Common Core Marketing Blog

5 Signs Your HubSpot Data Needs a Clean-Up (and How to Start)

Written by Common Core Marketing | Jul 15, 2025 10:04:48 PM

Your HubSpot portal might be working—but is it working for you?

We’ve audited dozens of HubSpot portals, and whether the business is in SaaS, manufacturing, or real estate, one theme keeps popping up: messy data.

It’s not just annoying. It’s expensive. Because when your data is wrong, your workflows fail, your reports mislead, and your sales and marketing teams get out of sync.

Here are 5 signs it might be time to clean things up—and what you can do about it.

1. Your Lifecycle Stages Don’t Make Sense Anymore

Your CRM is only as good as your funnel visibility. If contacts are all sitting in “Lead,” never progressing—or worse, jumping straight to “Customer” with no history—you’ve got a problem.

What to do:
Audit your lifecycle stage logic and make sure you’ve got automation to keep things moving forward.

2. You Have Dozens of Unused or Confusing Properties

We’ve seen portals with 300+ properties… and no one knows what half of them are for. Redundant, outdated, or unclear fields confuse your team and mess with segmentation and reporting.

What to do:
Identify high-usage properties vs. clutter. Archive what you don’t need. Standardize naming conventions and field types.

3. Lists and Workflows Keep Breaking or Timing Out

If your team is constantly troubleshooting broken filters, misfiring nurture emails, or mysterious internal alerts, it’s probably a symptom of deeper data issues.

What to do:
Audit list logic and workflow triggers. Make sure you’re using clean segmentation and data-driven enrollment criteria.

4. You Don’t Trust Your Reports Anymore

Are you manually checking pipeline totals because you don’t trust the CRM numbers? Are your dashboards full of “n/a” or blank fields?

What to do:
Clean up deal stage progression logic. Make key fields required for reporting. Build views that reflect your real-world sales process.

5. Your Sales and Marketing Teams Aren’t on the Same Page

Misaligned handoffs, duplicated outreach, and “I didn’t know that lead already came through”—these are all symptoms of a dirty CRM.

What to do:
Use workflows to support internal alerts, contact ownership, and lifecycle changes. But first, make sure your data is solid enough to power them.

🧰 Ready to Start?

We’re giving away our internal Data Hygiene Audit Checklist—the exact one we use when cleaning up client portals.

It covers what to look for, where to start, and how to prioritize fixes.

👉 Get the checklist here

If you want help cleaning things up, we also offer free portal audits—no pressure, no strings. Just clarity.