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Stop me if this sounds familiar.
You’re paying thousands for HubSpot each year, yet your reports don’t quite line up, workflows are tangled, and nobody seems entirely sure what’s working.
Marketing blames Sales. Sales blames Marketing. You end up back in a situation where you’re stuck in the same dynamics you were in before getting HubSpot.
And you quietly wonder whether the platform itself is the problem… or if your setups just drifted off course.
HubSpot portals, for the most part, rarely break regardless of the size of the company using them or how many things a team needs them to do. It just gets messy.
Over time, as teams grow and campaigns pile up, small inefficiencies compound: data gets dirty, workflows overlap, and dashboards lose meaning.
But that’s where a HubSpot Health Check comes in.
After auditing hundreds of portals for mid-to-large B2B teams, we’ve seen the same pattern:
Businesses using only a fraction of HubSpot’s potential while chasing fixes that never address the root cause.
In this article, you’ll learn the 10 key areas to review in a HubSpot Health Check (from messy reporting to broken alignment) and how to get your portal back to working for you instead of against you.
Why Should You Run a HubSpot Health Check?
Most teams don’t decide to run a HubSpot health check… they stumble into the need for one.
It starts with small frustrations: someone can’t find the right report, a workflow misfires, or the data in Sales’ dashboard doesn’t match what Marketing swears is true. It’s a messy predicament coupled with a thousand automations.
Over time, those tiny cracks turn into lost opportunities and finger-pointing. And because HubSpot still mostly works, no one stops long enough to ask, “Is this the best it could be?”
Don’t worry, a health check isn’t a teardown: it’s a way to get back to clean, confident performance before the chaos costs you more. And here are a few things to consider before running one ASAP:
Signs Your HubSpot Portal Is Working Against You
If any of these sound familiar, it’s time to pause and take a look under the hood:
| Red Flag | What’s Happening | Why It’s a Problem | Typical Symptom |
| 1. Dashboards confuse more than they clarify | Data requires explanation every time it’sviewed. | Reports aren’t telling a story, they’recreating friction and wasting time. | A simple dashboard like “Leads by Source” needs a 10-minute explanation. |
| 2. No shared definition of success across teams | Sales and marketing use different terms and metrics. | Misalignment causes reporting gaps and handover issues. | A contact is a “lead” in Sales and an “SQL” in Marketing. |
| 3. Spreadsheets are creeping back in | Team exports data “just to be safe” and begins working in Excel. | Trust in HubSpot’s accuracy slips and adoption drops. | Data being managed outside HubSpot even after the investment. |
| 4. Workflows no one fully understands | Too many people have built or edited automations over time. | Overlapping workflows create conflicts and unpredictable behaviour. | A lead ends up in multiple nurture sequences or properties change without logic. |
| 5. No clear picture of what drives revenue | Deals close, but sourceattribution is unclear. | Decisions become guesswork — you can’t double down on what’s working. | Revenue appears in HubSpot, but no one knows which campaign or channel caused it. |
On the surface, these issues seem manageable. After all, they’re just a few inefficiencies, right?
But when you multiply those across every campaign, every contact, and every month, the waste compounds. And it can take shape in the form of:
- Lost time: Rebuilding reports, troubleshooting workflows, and clarifying definitions means less time selling and creating campaigns.
- Bad decisions: Inaccurate data leads to wrong calls on budget and strategy, doubling down on what’s not working and cutting what is.
- Missed revenue: When leads slip through cracks in automation or misaligned handovers, they turn into wasted spend and lost potential lifetime customers.
Think of it like a leaky bucket: you can keep pouring in more leads and campaigns, but you’ll never fill it if the system itself is leaking.
A HubSpot health check can give you a reset without the rebuild. It helps you see what’s working, what’s redundant, and where alignment breaks down, so you can fix problems before they spread.
Here’s what you could expect after running a thorough health check and applying fixes after:
- When someone asks you a question about your portal, you’ll have the answer: You finally know what’s happening in your portal and why. Every dashboard has a purpose. Every workflow makes sense.
- You’ll no longer be stressed working with hundreds of complex automations: The goal isn’t to have more automations; it’s to make the right automations work flawlessly and with minimal human touch.
- You’ll finally have marketing, sales and leadership alignment: Sales and Marketing share one view of the truth. Same lifecycle stages, same definitions, same story.
- You’ll become the master of the system, and you’ll look smarter for it: You stop reacting to fires and start proactively improving. Every campaign, every sales sequence, every contact record builds on a clean foundation. You’ll be able to report fluidly and answer every question that comes your way.
