Discover how to conduct an effective audit of your HubSpot portal to get an improvement plan, optimize your strategy and improve business results.

What is a HubSpot portal audit?

A HubSpot portal audit is a process of evaluating your HubSpot account to identify potential areas for improvement and optimization. It consists of analyzing all aspects of your portal, from the technical setup to the marketing and sales strategy.

The main objective of a portal audit is to ensure that you are using all HubSpot features effectively and maximizing their potential to drive your business growth.

During a HubSpot portal audit, different elements are reviewed, such as the configuration of objects and their properties, the integration with other tools, the users/teams/profiles working on the portal, the security status of your account, the organization, the sales processes, the performance of marketing campaigns, among others.

In short, a portal audit in HubSpot allows you to get a clear view of how you are currently using the platform and helps you identify areas for improvement and opportunities to optimize your marketing and sales efforts.

When or how often should you perform an audit?

The process of auditing a portal is a constant process carried out by a SuperAdmin and is one of the fundamental pillars of their work. There are some review tasks that are performed on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis. The important thing is that they are part of a work dynamic that is sustained over time to achieve scalability and good results.

Need some examples?

Weekly activities: Control of contact data, businesses with incomplete information, errors in automations and integrations.

Monthly activities: Analysis of performance metrics, optimization of assets such as documents, templates, sequences, new audiences and segmentation, hard bounces of emails.

Quarterly activities: Review of permissions and users, new reports, attribution of campaigns by business unit, debugging of contacts to be deleted.

Benefits of performing a portal audit

Performing a portal audit in HubSpot has several benefits for your business:

1. identify opportunities for improvement: an audit allows you to identify areas of your portal that can be optimized to maximize the results of your marketing and sales strategies. This includes adjusting settings, improving workflows and automations, and more effectively segmenting your contacts or even improving internal communication between teams.

2. Optimize your strategy: By analyzing the metrics of your campaigns and strategies, an audit helps you identify which tactics are working and which are not. This allows you to adjust your strategy based on the results and focus on the actions that generate the greatest return on investment.

3. Increase efficiency: A portal audit on HubSpot helps you identify manual processes that can be automated, saving you time and resources. By automating repetitive tasks, you can focus on more strategic and high-value activities for your business.

4. Improve the customer experience: By analyzing your segmentation and personalization strategy, an audit helps you identify opportunities to improve the customer experience. This includes sending more relevant and personalized messages, which can increase customer satisfaction and build brand loyalty.

Steps to conducting an effective portal audit on HubSpot

Conducting an effective HubSpot portal audit requires following a few key steps:

1. Define your audit objectives: Before you begin, it is important to be clear about what specific aspects of your portal you want to evaluate and improve. This will help you to focus your audit and obtain more relevant results.

Review the technical configuration: Start by reviewing your portal's configuration, including property settings, integrations with other tools and conversion tracking settings. Make sure everything is properly configured and working optimally.

3. Evaluate marketing and sales strategy: Analyze your automation workflows, contact segmentation and content strategies. Identify areas where you can improve the personalization, segmentation and relevance of your messages to your contacts.

4. Analyze key metrics: Review your marketing and sales metrics to evaluate the performance of your campaigns. This includes metrics such as website traffic, conversion rates, lead generation and closing sales. Identify which tactics are working well and which need to be adjusted.

5. Document findings and recommendations: You have to hold off on playing at the moment! (unless it's something very serious) During the audit, make sure you document all your findings and recommendations. This will help you to have a clear record of areas for improvement and establish an action plan to implement the necessary changes.

6. Define an action plan: Based on the findings and recommendations noted, it is now time to set dates and responsibilities for the action plan. Carrying out the proposed changes will involve many people or teams and that is why it is important to set up an action plan with specific dates for each step and with the responsible parties involved in the process.

Useful tools to audit your CRM

Performing an audit of your entire HubSpot portal can be as exhausting and exhaustive as you want it to be. And since it's a process you'll be doing regularly to keep your portal healthy, there's no one way to do it.

But if you're just getting familiar with a new portal or it's the first time you're auditing your current portal and want some help getting started, then here are some steps to follow and key sections to review:

1. Licensing: Start by getting a good understanding of what licensing you have contracted. This will give you an idea of the tools you currently have available. Also remember to review and keep updated the account contact managers, as they will be HubSpot's main points of contact with the company and the ones responsible for making changes and/or new license contracts.

2. Users and permissions: Super important to understand who has access to our portal and to do what. Then review the active users, their permissions, deactivate or delete those users who do not belong to the company or with whom you no longer work (if 3rd parties). Keep teams and permission sets updated to facilitate management.

3. Security: Security is very important nowadays. So make sure you have your personal data up to date, a trusted phone charged and your two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Also check at the portal level how many super admins are on the account, if they are using 2FA and what actions they are performing on the portal.

4. Integrations: Knowing the complete stack of tools they are using is important to know how information is generated or modified within the CRM. Controlling that the integrated apps are active and working correctly is a basic piece of information for the security of your portal.

5. CRM - Objects and Properties: Check which objects are being used mainly, their most important and most used properties, where these properties are used and how. How does this information enter the CRM?

6. Marketing Tools: Here you can do a total audit of all the tools, we recommend starting with Marketing Subscriptions and Email Marketing and their performance (delivery, bounces, opens, clicks), Ads and their performance, Social Networks, Web Traffic and tracking code, Automations in use and errors to review, segmentation lists, file organization, asset nomenclatures...and more. Of course reviewing the dashboard with the main indicators/KPIs/OKRs you have will be part of this regular process, and if it doesn't exist, creating it is the first step.

7. Sales: Here you will review the current process steps, opportunity/business volume at each stage, if all stages are used, business owners, complete closing date, reason for missed closing, activities created by reps, contact and partner company (and other associations or tags) and then you can go through templates, sequences, calls and other specific activities. Of course also hand in hand with reviewing the reporting dashboards with the main business metrics or if it does not exist, create it.

Remember that these are just some of the tools available and processes you can audit in your HubSpot portal. As you audit more frequently along the RevOps path, you can go deeper and deeper into these or other topics.

IMPORTANT: During the audit process avoid touching and correcting things on the spot. This stage is one of discovery and evaluation. Then you will discuss with the team and put together the appropriate work plan for improvements. In this way you value the work done, involve the people involved and can measure the impact of the implementations.

How to interpret the audit results

Once you have performed the audit of your HubSpot portal, it is important to know how to interpret the results in order to make decisions and plan the concrete actions to be taken:

1. Prioritize the findings: Analyze the audit findings and prioritize them based on their potential impact on your strategy and results or their urgency. Identify areas that require immediate attention and establish an action plan to address them.

2. Set goals and timelines: Define clear goals and realistic timelines for implementing the improvements identified in the audit. This will help you maintain focus and ensure that changes are made in a timely manner.

3. Designate responsible parties involved in decision making or implementation of changes: It is important to be clear when someone on the team should be involved in decision making or moving forward with required implementations. The audit is a job that involves the entire company.

4. Track results: After implementing improvements, track the results to evaluate their impact. Use the key metrics identified during the audit to measure the success of the improvements and adjust your strategy as needed.

5. Maintain a culture of continuous improvement: Your HubSpot portal audit should not be a one-time event, but part of a culture of continuous improvement. Schedule regular audits to ensure that your portal is optimized at all times and that you are taking full advantage of HubSpot's features.

In short, conducting an audit is about taking note of all the findings and putting together a work plan. Prioritize the findings, set goals and deadlines, track the results and maintain a culture of continuous improvement to keep the business growing. Don't let the turtle slip away in front of your eyes.