It's a statistic that should make any business leader pause: over 50% of CRM implementations fail within the first few years. The initial investment in a powerful platform like HubSpot is just the beginning. Without proper maintenance, even the most advanced CRM can become a cluttered, inefficient system that hinders growth rather than driving it.
This is where a HubSpot health check becomes one of the most valuable investments you can make in your business operations. Just as you'd take a car for a regular service to ensure it runs smoothly, a HubSpot health check is a comprehensive diagnostic of your entire portal, designed to identify issues, optimize performance, and ensure your CRM is perfectly aligned with your business goals.
For growing businesses, particularly in fast-paced sectors like SaaS, HealthTech, and FinTech, a healthy HubSpot portal is not a luxury—it's the engine of your revenue operations. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about conducting a HubSpot health check, from identifying the warning signs that your portal is underperforming to a detailed breakdown of what a thorough audit should cover.
What Is a HubSpot Health Check?
A HubSpot health check is a comprehensive audit and diagnostic review of your entire HubSpot portal. Think of it as a deep-dive inspection that goes far beyond a surface-level glance. Its primary purpose is to assess the overall performance, efficiency, and alignment of your HubSpot account with your business objectives.
This process involves a systematic examination of your data quality, automation processes, system integrations, and user adoption to identify areas of inefficiency, uncover hidden opportunities, and ensure you are maximizing your return on investment in the platform. While the terms "audit" and "health check" are often used interchangeably, a health check is typically more proactive and holistic, focusing on long-term performance and strategic alignment, whereas an audit might be more narrowly focused on resolving specific, existing problems.
A thorough health check provides a 360-degree view of your customer relationship management (CRM) ecosystem, evaluating everything from the technical setup to the strategic execution of your sales and marketing efforts. It's designed to answer critical questions: Is our data clean and reliable? Are our workflows firing correctly? Are our teams using the platform to its full potential? By scrutinizing every corner of your portal, a health check delivers a detailed roadmap for optimization, helping you to streamline operations, improve data integrity, and ultimately drive more revenue.
Why You Need a HubSpot Health Check
In today's competitive landscape, a CRM is more than just a database; it's the central nervous system of your entire commercial operation. When your HubSpot portal is unhealthy, the symptoms are felt across the business, from frustrated sales reps to disjointed marketing campaigns and unreliable forecasting.
The primary reason you need a HubSpot health check is to prevent the slow, often unnoticed degradation of your CRM's effectiveness. Over time, as teams evolve, processes change, and data accumulates, even the best-configured portals can develop inefficiencies.
Duplicate records, broken automations, and inconsistent data entry practices can create a domino effect, leading to a lack of trust in the data and, ultimately, low user adoption. This is where a health check becomes a critical component of your digital transformation strategy.
A successful digital transformation is not just about adopting new technologies; it's about ensuring those technologies are continuously optimized to deliver business value. An underperforming CRM is a significant roadblock to this goal.
A regular health check ensures that your HubSpot portal remains a single source of truth, providing the clean, reliable data needed for accurate reporting, effective decision-making, and a seamless customer experience. By investing in a regular health check, you are not just maintaining a piece of software; you are safeguarding the engine of your revenue growth.
Signs Your HubSpot Portal Needs a Health Check
Recognizing the warning signs of an unhealthy HubSpot portal is the first step toward optimization. Often, these issues manifest as subtle frustrations or minor inefficiencies that, over time, snowball into significant operational roadblocks. One of the most telling indicators is team frustration.
If your sales or marketing teams are creating their own spreadsheets to track data, avoiding certain HubSpot features, or complaining that the system is "clunky" or "doesn't work," it's a clear sign that your CRM is no longer serving their needs.
This frustration often stems from poor data quality. Inaccurate or incomplete data erodes trust and makes it impossible to rely on your CRM for decision-making. Are your sales forecasts consistently off? Are your marketing emails bouncing due to outdated contact information? These are classic symptoms of a portal in need of a health check. Another major red flag is low user adoption. A CRM is only as valuable as the data it contains, and if your team isn't using it consistently, you're operating with a significant blind spot. This is where the principles of Revenue Operations (RevOps) become crucial. RevOps is about creating alignment across your sales, marketing, and service teams, and a healthy CRM is the bedrock of this alignment.
