HubSpot audit checklist: 16 checks and the pass marks we use

A HubSpot audit checks five areas: properties, pipelines, workflows, data and reports. Each check is pass or fail. Duplicates under 5%. More than 80% of contacts tied to a company. Fewer than 8 pipeline stages.

This is the list we run at the start of every rescue. It finds what’s broken. Deciding what to do about it comes after.

The HubSpot audit checklist

Run it in this order. Properties feed everything built on top of them, so a failure here often explains failures further down.

Properties

1. No repurposed default properties. Someone renamed a default field to hold something else. Every report built on the original meaning is now wrong.
2. Dropdowns, not free text. “Distributor”, “distributor” and “Dist.” are three different values to a report.
3. Contact Source and Lead Source filled in. If you can’t say where a contact came from, you can’t say which channel pays. How to set up lead source →
4. UTMs captured on forms. Submit a test form from a tagged link and check the record.

Pipelines

5. Fewer than 8 stages. Each stage needs an exit rule a rep can repeat. Past seven, stages blur into each other. Why six beats twelve →
6. Closed Lost Reason required. Without it, a lost deal teaches you nothing.
7. No Closed Won deals without a contact. HubSpot can’t attribute revenue to a deal with no contact on it.

Workflows

8. No two workflows with the same enrollment criteria. They fight over the same records, and nobody knows which one won.
9. Every workflow has an off-switch or a cap. One bad trigger can email thousands of contacts.
10. Lifecycle automation on. HubSpot can move contacts and companies to Customer when a deal is won. It’s a setting, not a workflow: in Settings, open Objects, then Contacts, then the Lifecycle Stage tab, then Automate, and turn on “Set lifecycle stage when a deal is won.” A workflow doing this job duplicates the setting.

Data

11. Duplicate rate under 5%. Above that, one customer lives on several records, and their deals and activity split between them. Standardize values before you merge. Standardize before you dedupe →
12. More than 80% of contacts tied to a company. Personal email addresses and imports that skipped associations are the usual gaps.
13. Contacts with no activity in 90 days flagged. Flag them for suppression so they stop inflating your counts.

Reports

14. A sales velocity report. How long deals sit in each stage.
15. A Closed Lost Reason report, read monthly. The required field from check 6 is only worth something if someone reads it.
16. A source attribution report. Where customers come from, built on check 3.

What to do with what fails

Every failure gets one of three calls: fix it, rebuild it or leave it alone. Leave alone is a real answer. An unused property clutters a record, but nothing breaks because of it.

Order matters more than speed. Standardize data before you deduplicate it. Fix a property before you touch the workflows and reports that read it.

Some checks are fixed at the source, not by cleanup. Fairbank Equipment’s deals now sync from Epicor Eclipse with the customer attached. Of open deals created since the project began, 99.49% are tied to a customer account. Of open deals created before it, 39.53% were. Fairbank’s Eclipse integration →

How often to run the list is its own question. Why audit every six months →

FAQ

What’s in a HubSpot audit?

A HubSpot audit checks five areas: properties, pipelines, workflows, data and reports. Each check is pass or fail against a set mark, such as duplicates under 5% and fewer than 8 pipeline stages. What fails gets one of three calls: fix it, rebuild it or leave it alone, ranked by what it costs your team.

Can I run a HubSpot audit myself?

Yes. An admin can run most checks on this list from HubSpot’s own settings, filters and reports. The harder part is the second step: deciding what to fix, what to rebuild and what to leave alone, and in what order, so a fix to one property doesn’t break the workflows and reports that read it.

What duplicate rate is acceptable in HubSpot?

Under 5% of contacts and companies is our pass mark. Above it, the same customer sits on several records, and their deals and activity split between them, so reports undercount the relationship. Standardize domains, names and phone numbers before you merge anything, or duplicates hide behind formatting differences and the merge misses them.

We run this checklist on your portal, fix the quick wins free, and give you a fixed price for the rest. Request your free HubSpot audit →