5 Signs It's Time to Audit (and Clean Up) Your HubSpot Portal

I like to think of HubSpot portals like how people tend to treat new cars.

When you first get a new car, you keep it in tip-top shape — inside and out. The carpets are pristine, the engine gets the best oil, and any trash is removed immediately.

This might remain the case for the first few weeks, or even months, until you start to get tired of putting in the effort to keep everything so clean. So you let a few crumbs slide in between the console. And who cares if your gym clothes stay in the back seat for a couple months? Or that there’s trash on the floor?

Eventually you realize just how filthy your car’s gotten and have to do a major cleaning. Okay, yes, my car is a complete mess, don’t judge me!

Unfortunately, the same thing happens with our HubSpot portals. We get in there and start setting things up and at first it’s easy (and maybe even enjoyable) to keep things clean and organized. But over time, life wears on our portals and they get messy and disorganized.

Before we get into a few of the major signs that you probably need to do some spring cleaning on HubSpot portal (i.e. audit it!), let’s talk about what we mean.

Spring Cleaning: What Do Mean by “Audit” My HubSpot Portal?

I’m sure if I told you to go audit and clean up your car, you’d have a pretty good idea of what to do next. But what about your HubSpot portal?

At the very least, auditing your HubSpot portal means taking a step back from your daily marketing and sales activities to identify areas for improved utilization and organization of the platform.

You can audit your whole portal at once (recommended if your portal is on the newer side, without a ton of active users, OR if you’ve got a big chunk of time you can set aside for it), or you can audit your portal tool-by-tool as time permits.

If you’re not sure where to start, here’s what I’d recommend:

1. Identify the HubSpot tools that are hardest for your team to use (whether it’s due to disorganization, complicated setups, or anything else)
2. Start with a single tool (let’s use Forms as an example)
3. Make sure assets are organized (for Forms, look at consistent naming conventions. Is it easy to find the form you’re looking for in the tool?)
4. Purge old assets (if you’re scared to delete them because you want to be able to see historical data on how those assets performed, most tools allow you to archive old assets.  You’ll still have access, but they won’t clutter up the tool.)
5. Establish a process for keeping the tool organized going forward

If you’re not sure whether or not you should be auditing your HubSpot portal, here are the five major signs that it’s time for some spring HubSpot cleaning.

1. Wear and Tear: You’ve Been Using HubSpot for 3+ Years

Just like with your car, things are naturally going to get a little messy over time. Even if you’ve set specific rules for how to use your portal, if you’ve been using HubSpot for over three years it’s time to give your portal that good deep clean.

It’s always valuable to spend some time looking at your most commonly-used tools and making sure you’re cleaning out all the dust gathering in the cracks.

A few of the most common tools that need to be audited and cleaned up after a few years on the platform are:

• File Manager
• Calls-to-Action
• Forms
• Emails
• Contacts
• Lists
• Workflows

2. Different Drivers: You Have New Team Members or Recent Turnover in the Department

Just because things make sense to you in your portal doesn’t mean that they’ll make sense to the person who has to work in there after you leave, or to the new team member starting next week.

If your team or department is hiring new team members that will be using your HubSpot portal, getting your portal cleaned up before they start will help them onboard more quickly and ensure they don’t end up wasting time trying to understand how things are set up.

On a similar note — if you’ve had a lot of turnover on your team and people who have used the tools in the past are no longer at the company, you’ll want to spend time auditing the assets and processes they set up in your portal.

You don’t want to open the glove compartment in your car to find that the last driver stuffed your first aid kit with loose bandaids and half-eaten bags of Cheetos.

3. High Mileage: You’ve Been Very Active in Your Portal

Whether you’ve been using it for years or just a few months, if you are spending all day every day in your HubSpot portal it can get real messy real fast.

It’s definitely time for an audit if you’re pushing triple digits in any of the following tools:

• Workflows
• Forms
• Calls-to-Action
• Lists

It doesn’t matter if it takes you two weeks or two years to put 3,000 miles on your new car.  Either way, it’s time for an oil change.

4. Dirty Windshield: You Can’t Report on the Success of Your Marketing and Sales Efforts

It doesn’t matter how clean and organized the inside of your car is if you can’t see where you’re going!

If you’re having a hard time clearly tracking the success of your marketing and sales efforts, it’s time for an audit. Maybe you’ve perfectly organized your tools and kept them clean with nice naming conventions and processes, but it may be time to do a bigger picture audit on what all that is for.

The end goal of keeping your portal squeaky clean isn’t so you can pat yourself on the back at the end of the day, it’s so you can achieve your sales and marketing goals and clearly track your progress as you go!

5. Messy Glove Compartment: You Waste Time Searching for and Finding Different Assets

Ever get pulled over and have a hard time finding your registration in the stack of all the other car papers shoved in your glove compartment? Of course you haven’t!  Me either…

Disorganization in individual tools can compound into multiple minutes (and sometimes hours) every day spent looking for different files or forms or calls-to-action.

If you find yourself getting frustrated when trying to find things in your portal, it’s time to audit and clean up.

The File Manager is often the biggest culprit of disorganization in HubSpot. Any image ever uploaded, any PDF download, any video, all live in the same place, and if you’re not careful you can end up with a list of assets 100 pages long with zero organization.

Similarly, tools like forms, CTAs, lists, and workflows can all quickly become a sea of junk. Are we using this form or that form? Where was that list of engaged contacts I created last week? And the more disorganized, the more time sucked out of your day.

Clean it up!

Don’t Have Time to Audit and Clean up Your HubSpot Portal?

If you’re nodding your head to one or many of these signs, but are thinking “Man, I just don’t have the time to get in there and do that right now,” you’re in luck!

We like both clean cars AND clean HubSpot portals here at IMPACT, and we’d love to get in there and give you a tune-up. (We even offer Portal Audits by one of our dedicated HubSpot Consultants with a two-week turnaround to get you on the path to a squeaky clean portal!)

Reach out to us to start the conversation, or just get in there and get after it!!