If your teams are working in silos, with disconnected processes and inconsistent data, your RevOps strategy is destined to fail. Other signs include inaccurate reporting, where you can't get a clear picture of your pipeline or campaign performance, and slow system performance, where your portal feels sluggish and unresponsive.
How Often Should You Conduct a HubSpot Health Check?
Determining the right frequency for a HubSpot health check depends on several factors, including the size of your business, the complexity of your operations, and the rate at which your company is growing. However, a general rule of thumb is to conduct a comprehensive audit at least once a year.
An annual health check serves as a crucial strategic review, ensuring that your HubSpot portal is aligned with your business goals for the year ahead and that you are starting with a clean, optimized foundation. For rapidly scaling businesses, particularly those in dynamic sectors like SaaS or FinTech, a more frequent cadence is often necessary.
We recommend a quarterly review for these companies to ensure that their CRM is keeping pace with their growth. A quarterly check-up allows you to address issues before they become systemic, adapt your processes to reflect new business realities, and continuously optimize your portal for peak performance. In addition to these scheduled audits, it's also wise to implement a system of continuous monitoring for key health indicators. This might involve monthly checks on data quality metrics, workflow error rates, and user activity levels.
Certain business milestones should also trigger an immediate health check, including events like a merger or acquisition, the launch of a new product line, a significant change in your sales or marketing strategy, or the integration of a major new piece of technology into your tech stack.
What Does a HubSpot Health Check Include?
A comprehensive HubSpot health check is a meticulous, multi-faceted process that examines every aspect of your portal to ensure it is functioning optimally. It's not just about fixing what's broken; it's about proactively identifying opportunities for improvement and ensuring your CRM is a powerful engine for growth.
A thorough audit, like the one we conduct at Pixcell.io, is typically structured around 12 key categories, each one representing a critical component of your HubSpot ecosystem. This systematic approach ensures that no stone is left unturned. The audit begins with a deep dive into your foundational data, scrutinizing your Companies and Contacts to assess the quality and completeness of your records. This is a critical step in establishing strong CRM data hygiene, as clean, reliable data is the bedrock of any successful CRM strategy. From there, the audit moves on to your sales and marketing processes, examining your Deals and Pipelines, Forms and Landing Pages, Lists and Segmentation, and Workflows and Automation.
The goal is to ensure that your processes are streamlined, your automation is efficient, and your segmentation is effective. A key part of this is ensuring high data quality management throughout the customer lifecycle. The health check also includes a thorough review of your Dashboards and Reports to ensure you are tracking the right metrics and have clear visibility into your performance.
The 12 Essential Areas of a HubSpot Health Check
To truly understand the health of your HubSpot portal, a comprehensive audit must dissect its core components. At Pixcell.io, we structure our health checks around 12 essential areas, ensuring a thorough and actionable analysis.
This framework allows us to pinpoint specific weaknesses and opportunities for improvement. The process begins with Companies and Contacts, the foundation of your CRM, where we assess data integrity, identify duplicates, and review custom properties for relevance and consistency. Next, we analyze your Deals and Pipelines, a critical step for sales pipeline optimization.
We look for bottlenecks, evaluate stage definitions, and ensure your pipeline provides an accurate forecast. We then examine Custom Objects to see if you are effectively tailoring HubSpot to your unique business model. Following that, we review Forms and Landing Pages to optimize conversion points and data capture.
The audit continues with a deep dive into Lists and Segmentation, ensuring you can effectively target your audience, and Workflows, where we focus on improving marketing automation efficiency by eliminating redundant processes and fixing broken sequences.
We then scrutinize your Dashboards and Reports to verify that you are tracking meaningful KPIs and that your leadership team has clear visibility into performance. The final areas of focus are General portal settings, Existing Integrations, Inbound Marketing effectiveness, overall Portal configuration, and critical System Integrations.
How to Perform a HubSpot Health Check
Performing a HubSpot health check can be approached in two ways: as a do-it-yourself (DIY) project or by engaging a team of experts like Pixcell.io. For smaller businesses with a relatively simple HubSpot setup, a DIY audit can be a good starting point.
This typically involves using a checklist to manually review each area of your portal, from data quality to workflow performance. The process begins with a thorough review of your contacts and companies, looking for duplicates, incomplete records, and unused properties. Next, you would move on to your sales pipeline, examining deal stages, and identifying any bottlenecks. You would then audit your marketing assets, including forms, landing pages, and email campaigns, to ensure they are optimized for conversion. Finally, you would review your workflows and automation to check for errors and inefficiencies.