A HubSpot health check is a lot like tuning a high-performance car. You don’t wait for the engine to fail before checking it; you service it regularly so it keeps running smoothly.
And your HubSpot portal deserves the same care.
The 10 HubSpot Health Check Points
Here’s how to check the 10 most common areas where things go wrong (and what to do about them):
Point #1: Messy Reports
When your team struggles with understanding your dashboards, you’re missing out on a core component of HubSpot’s value in your workflow. Reporting should tell a story at a glance, not require a meeting to interpret.
This usually happens because many portals have dozens of reports tracking vanity metrics (page views, email opens, contact growth), but none showing whether those actions are leading to revenue.
If your marketing team is looking at form submissions while your sales team tracks meetings booked, you’re not seeing the same reality. You need a single chain of truth that links top-of-funnel to closed deals.
Here’s how to fix messy reports:
- List out all existing dashboards and reports in HubSpot.
- Group them by audience (Sales, Marketing, Leadership).
- Delete or archive any that aren’t tied to a key business objective.
- Rebuild three core dashboards: one per team.
- Use consistent KPIs and naming conventions so everyone speaks the same data language.
By following the steps above, you can steer your portal back in the right direction by creating clear, role-based dashboards.
Afterwards, marketing can see lead sources and campaign ROI. Sales could have a much easier time sorting deals by stage and close rates. Leadership might have an easier time seeing pipeline health and forecast accuracy.
As a rule of thumb, keep it simple enough to check over coffee, not over spreadsheets.
And when you configure them the right way, your reports become conversation starters, ensuring that your team makes faster, more confident decisions.
Why Does Your HubSpot Portal Get Messy Over Time?
Point #2: Overly Complex Workflows
HubSpot workflows should make you and your team’s lives easier, not become the digital equivalent of tangled Christmas lights.
As teams grow, it’s common to keep adding new workflows instead of refining the old ones. Before long, one lead form submission triggers 10 automations: assigning owners, sending emails, updating fields, enrolling in sequences… until something breaks.
Here’s how to fix overly complex HubSpot workflows:
- Export or list every workflow in your portal.
- Identify duplicates, inactive workflows, and those without clear naming.
- Document what each workflow does and where it’s triggered from.
- Consolidate overlapping ones and delete outdated or unused versions.
- Test remaining workflows one by one before re-enabling them.
With each step in the fix, you’ll get to audit every workflow, merge duplicates, delete abandoned ones, and build better habits like giving each of them a clear naming convention like “MKTG – Lead Nurture – v2.”
Altogether, these fixes will allow you to see the most ROI out of your HubSpot automations and finally trust them enough to help with decision-making and strategy again.
And, in the long run, your workflows can run lean and reliable, and your team might stop being scared to touch them.
Point #3: Poor Data Hygiene
Bad data hides in plain sight: duplicate contacts, outdated job titles, missing fields, half-filled company records. Every one of those errors chips away at reporting accuracy and sales efficiency.
If your team starts saying things like “don’t trust the numbers in HubSpot,” that’s your warning sign.
Here’s how to fix poor data hygiene:
- Export your contact and company data. Run a duplicate check using HubSpot tools or third-party apps like Insycle.
- Standardise field names, dropdown options, and property types.
- Validate email addresses and remove bounced or inactive ones.
- Fill missing key properties (industry, lifecycle stage, source).
- Set up recurring “data cleanup” workflows or reminders.
Once you solve your data hygiene, your data can become trustworthy again… and decisions become faster and sharper because everyone’s reading from one clean source.
How To Do a HubSpot Portal Audit
Point #4: Inconsistent Lifecycle Stages
If Marketing says a lead is “qualified” but Sales disagrees, you’ve got a trust problem, not a data problem. Inconsistent lifecycle stages are like using different maps for the same road trip.
Here’s how to fix inconsistencies with your lifecycle stages:
- Bring Marketing and Sales together to define each lifecycle stage clearly.
- Write these definitions down and circulate them internally.
- Update your forms, workflows, and lead scoring to align with the definitions.
- Build automation rules to move leads between stages automatically.
- Review these definitions quarterly as your buyer journey evolves.
With the fixes above, you’ll get your marketing and sales teams to agree on definitions for terms like Lead, MQL, SQL, Opportunity, and Customer. Then, this becomes your opportunity to build automation that supports those definitions, not overrides them.
After fixing inconsistencies with your HubSpot lifecycle stages, you might be able to have both your sales and marketing teams pull in the same direction. And this way, you can finally measure pipeline health with confidence.
