A HubSpot audit is a full review of your portal: how data gets in, what happens to it, what’s automated, what’s broken, and what you’re paying for but not using. A good one ends with a short list of fixes you can make this month and a 30/60/90-day plan for the bigger work.
We’ve run audits on portals with 1,500 contacts and portals with 100,000. Here’s what we look at, how we look at it, and what tends to turn up.
Key takeaways
Start with an audit before changing anything. Imports and edits can set off workflows nobody remembers building.
The best findings come from testing things: clicking the links, running the formulas, checking what a status light measures.
Old migrated data can make a strong team look bad. Compare lifetime numbers to the last 12 months.
The output that gets used is short: quick wins, a 30/60/90 plan, and one page for leadership.
Why we start with an audit
When a new client wants us to jump in and start fixing things, we ask for an audit first. Changes in a portal you don’t know are risky. Import a list, and a workflow someone built three years ago might start emailing people. Delete a property, and a report somewhere goes blank.
An audit gives everyone the same picture before anything moves. It also gives the team a few early wins while the bigger work gets planned.
It starts with a conversation
Before we log in, we talk to the people who use HubSpot every day. Three questions do a lot of the work:
“When someone fills out a form, what happens next?”
“When do you decide to open a deal?”
“Is there one or two things in HubSpot that drive you crazy, that if we fixed them in the next couple of weeks, your life would be better?”
We also ask what the team tracks in spreadsheets. Whatever lives in a spreadsheet is something HubSpot isn’t doing for them yet, and it’s often the most important data in the business.
The answers tell us where to look first. They also tell us when a setup that looks odd was built that way on purpose, like a company running customer success in a second CRM by design.
What we review, section by section
Our audit template runs about 20 pages. Here’s what it covers, and what we often find in each area.
Account & licensing. Hubs, tiers, seats, contact tier, credits, contract dates. Often: paid seats nobody logs into, or tier limits blocking the plan.
Users & security. Admins, partner access, 2FA, departed users. Often: too many Super Admins, and ex-employees still owning records.
Database. Duplicates, bounces, marketable contacts, record sources. Often: thousands of duplicates, and lists loaded once and never used again.
Properties & lifecycle. Custom fields, fill rates, dropdowns, lifecycle stages. Often: fields nobody fills in, and contacts with no lifecycle stage.
Pipelines & deals. Stages, values, close dates, associations. Often: deals with no amount, no contact, or close dates in the year 2000.
Automation & tasks. Workflows, errors, goals, open tasks. Often: erroring workflows, and task lists that are almost entirely overdue.
Integrations. Connected apps, sync settings, private apps. Often: disconnected apps, and syncs that stopped without an error.
Marketing. Forms, email performance, lists, landing pages. Often: forms that convert at under 1%, and email programs that stalled.
Sales tools. Sequences, meeting links, playbooks, quotes. Often: Pro features paid for and never built.
Reporting. Dashboards, reports, a leadership view. Often: lots of reports, and no single view leadership trusts.
Breeze & credits. Enrichment, buyer intent, credit usage. Often: buyer intent signals nobody routes to a rep.
We test whether things work
A settings checklist tells you what exists. The findings that change a business come from trying things.
Click every link on the buyer’s path. On one discovery call, a consultant on the client’s side filled out the “Request a Demo” form while we were all talking. The thank-you page offered a link to book a time. It landed on an error page. That form had 6,871 views a year, and the visitors ready to book on the spot had been hitting a wall.
Check what a status light measures. On a Salesforce sync audit, contacts that never reached Salesforce showed “Sync status: Up to date.” That label meant the integration had last looked at the record, and nothing more. Another 8,467 records had stopped syncing with no error anywhere.
Run the team’s formula on accounts they know. A customer success team asked us to check their health score. We ran it on three accounts they’d picked as examples. Two had fewer than half their employees activated, and they scored “Healthy” and “Strong.”
Separate automation from people. In one portal, 73% of logged sales activity came from an outbound email tool syncing in. The real selling was a fraction of what the dashboard showed.
Old data tells the wrong story
Migrated records skew everything built on them. One client’s lifetime win rate was 1.8%. On deals created in the last 12 months, it was 28%. Thousands of deals from an old CRM, some with close dates back to 2000, were sitting in Closed Lost.
Another portal showed a 37% lifetime win rate and an 82% rate for the last year. Same pattern, different company.
So every number in our audits comes in two versions: lifetime and recent. The recent one is usually the one to plan around.
Finding what you pay for and don’t use
This one comes up in almost every audit. A team on Sales Hub Professional with zero sequences built and playbooks with zero views. A portal with 145 right-fit companies visiting the website every week, flagged by buyer intent, and never routed to a rep. A feedback survey tool, already licensed, that two team leads had asked for by name.
None of it costs more money to fix. It needs someone to switch it on and show the team how to use it.
What you get at the end
Quick wins. Ten or more fixes that are fast and safe. Some aren’t critical. They’re easy, and they give the team a visible win in the first week.
A 30/60/90-day plan. The bigger work, in order, with what has to happen first. (Clearing a task list that’s 99% overdue comes before adding new automated tasks to it. Fixing sync settings comes before cleaning up records the sync will put right back.)
One page for leadership. The full audit is for the people doing the work. The person signing off needs the findings and the plan on a single page, so we write both.
A maintenance calendar. Twelve months of what to check and when, built from what the audit found, so the cleanup sticks.
Signs your portal is due for one
Your team keeps a spreadsheet next to HubSpot “just to be sure”
Leadership doesn’t trust the dashboard numbers
Someone who built a lot of the portal has left
You’re about to migrate, integrate, or add a hub
Your renewal is coming up and you’re not sure what you’re using
If two or more of those sound familiar, an audit will pay for itself in the quick wins alone.
Common questions
How long does a HubSpot audit take?
Ours takes 14 days. Your team’s time is about two hours: a kickoff call and a walkthrough.
Will you change anything in our portal during the audit?
Only the quick wins you approve. Everything else is read-only.
Can we audit our own portal?
Yes, and the list above is a good place to start. The hard part is testing things with fresh eyes, which is tough in a portal you’ve lived in for years.
Where to go from here
Start with the five signs above. If your portal fits a few of them, our 14-Day HubSpot Health Check is a fixed-price audit with a ranked fix list, a walkthrough call, and a maintenance calendar. If we don’t find 10 fixes worth making, it’s free.
About the author: Anne Fellini is the founder of Anneomaly Digital, a HubSpot Gold Partner and top 10 HubSpot Solutions Provider (2024), with 14 years in the platform.