However, the DIY approach has its limitations. It can be time-consuming, and without deep expertise in HubSpot, it's easy to miss critical issues or misinterpret the data. For a more comprehensive and objective assessment, a professional audit is the recommended path. At Pixcell.io, our process is built on a foundation of deep expertise and a commitment to understanding your unique business. We leverage advanced tools and a proven methodology to conduct a deep-dive analysis of your portal. A key part of our process is understanding your business process automation goals, ensuring that your HubSpot portal is not just a collection of tools, but a fully integrated system that automates and streamlines your operations.
How Long Does a HubSpot Health Check Take?
The timeline for a HubSpot health check can vary significantly based on the complexity and size of your portal. For a small business with a straightforward setup, a comprehensive audit might take as little as one to two weeks. However, for larger organizations with extensive data, complex automations, and multiple integrations, the process can take anywhere from four to six weeks.
The duration is influenced by several key factors, including the number of contacts, the volume of custom properties, the quantity and complexity of workflows, and the number of third-party systems integrated with your HubSpot account. The initial phase of the health check involves a deep-dive discovery process, where the audit team works to understand your business goals, operational processes, and specific pain points. This is followed by the technical audit itself, where every corner of your portal is meticulously examined.
The final phase involves compiling the findings into a detailed report and presenting a strategic roadmap for optimization. At Pixcell.io, we have refined our process to be as efficient as possible without sacrificing thoroughness. Our experience with over 100 HubSpot implementations allows us to quickly identify common issues and focus on the areas that will deliver the most significant impact.
How to Prepare for a HubSpot Health Check
To ensure a smooth and effective HubSpot health check, preparation is key. The more organized you are at the outset, the more efficient the audit process will be. The first step is to gather all relevant documentation, including any existing process maps, data dictionaries, and documentation for your current integrations. It's also helpful to compile a list of all the users who have access to your portal, along with their roles and permissions.
The next crucial step is team alignment. Before the audit begins, it's important to meet with your key stakeholders from sales, marketing, and service to understand their pain points, challenges, and goals. This will provide the audit team with valuable context and ensure that the final recommendations are aligned with the needs of the entire business. You will also need to provide the audit team with the necessary access and permissions to your HubSpot portal. This typically involves creating a dedicated user account with super admin privileges.
Finally, it's important to set clear objectives for the health check. What do you hope to achieve? Are you looking to improve data quality, streamline your sales process, or get more out of your marketing automation? By defining your goals upfront, you can ensure that the audit is focused on the areas that matter most to your business.
Common HubSpot Portal Issues and How to Fix Them
During a HubSpot health check, several common issues tend to surface time and again. One of the most prevalent is the presence of duplicate records. These can wreak havoc on your data, leading to inaccurate reporting and a fragmented view of your customers.
The fix involves a meticulous data cleansing process, using HubSpot's built-in deduplication tools or more advanced third-party solutions to merge duplicate contacts and companies. Another frequent problem is broken workflows. Over time, as properties change or users are deactivated, workflows can break, leading to failed automations and missed opportunities. The solution is to conduct a thorough audit of all your workflows, testing each one to ensure it is firing correctly and updating them as needed.
Poor data hygiene is another chronic issue, with incomplete records, inconsistent formatting, and unused properties cluttering up the system. This is where a robust lead management system becomes critical. Establishing clear data entry standards, using required fields, and regularly archiving old or inactive contacts can go a long way toward improving data quality. Finally, integration problems are a common source of frustration. Whether it's a broken connection to your accounting software or a faulty data sync with a third-party app, integration issues can create significant data silos. The fix involves a thorough review of all your integrations, ensuring they are properly configured and that data is flowing seamlessly between systems.
Measuring HubSpot Portal Health
Measuring the health of your HubSpot portal requires a data-driven approach that goes beyond anecdotal evidence. To truly understand the state of your CRM, you need to track a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide a clear, objective view of its performance.
One of the most effective ways to do this is by creating a health score. A health score is a composite metric that combines several key health indicators into a single, easy-to-understand score.
This allows you to track the overall health of your portal over time and quickly identify any negative trends. The components of a health score can vary depending on your business, but they typically include metrics related to data quality, user adoption, and system performance. For example, your data quality score might be based on the percentage of contacts with complete and accurate information.
