them and relaunch them so that they deliver the value intended.
It might also be true that you’re missing certain important dashboards based on your overall goals and objectives. There are many creative ways to slice and dice the data and even more creative ways to present the data.
Pipeline reports, pipeline value and pipeline velocity are a few of the less common ones. Customer retention, customer upsell, percent of wallet and advocacy dashboards are also less common but equally valuable.
Having an outside expert look at your dashboards can uncover areas that need fixing and provide interesting recommendations for quickly improving your sales and marketing performance.
Start Today Tip – You take your car in for regular service so that it continues to run reliably, and you should consider a similar approach to HubSpot. There are so many ways and places where HubSpot can become inefficient, inaccurate and out of date. You should review or audit your entire HubSpot instance at least twice a year. You have people in and out of it, company changes that affect it, website upgrades and database changes. This all impacts HubSpot’s ability to run accurately and produce the results you expect. Doing regular maintenance is critical to getting full value from your investment in HubSpot. Let us run a 13-point checkup on your HubSpot instance today.