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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 walk you through how to complete a full HubSpot audit to measure efficiency and gaps to successfully walk prospective customers through the lifecycle stages, shown below, to grow your company.
We break it down into three sections (feel free to jump to the one you are most curious about):
- HubSpot Marketing Self-Audit
- HubSpot CRM Best Practices
- Deciding Which HubSpot CRM Sales Package is Right For You
We chose these topics to help you see how you should be best utilizing HubSpot based on your goals and needs. We do this to help you really narrow down any gaps or areas of opportunities you may be missing out on.
How To Self-Audit Your HubSpot Marketing Software
First, it's essential to look at your marketing team's role and software. The marketing team is over the first three lifecycle stages: Subscriber → Lead → Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL).
You can efficiently evaluate how your marketing team is doing by taking the time to complete a HubSpot audit of your marketing portal. Then you can see how your team is walking prospective customers through the funnel and if there are any gaps in the framework.
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, make sure to take the time to make sure it’s all entered into your HubSpot Portal. That means contacts, offline sources, anything that has created leads but may not have been entered into the system yet.
This will allow you to better organize 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 really dig into the data that you see and try to answer what questions arise.
Overall, determining your conversion rate is the key in auditing. This is what tells you what is doing well and where you have gaps.
3. Identify Your Gaps
Take the information you’ve just learned and see what questions went unanswered.
Are you producing a lot of website traffic but little to none of them are converting? Or do you have a high conversion rate, but little to no website traffic?
You can find this out by looking at your lead conversion data. Your lead conversion data is the percentage of your website visitors who have become contacts in your contact database; you can see this data in your 'Traffic Analytics' report and by selecting 'Contact conversion rate.'
The first step is to determine whether you have a gap in your website traffic or in your lead conversions. If you aren’t sure, ask yourself, “is my website converting a healthy percentage of web traffic into leads?”
The average visit-to-lead conversion rate among HubSpot is 0.93% which means about 1 out of every 100 visitors converts into a lead.
Maybe you realize that you are pulling in tons of website traffic yet they aren't converting to leads. Or the majority of your website traffic is converting to leads, and you don't have a lot of traffic. Luckily, there are ways to fix that.
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, 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 actions) 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 really help take you and your HubSpot portal to the next level, which in turn, gives you more leads and a higher conversion rate.
For more details, check out this article walking you through the four steps in detail to measure your company's strengths and areas of opportunities.
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
After you have located any gaps in the first part of your funnel, you need to then look into the second half of your lifecycle stages, which your sales team is responsible for: Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) → Opportunity → Customer.
It's essential to take the time to look into how your sales team is utilizing its CRM software to see if they are using it efficiently. By taking the time to note how they're using the HubSpot CRM software, you're able to begin improving your systems to create higher efficiency.
This means reaching more qualified leads at a faster rate in an organized, efficient manner.
Our HubSpot CRM expert took the time to break down nine helpful ways to clean your HubSpot CRM portal.
From suggestions on how to clean up your contacts to ways to keep your deals clean and organized, here are nine practical ways you can audit your own HubSpot CRM portal.
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
Sometimes we create contact properties with one thought in mind, and before we know it, there is no organization or sense to be made of the record in question. If you come across this situation, you can quickly clear out contact properties for all contacts.
Create a workflow in your HubSpot portal and choose the action “Clear Contact Property” then select the proper contact property.
Be sure to enroll the contacts you want to clear this contact property for and activate your workflow. In just a couple of minutes, you have a clean slate for your contact property!
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 find yourself frustrated with having multiple contact properties that mean the same thing - this is the tip for you. Take the time to delete any contact properties that are a duplicate or similar to other contact properties. This can help eliminate confusion, frustration and a messy system.
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
Make sure your sales team is always updating the deal status in HubSpot! This will not only help keep information up-to-date but also help keep your system clean and trustworthy.
Key things to keep organized in your deals are:
- Moving deals through their stages in real-time
- Updating close dates as they become more clear
- Updating the amount of the deal as it becomes more clear
- Associating the appropriate and correct contacts and companies to the deal
By taking the time to go through your CRM, you can see where you can improve to increase sales efficiency internally and externally.
When you take the time to clean your portal up, it allows your sales team to thrive. They will be able to efficiently connect with SQL's in an organized and timely manner by merely taking the time to organize and audit your CRM software now.
Comparison: HubSpot Sales Free, Starter, Professional, and Enterprise
If you buy a Ferrari, but only drive it through the neighborhood, you have a significant amount of untapped horsepower. The same can be said for the HubSpot CRM.
If you're a small company with only 1-2 sales employees, Sales Starter if perfect for you. But if you're a larger company with a large sales staff, that won't work for you.
It's essential to make sure you have the correct software based on how it can best support your sales teams. With so many options, it's tough to decide which may be the best to support your sales team and their needs.
That’s why we took the time to look into HubSpot’s different CRM Sales Software packages and really break down what each package has to offer.
We compare HubSpot Sales Free vs. Sales Starter vs. Sales Professional vs. Sales Enterprise and its different benefits and costs so you can narrow down what package is best for you based on your sales teams needs.
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.
You can see what each package includes as far as benefits in this helpful chart.
Be sure to have your sales team write out their needs from their software. This will give you a better understanding of the capabilities your CRM software will need.
Then take time to dive into the different software offerings of HubSpot in our article, Which HubSpot CRM Upgrade Is Right For You? and decide what will fit your sales teams needs.
How Do I Get The Most Out of HubSpot?
When you want your company to grow, it's easy to wish that it happens overnight. But the reality is it doesn't - and probably never will.
But when you take the time to understand where your company is at and evaluate the ways you can get it to be where you’d like it to be, you can really set your company up for successful and measurable growth.
By taking the time to look through the ways you are and aren't utilizing your HubSpot portal, you're able to identify areas where you could be better or where you could save money and in turn, help your company grow.
With better and more leads, your company will grow at a faster, more efficient, and consistent rate. Ways to do that are by running regular HubSpot audit of your marketing and CRM software and making sure you have the right fit for your company's needs.
HubSpot has so many benefits, and when you don't utilize them, you miss out on opportunities. Sometimes you don't even know that you're missing out; that's why it's so important to prioritize regular HubSpot audits.
Need Help With Your HubSpot?
If you feel overwhelmed and aren't sure ways you can improve your HubSpot software, that's okay. We get it. It's a lot sometimes, and when you start to uncover issues and gaps, it's easy to get overwhelmed by how many there may be.
That's when it's essential to look to professionals for help.
Many agencies, including digitalJ2, offer a free HubSpot audit where we talk with you to narrow down what your goals and needs are. Then we audit your account and analyze ways you could improve with a plan to help you accomplish this through a measurable action plan.
If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, click here to learn more and unlock your free HubSpot Portal Audit by digitalJ2.
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