Your user adoption score could be based on the number of active users, the frequency of logins, and the usage of key features. Your system performance score might be based on metrics like workflow error rates and page load times. In addition to a health score, it's also important to track metrics related to your sales forecasting accuracy. If your sales forecasts are consistently off, it's a strong indication that your pipeline data is unreliable.
What Happens After a HubSpot Health Check?
Completing a HubSpot health check is not the end of the process; it's the beginning of your journey toward a healthier, more efficient CRM. The first deliverable you will receive is a comprehensive audit report. This document provides a detailed analysis of your portal's health, highlighting areas of strength, identifying weaknesses, and providing a clear, prioritized list of recommendations for improvement.
The report should be easy to understand, with clear explanations of the issues found and the potential impact on your business. Once you have reviewed the report, the next step is to create an implementation roadmap. This involves prioritizing the recommendations based on their potential impact and the level of effort required to implement them. Some fixes, like cleaning up duplicate records, might be quick wins that can be implemented immediately. Others, like re-architecting your data model or overhauling your workflows, might be larger projects that require more planning and resources.
At Pixcell.io, we don't just deliver a report and walk away. We work with our clients to create a practical, actionable roadmap and provide the ongoing support needed to implement the recommendations and ensure long-term success.
How to Maintain HubSpot Portal Health
Maintaining the health of your HubSpot portal is an ongoing process, not a one-time fix. Once you've completed a comprehensive health check and implemented the initial recommendations, it's crucial to establish a set of ongoing best practices to prevent your portal from degrading over time. One of the most important aspects of this is regular monitoring.
This involves tracking your key health indicators on a regular basis, using dashboards and reports to keep a close eye on data quality, user adoption, and system performance. By catching issues early, you can prevent them from becoming systemic problems. Team training is another critical component of long-term health. Your team needs to be properly trained on your data entry standards, your operational processes, and the best practices for using HubSpot.
This ensures that everyone is using the platform consistently and that your data remains clean and reliable. It's also important to establish clear documentation standards. This includes documenting your data model, your workflows, and your integration configurations. This documentation is invaluable for onboarding new team members and for troubleshooting issues as they arise. Finally, it's important to have a clear governance process in place for making changes to your HubSpot portal.
The Cost of a HubSpot Health Check
The cost of a HubSpot health check can vary widely depending on the scope of the audit and the provider you choose. However, it's important to view this as an investment rather than a cost.
The price of a health check is typically determined by several factors, including the size of your HubSpot portal, the complexity of your setup, and the level of detail required in the audit. A basic health check for a small business might cost a few thousand dollars, while a comprehensive audit for a large enterprise with multiple integrations could be significantly more. When evaluating the cost, it's important to consider the potential value that a health check can deliver.
A well-executed audit can uncover significant cost savings by identifying unused licenses, streamlining inefficient processes, and improving data quality. It can also drive significant revenue growth by optimizing your sales and marketing processes, improving lead conversion rates, and increasing customer retention.
At Pixcell.io, we offer a range of health check packages to suit different needs and budgets. Our approach is to provide a clear, transparent pricing model with no hidden fees. When you consider the potential ROI of a healthier, more efficient CRM, the cost of a professional health check is a small price to pay.
HubSpot Health Check Best Practices
Adhering to HubSpot health check best practices is essential for maximizing the value of your audit and ensuring that your portal remains in peak condition. One of the most important best practices is to approach the health check with a strategic mindset. It's not just about fixing technical issues; it's about ensuring that your HubSpot portal is fully aligned with your business goals.
This means involving key stakeholders from across the business in the process and using the audit as an opportunity to have a broader conversation about your sales, marketing, and service strategies. Another key best practice is to be thorough and systematic. A superficial glance at your portal is not enough.
A proper health check requires a deep dive into every aspect of your setup, from your data model to your automation rules. This is where a proven methodology and a comprehensive checklist are invaluable. It's also important to be objective and data-driven. Don't rely on anecdotal evidence or gut feelings. Use data to identify issues, measure the impact, and track your progress over time. Finally, it's crucial to prioritize and execute. A health check is only as valuable as the action it inspires.
Can You Do a HubSpot Health Check Yourself?
For businesses with a relatively simple HubSpot setup and a technically savvy team, a DIY HubSpot health check can be a viable option. There are many checklists and resources available online that can guide you through the process of auditing your own portal. A DIY audit can be a good way to identify some of the more common issues, such as duplicate records, incomplete data, and broken workflows. It can also be a valuable learning experience, helping your team to develop a deeper understanding of the HubSpot platform. However, the DIY approach has its limitations.
