The First 5 Steps for HubSpot Optimization (That Anyone Can Do!)

How’s your HubSpot portal looking these days? Maybe it could use a little attention, and we know that’s a tall task for some portals…trust us, we’ve seen it all. 

In the end, though, we have found consistent, basic ways you can clean up your HubSpot portal to show immediate improvement and make you a rockstar to other departments. 

We’re only covering the first five steps, but if you’re hungry for more than five stay tuned for more…or check out The 10 Most Recommended Ways to Clean Up Your Out-of-Control HubSpot Portal now and get much more detail, too!

HubSpot Pricing and Security

The first areas you want to focus on center around people—those working in HubSpot and your contacts. But beyond that, they impact security and your HubSpot bill. They’re Nos. 1 and 2 on the list for a reason!

1. Clean Up User Permissions

In your portal settings, review the HubSpot users. Is everyone on that list still part of the team—let alone the company? For those users who you do not want to have access, you have two options:

• You can deactivate a user, meaning their profile will remain in the account and could be reactivated. Also, they’ll still appear in reports and be assigned to contacts.
• You can remove a user, which means their profile is gone...along with other information.

There are many repercussions when you remove someone, so take a step back and copy items over as needed. Reassign contacts, deals, conversations, workflows and sequences before removing a user.

You should also review permission sets. When roles, assignments or processes change, keep your account secure by regularly reviewing and updating permission sets. 

Trust us. You do not want everyone to be a Super Admin. You do not want everyone to have a paid sales seat. Choose how you dole out HubSpot power wisely. 

2. Create a Database Hygiene Strategy

Those same folks who love you because you’re taking security seriously will love you because this step could save them money in the long run. 

Cleaning up your data starts with some easy steps:

• Use the “manage duplicates” functionality to merge contacts as applicable—HubSpot’s suggestions make this manual process easy
• Create workflows to automatically assign tasks to contact owners to fill in missing data
• Utilize third party tools to supplement data
• Review synced data from Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics to make sure you’re not completely undoing all the hard work you’re putting in. (Psst…we have a great look at how to painlessly set up your Salesforce-HubSpot integration that can help take care of this.)
• Finally, prioritize manual cleanup. We know, we know…it's the worst, but if you use the suggestions above, it will make this step way easier.

Next, determine who you’re looking to communicate with and how—and make sure you’re not overpaying for marketing contacts. 

Marketing Hub portals (unless you are grandfathered in with an older portal) have a base number of marketing contacts, or people you can send a bulk email to. But the second you go over your allotted tier by even just one contact, you’re automatically upgraded to the next tier and you cannot go back. And they aren’t small jumps either…cue the scary music.

Find out how to further manage marketing contact status.

Utilizing HubSpot Lifecycle Stages and Lead Scoring

Now that your database is looking good, ask yourself the all-important question: Are the contacts in the right stages so you can fully utilize segmentation, emails, syncs, sequences and other HubSpot features? This is the base for the marketing programs and campaigns you are launching; make sure your efforts to move people through your funnel are supported with a clean setup.

3. Review Lifecycle Stages

HubSpot does a lot for people in all kinds of industries. But when it comes to lifecycle stages, what they give you out of the box might not work. Thankfully, they have updated this property to be editable! (You guessed it, we have a HubSpot Helper Video for that.)

Review the funnel and what each stage means with team players, then adjust the labels and order. Carefully review the contacts in each current stage first and make a plan to move them via workflows to other stages if they don’t quite match your new funnel.

Don’t need an evangelist stage because "customer" covers it all? That works…remove it! Need something for job seekers? Add it! Take control of your funnel and make it fit your business. Your sales and marketing teams will love you. 

Then make sure workflows are set up to move people through the funnel when they hit a lead-scoring threshold or perform a specific action. How do you determine that threshold? We're glad you asked...

4. Update Lead Scoring

First and foremost, this doesn’t need to be hard. What are the most important demographic features and actions that a contact can take to move through your funnel? That’s all we want to know right now. 

Determine a number for each (1, 10, 65…pick what you’re comfortable with). Then determine what combination of those factors makes the most sense for someone to move to the next lifecycle stage—most commonly lead to MQL or MQL to SQL. Once you have the list and numbers assigned, review what you currently have or start from scratch! 

Lead scoring is done in the property HubSpot Score. It’s a combination of positive and negative attributes, and HubSpot does the calculations for you. After you enter your numbers, build a workflow to automatically move a contact from one lifecycle stage to the next when they hit HubSpot Score = X. 

And if you have it set up already, check it regularly. Doing so can keep sales happy and maybe get yourself a little more credit in the process. Ask yourself:

• Is the average lead score for closed won deals what you expect? 
• Is your threshold to move to the next stage too low or high? 
• Does scoring reveal the need for other lifecycle stages?

Depending on your answers, make adjustments to the scoring property and related workflows or syncs to Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. Want more? We have some advanced lead scoring techniques you can take advantage of.

Staying Compliant In HubSpot

You are running a very powerful tool that can make your company’s potential customers very happy…or quickly irritate them. These areas of your HubSpot portal often are overlooked, unfortunately, which in some cases could land your team in trouble if you’re not following things like GDPR and CAN-SPAM laws. 

5. Fix Email Subscription Types

If you’re not using email subscriptions, then we need to start there. Determine what types of emails you’re sending to contacts:

• General marketing
• Newsletters
• Company news
• Product updates
• Industry intel 
• Etc. Etc. Etc.

This allows contacts to choose what they opt into and helps prevent them from unsubscribing from all if they receive too many emails (not just from you, but overall). Empower them to adjust what they receive rather than unsubscribing from all. Losing the ability to contact them is the last thing you want!

Set up subscription types and then update email-building processes to make sure that each email has the right type chosen in the email settings section. That way if someone opts out from that type, say newsletters, HubSpot will make sure they don’t receive those emails but still allow you to send company news or general marketing messages.