The Difference Between Lifecycle Stage, Lead Status and Deal Stages in HubSpot
Point #5: Weak Lead Scoring
If everyone in your CRM has a similar score, or nobody looks at the score at all, it’s not helping.
Ideally, lead scoring should act like a spotlight, showing who’s ready for sales attention and who needs nurturing.
Here’s how to fix weak lead scoring:
- Review your existing lead scoring criteria and identify irrelevant or unused fields.
- Add weighting to both behavioural (e.g. page visits, downloads) and demographic data (e.g. role, company size).
- Include negative scoring for disqualifying actions (e.g. unsubscribes).
- Test and refine the model based on closed-won data.
- Train your sales team to use scores in prioritising outreach.
After you start reviewing your scoring model, combining demographic factors with behavioural ones, and updating it quarterly, you’ll start seeing a sizeable difference in how your team can convert leads.
Once you solve the problem of weak lead scoring, your sales team could have more room and time to focus on leads that actually convert instead of getting misled by ones that just look active.
Point #6: Sales and Marketing Misalignment
When these two teams drift apart, your HubSpot setup reflects it.
Marketing optimises for leads; sales optimises for revenue; the system sits awkwardly in the middle.
Here’s how to align your sales and marketing teams through HubSpot:
- Run a joint “alignment audit” to pinpoint friction points; e.g., lead handoff, definition of MQLs.
- Create shared dashboards visible to both teams.
- Establish a Service Level Agreement (SLA): clear expectations for lead follow-up and feedback.
- Schedule monthly alignment meetings to review lead quality and closed-loop reporting.
- Celebrate wins where alignment led directly to revenue results.
When done right, resolving this health check point can help you prevent campaigns from falling flat, smoothen handovers, and enable both your teams to start seeing the same success metrics.
How to Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams Using HubSpot
Point #7: Faulty Integrations
Integrations are the veins of HubSpot. If they clog, data can stop flowing… which often leads to insights drying up.
Here’s how to fix faulty HubSpot integrations:
- List every integration currently connected to HubSpot.
- Check sync frequency, permissions, and data mapping for each.
- Test bidirectional sync (HubSpot ↔ external system).
- Remove unused or duplicate integrations.
- Set up monthly automated sync error reports.
After applying the fixes above, it’s best to keep the momentum going by reviewing your connected apps quarterly. Reconnect or replace the ones causing data gaps.
By taking action with this HubSpot health check point, your tools finally talk to each other and strengthen your workflow the way they’re meant to. No more ghost contacts or missing deal data.
Point #8: Unfocused Dashboards
If your dashboard has 30 widgets, it’s not a dashboard… it’s a data dump. Too many metrics lead to decision fatigue and missed insights.
Here’s how to bring back a sense of focus to your HubSpot dashboards:
- Review all existing dashboards.
- For each, identify its primary audience and purpose.
- Remove vanity metrics (views, clicks) that don’t impact revenue.
- Prioritise five to seven core metrics per dashboard.
- Add simple visual cues (trend arrows, colour codes) to highlight action points.
At the end of the day, it helps to tie every metric to a specific business goal. If it doesn’t serve a goal, delete it.
When this HubSpot health check point is handled right, you can expect two things: leadership will get clarity at a glance, and your team will stop drowning in data it doesn’t need.
How to Get More ROI from HubSpot (without spending more)
Point #9: Unclear Content Attribution
Marketing teams often struggle to prove what’s actually driving revenue. Without proper attribution, campaigns look like random acts of content rather than measured investments.
Here’s how to fix your portal’s content attribution issue:
- Review all campaigns for consistent naming and UTM tracking.
- Ensure every landing page, email, and ad is tagged correctly.
- Use HubSpot’s campaign tool to group related assets together.
- Turn on multi-touch attribution reports in HubSpot.
- Train your team to review attribution data monthly and refine campaigns accordingly.
When done right, applying the fixes above can mean that your marketing finally has proof: clear visibility into which efforts drive real pipeline and which can be trimmed.
Point #10: Underutilised Features
Many teams use HubSpot as a glorified contact list by sending emails, tracking deals, and stopping there. But the platform’s real value lies in higher-level features like automation, reporting, and AI-driven insights.
Here’s how to get your team back on track with maximising HubSpot’s features:
- Identify underused features in your current plan (e.g. sequences, snippets, custom reports).
- Survey your team to find gaps in confidence or training.
- Run short, focused training sessions — one feature per week.
- Create an internal “HubSpot playbook” with examples and workflows.
- Review feature adoption quarterly and refresh training as needed.
HubSpot starts working for you instead of against you when your team learns how to use the features they could benefit from the most. This way, you’ll be freeing your team from admin drudgery and giving you more time to sell, analyse, and grow.