It can be a time-consuming process, and without deep expertise in HubSpot, it's easy to miss more complex or subtle issues. A DIY audit also lacks the objectivity of a third-party assessment. It can be difficult for an internal team to be truly impartial when evaluating their own work. For a more comprehensive and unbiased assessment, it's often best to hire experts. A professional HubSpot consultancy like Pixcell.io brings a wealth of experience and a proven methodology to the table. We can quickly identify issues that an internal team might miss and provide a strategic perspective that goes beyond simple technical fixes.
Tools Used for HubSpot Health Checks
A thorough HubSpot health check leverages a combination of native HubSpot features and specialized third-party tools to conduct a deep and comprehensive analysis of your portal. Within HubSpot itself, there are several powerful tools that can be used to assess the health of your system.
The data quality command center, for example, provides a centralized view of your data health, allowing you to identify and fix issues like duplicate records and formatting errors. The workflow audit log is another invaluable tool, providing a detailed history of your workflow executions and helping you to identify and troubleshoot errors. HubSpot's reporting and analytics tools are also essential for a health check, allowing you to track key metrics and measure the performance of your sales and marketing efforts.
In addition to these native tools, there are also several third-party tools that can enhance the depth and efficiency of a health check. Tools like Insycle and Demand Spring's Dupe Eliminator are powerful data cleansing solutions that can automate the process of identifying and merging duplicate records. At Pixcell.io, we use a combination of these tools, along with our own proprietary methodology, to conduct a comprehensive and data-driven health check.
When to Schedule Your Next HubSpot Health Check
Knowing when to schedule your next HubSpot health check is just as important as knowing how to perform one. The optimal timing depends on a variety of factors, but there are several key triggers that should prompt you to consider an audit. As a general rule, it's a good idea to schedule a health check at least once a year.
This provides a regular opportunity to clean up your data, optimize your processes, and ensure that your portal is aligned with your annual business goals. However, there are also several specific events that should trigger an immediate health check. If you are planning a major business change, such as a merger, acquisition, or a shift in your business model, a health check is essential to ensure that your HubSpot portal can support the new reality.
Similarly, if you are about to launch a new product or service, a health check can help you to ensure that your sales and marketing processes are ready to support the launch. Another key trigger is a change in your tech stack. If you are integrating a new piece of software with HubSpot, a health check can help to ensure that the integration is seamless and that data is flowing correctly.
How Pixcell.io Conducts HubSpot Health Checks
At Pixcell.io, our HubSpot health check is more than just a technical audit; it's a strategic engagement designed to turn your HubSpot portal into a powerful engine for growth. Our methodology is built on the experience of over 100 successful HubSpot implementations across a wide range of industries, including SaaS, HealthTech, EdTech, and FinTech. This deep industry expertise allows us to understand your unique challenges and tailor our approach to your specific needs. Our process begins with a deep-dive discovery session, where we work with your team to understand your business goals, your operational processes, and your specific pain points.
We then conduct a comprehensive, 12-point audit of your portal, using a combination of advanced tools and our own proprietary methodology to scrutinize every aspect of your setup. We don't just identify problems; we uncover the root causes and provide practical, actionable recommendations for improvement. Our deliverable is not just a report; it's a strategic roadmap that prioritizes the recommendations based on their potential impact and the level of effort required to implement them. As a leading HubSpot consultancy, we are committed to helping our clients unlock the full potential of the HubSpot platform.
Conclusion and Next Steps
In today's competitive business environment, a healthy, high-performing CRM is not a nice-to-have; it's a must-have. A regular HubSpot health check is the most effective way to ensure that your CRM is a powerful asset that drives growth, rather than a cluttered, inefficient system that holds you back.
By systematically auditing your portal, you can identify and fix issues, optimize your processes, and ensure that your HubSpot investment is delivering the maximum possible return. Whether you choose to conduct a DIY audit or engage a team of experts, the key is to be proactive and to make the health of your HubSpot portal a strategic priority. If you are ready to unlock the full potential of your HubSpot portal, we invite you to learn more about our HubSpot health check services. At Pixcell.io, we have the expertise and the experience to help you turn your CRM into a powerful engine for growth.
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation and learn how we can help you build a healthier, more effective HubSpot portal.
