When I take on a new RevOps engagement where HubSpot is the CRM, the first thing I do is an audit. Not because I want to find problems — because I need to understand what's actually happening in the system before I can make anything better. Most CRM problems look like data problems on the surface. Underneath, they're almost always process problems that the CRM is faithfully recording.
This playbook covers exactly how I run a HubSpot CRM audit: what I look at, in what order, and what I'm trying to learn from each area.
Why Audits Matter Before Any Other Work
Every RevOps engagement I've seen that skipped the audit phase wasted time. Someone rebuilds the pipeline stages without understanding why the old ones were set up that way. Someone automates a workflow on top of dirty data. Someone builds a dashboard that looks clean but reports on fields nobody actually fills in.
An audit is how you find out what's real. It takes two to three days of focused work. The output — a clear picture of where your system matches your process and where it doesn't — is worth every hour.
Phase 1: Pipeline and Stage Audit
Start with the pipeline. Open your deal pipeline view and look at the following:
- How many pipeline stages do you have? More than seven is usually a sign of stage inflation or committee design.
- What are the stage names? Do they describe what has happened or what you hope will happen?
- What percentage of your pipeline is in the first two stages? If it's over 60%, you have a qualification problem.
- What deals have been in their current stage for more than 45 days? Pull that list and go through it. Many of those deals are dead and nobody has closed them as lost.
Document what you find. Don't fix anything yet.
Phase 2: Contact and Company Data Quality
Go to your Contacts view and run these checks:
- What percentage of contacts have a company name? If it's under 80%, your company association is broken.
- What percentage of contacts have a lifecycle stage set? Blank lifecycle stages mean you can't run any meaningful funnel reporting.
- How many contacts are marked as Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) vs. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)? Is that ratio realistic given your actual marketing and sales volumes?
- How many contacts have no activity in the last 90 days and no deal associated? That's your dead weight — contacts that are taking up space and skewing engagement metrics.
Run the same checks on Companies. Look for duplicates (HubSpot has a built-in duplicate management tool — use it), missing industry or company size data, and companies with no associated contacts.
Phase 3: Deal Properties and Required Fields
Go to Settings → Properties → Deals and look at all the properties you have defined. Ask for each one: Is this being used? When was it last populated? Is it driving any report or decision?
Most HubSpot instances I audit have 40–80 deal properties with fewer than 10 that are consistently populated. The rest are either legacy fields from old workflows, aspirational fields someone added "just in case," or duplicates of data that lives somewhere else.
Properties that aren't being used create noise for reps and make reporting harder. Flag everything that has under 20% fill rate and isn't required by a workflow or report. You'll archive most of them.
Phase 4: Workflow and Automation Review
Open your Workflows section and filter to active workflows. For each one, document:
- What triggers this workflow?
- What does it do?
- When was it last modified?
- How many records has it processed in the last 30 days?
Look for workflows that haven't processed any records recently — they're either broken or obsolete. Look for workflows that fire on the same trigger as other workflows — you probably have overlap or conflict. And look for any workflow that modifies a lifecycle stage, because those are the most dangerous automations to have running incorrectly.
Phase 5: Reporting and Dashboard Audit
Go to your reports library and look at what's there. How many reports exist? When were they last viewed? Who created them?
Most HubSpot instances have a reporting graveyard — dozens of reports that were created for a specific meeting or question and never used again. The problem is clutter: when everything is reported on, nothing is.
Identify the five to seven reports that leadership actually looks at. Those are the ones worth investing in. Everything else can be archived or deleted.
Phase 6: Integration Health
Check what's connected to HubSpot. Look at your Connected Apps settings and document every integration. For each one: Is it actively syncing? Is the data it pushes into HubSpot clean and trusted? Is the data it pulls from HubSpot reliable?
Common integration problems: Salesforce sync that's out of date, Zoom or calendar integrations that stopped logging meetings, marketing tool integrations that are sending lead source data inconsistently, or enrichment tools that are overwriting good data with bad.
What to Do With Your Findings
Once you've completed the six phases, you should have a clear picture of where your HubSpot instance matches your revenue process and where it doesn't. Organize your findings into three categories: critical (things that are actively breaking reporting or causing data loss), important (things that are creating friction or noise but not catastrophic), and nice-to-have (cleanup and optimization).
Fix critical issues first. Then work through important issues in order of impact. Nice-to-have items are backlog — address them when you have capacity.
If you're building on HubSpot from scratch rather than auditing an existing instance, see the HubSpot RevOps setup guide.
Want an outside eye on your HubSpot instance?
I run structured CRM audits for mid-market and growth-stage teams — and deliver a clear action plan, not just a list of problems.
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