5 Best HubSpot Features
A healthy HubSpot portal doesn’t need to be perfect: it just needs to be intentional.
When you know what each part does, why it matters, and how it connects, you stop fighting the system and start letting it work for you. And by assessing your portal using the ten health check points above, you’ll be able to better equip it for growth and scalability.
How to Approach Your Own HubSpot Health Check
A HubSpot health check doesn’t need to feel like open-heart surgery.
It’s more like a regular service check for your business engine: tightening what’s loose, cleaning what’s clogged, and making sure each part is working in sync with the others.
Here’s how to approach it so it’s useful, not overwhelming.
1. Start Small, Not Deep
Most people try to audit everything at once, and that’s where they burn out. Instead, start where the pain is most obvious (like reports or workflows).
For instance, if your sales dashboard never seems to match your marketing dashboard, start there. Ask:
- What data feeds each one?
- Where might it be pulling inconsistently?
- Are both teams even measuring the same definitions of “lead” or “deal”?
Fixing that one gap often exposes others naturally.
2. Map Before You Mend
Before touching a single workflow, map out what should happen versus what is happening.
This step saves hours of backtracking later.
Let’s say a new lead downloads an eBook. Ideally, they should enter a nurturing sequence, get scored, and (if engaged) move to the sales team. In reality, that lead might also be entering two separate workflows, receiving double emails, and confusing your data.
Drawing it out on paper or a whiteboard forces visibility. It’s the difference between fixing symptoms and fixing causes.
3. Involve Both Sales And Marketing
A HubSpot audit done in isolation is half an audit. Sales and marketing are two ends of the same funnel… yet most of the system issues happen in the space between them.
For example, marketing may have a workflow that passes MQLs to sales once a lead hits a score of 50. But sales might ignore those leads because they think 50 is too low.
Now you’ve got automation doing its job perfectly, but serving a broken agreement.
Bringing both sides to the table exposes these mismatches early. It also creates shared accountability for the fixes, instead of finger-pointing later.
4. Measure What Matters
A clean portal is useless if you’re tracking the wrong numbers.
Vanity metrics (like “emails sent” or “form fills”) make you feel busy but don’t prove value.
The question to ask is: Does this number tell me whether we’re growing?
If not, it’s decoration.
For example:
- Instead of “website visits,” track “conversion rate to MQL.”
- Instead of “email opens,” track “influenced deals created.”
- Instead of “workflow completions,” track “leads moving to SQL.”
5. Document As You Go
Most HubSpot chaos comes from good intentions with no documentation.
Someone builds a clever workflow, leaves the company, and suddenly no one knows what it does… but everyone’s scared to delete it.
Treat your audit like a living manual. As you clean or change something, note:
- What was changed.
- Why it was changed.
- Who approved it.
- What dependencies it touches.
You can keep this in HubSpot’s notes, a shared spreadsheet, or a Notion doc. At the end of the day, the format doesn’t matter: the habit does.
6. Know When To Bring In Help
Some problems are too close to home.
If your workflows are stacked 10 layers deep or you’re seeing unexplained numbers in reports, an outside view can save days of frustration.
Think of it like calling a mechanic. You could technically figure it out yourself… but someone who’s done hundreds of HubSpot audits will spot the loose bolt immediately.
A specialist can also benchmark your setup against best practices: what “good” looks like for data structure, reporting cadence, or lifecycle automation in your specific industry.
What’s in a HubSpot Optimisations Package?
Running your own HubSpot audit when your portal doesn’t work as well as it should needs to start with the goal of making it work again.
Once you can trust what you see in your dashboards and know exactly how leads move through your system, you stop managing HubSpot and start leading with it.
Get Started With a HubSpot Audit
There’s never a perfect time to fix your HubSpot portal. But, there’s always another campaign, another quarter, another excuse to leave it be.
Here’s the problem: every day you wait, the clutter compounds.
Data gets a little dirtier, workflows tangle a little tighter, and trust in your reports erodes a little more.
The good news? You don’t need a full rebuild or a six-month project plan. You just need to start looking and take that first health check and see what’s really under the hood. Most fixes take hours, not weeks.
And the payoff (clean data, clear reporting, alignment between Sales and Marketing) shows up fast.
If you’re unsure where to begin, start small: run through the 10 health check points in this guide and see what feels most broken.
Don’t let “later” be the reason you keep running blind. HubSpot can be the sharpest tool in your stack; it just needs a clean tune-up to work like one.
If you want a free HubSpot Audit, get in touch with us here.
