TL;DR: A messy HubSpot portal is a growth tax. To fix it, you need to systematically audit your assets, clean up your data (duplicates, unengaged contacts), enforce clear naming conventions, and organize your properties and workflows. This process creates a transparent, efficient portal that builds trust and drives growth.
Clean data is the foundation of your portal. Without it, you cannot create reliable reports, effectively segment your audience, or trust your insights, making it impossible to make informed business decisions.
A one-time cleanup isn't enough. Establish a regular maintenance plan with scheduled quarterly audits and monthly duplicate checks. This ensures your portal remains organized and efficient for the long term.
Raise your (virtual) hand if this sounds familiar:
You and your team were thrilled to start with HubSpot. The promise of a unified marketing, sales, and service platform was exciting. Woohoo! For a while, it worked. Leads were flowing, deals were closing, and everything felt…relatively organized.
But then, little by little, the clutter started to creep in.
An old campaign's workflow was left running. A few team members started creating their own custom properties. The forms dashboard became a graveyard of outdated assets. And suddenly, your once-pristine portal looks less like a powerful business tool and more like that junk drawer in your kitchen.
You know it's a problem. You’ve probably felt the frustration firsthand when you couldn't find the right list for an email send or when a new hire spent two hours trying to understand a confusing lead status property. But the idea of cleaning it all up feels overwhelming. You're afraid you might break something important. You're worried about the time it will take. And honestly, you're not even sure where to start.
I get it. But here’s the truth I want you to embrace:
A messy HubSpot portal is a growth tax. It's not just an inconvenience; it's actively costing you money, time, and opportunities. It’s a silent killer of productivity and clean reporting. It prevents you from trusting your data and, ultimately, from making good business decisions.
But what if I told you there’s a way to tackle the mess without blowing everything up?
This isn't about starting from scratch. It's about a systematic, step-by-step process to bring order back to your portal so it can become the growth engine it was always meant to be. This is your guide to cleaning up the chaos and structuring your HubSpot portal for long-term success.
Before we get to the solution, let's be transparent about the core issues. A messy portal is a problem because it creates a domino effect of negative consequences.
Reporting You Can't Trust: Your CEO asks you for a report on lead-to-customer conversion rates, but you can’t provide a confident number. Why? Because the lifecycle stages are a mess, a dozen duplicates exist for a key account, and your data is incomplete. If you can’t trust your data, you can’t make strategic decisions.
Wasted Time and Money: How much time does your team spend searching for assets, correcting bad data, or fixing broken automation? The time you're paying them to "fix" the system could be spent on things that actually drive revenue.
Poor Team Adoption: Your salespeople have stopped logging calls in HubSpot because the contact record is cluttered with irrelevant properties. Your marketing team is creating new, redundant assets because they can't find the ones that already exist. This leads to team silos and a frustrating user experience that undermines the very reason you invested in HubSpot in the first place.
This is the fear and frustration at the heart of the problem. It’s the feeling of a tool that was supposed to make your life easier now making it harder. But don’t worry, we’re going to fix it.
Let's start with the foundation and work our way up, ensuring we don't just clean the surface but also set up a system to prevent the mess from happening again.
Before you go on a deleting spree, you need to understand the full scope of the mess. This is the single most important step. Without it, you risk deleting a crucial asset that is being used somewhere you didn't expect.
What to do:
Audit Your Assets: Look at all your forms, lists, workflows, and emails. Use HubSpot's built-in tools to see where they're being used. Don’t delete anything yet—just tag or make a note of the assets that seem old, unused, or redundant. Spreadsheets can be your friend here for tracking purposes.
Review Your Properties: Navigate to your properties and see how many you have. Are there duplicates like "Industry" and "Client Industry"? Are there a bunch of old properties that nobody uses anymore?
Check Your Data: Do a quick search for common duplicates. Filter your contacts by "Last Engaged" date. You’ll get a sobering look at how much of your database is unengaged.
The goal here isn't to fix everything at once; it's simply to see the full picture.
Dirty data is like a cracked foundation. No matter how many pretty things you put on top, the house will eventually crumble. Start by getting your contacts and companies in order.
What to do:
Merge Duplicates: This is low-hanging fruit. Use HubSpot's built-in duplicate management tool. Merge contacts with the same email address and companies with the same domain. It’s a quick win that will immediately improve your reporting and team’s sanity.
Tackle Unengaged Contacts: Create a list of contacts are unsubscribed from email, or who haven't opened an email or visited your site in over a year (and who aren't customers). You can either archive them or set them to non-marketing contacts to save money on your subscription.
Standardize Lifecycle Stages: Sit down with your sales and marketing teams and define exactly what each lifecycle stage means. Is a "Marketing Qualified Lead" someone who filled out a form, or someone who filled out a form and attended a webinar? Once you have a clear definition, use workflows to automatically move contacts between stages. This is a game-changer for accurate reporting.
This is probably one of the biggest reasons for the chaos, and it’s one of the easiest to fix. A clear naming convention makes it easy for anyone on your team to find what they need.
What to do:
Create a Rulebook: Decide on a simple, consistent system and share it with everyone. It should include the asset type, the campaign, and a brief description. I suggest first classifying by the object type, then giving a descriptive name of what the asset actually is used for.
Example Naming Conventions:
Workflows: Contact | Nurture - SEO Guide Download
Forms: Contact Us Page
Emails: Nurture - SEO Guide Email 1
Lists: Contact | SEO Guide Leads
It may seem tedious at first, but this simple change will have a massive impact on your team's efficiency.
Properties are the backbone of your data. When they’re messy, everything breaks.
What to do:
Delete Unused Properties: Remember that audit you did in Step 1? Now's the time to delete all the properties you tagged as unused. HubSpot even has a property usage report to help you identify them.
Group Properties Logically: Use property groups to organize your properties into logical buckets. Create a group for "Sales Information," "Marketing Data," "Customer Success," etc. This makes the contact record view clean and easy for your team to use.
Standardize Picklists: If your team has been entering "Westlake, OH," "Westlake," and "Westlake Ohio" for the same city, your data is a mess. Use dropdown select properties and make sure your team uses them.
Workflows are powerful, but they can be the biggest source of confusion.
What to do:
Turn Off Redundant Workflows: If you find two workflows doing the same thing, turn one off and make sure the other one is working as intended.
Delete Unused Reports / Dashboards: Remember that report your CEO told you to make 3 years ago and they never looked at it?... It's time to let go and get rid of it.
Use Folders and Campaigns: Organize your workflows (and all other assets) into folders. This is crucial as your portal grows. HubSpot's Campaigns tool is also an incredible way to group all related assets (emails, forms, landing pages, etc.) for a specific campaign, making reporting a breeze.
Test Everything: Before you turn a new workflow on, use a test contact to make sure it enrolls and works as expected. Don't risk sending a sales email to a brand new lead.
Cleaning up your HubSpot portal isn't just about deleting old stuff. It's about building a system that fosters transparency, honesty, and efficiency.
Imagine a world where a new team member can jump into your portal and understand your entire process in a single day. Imagine a world where your dashboards tell you the honest truth about your business, and you can make decisions with confidence.
That's the promise of a well-structured HubSpot portal. The journey to get there may take some effort, but the payoff—in time saved, money earned, and a team that finally trusts their tools—is worth every minute. Start with one step today, and let’s get that junk drawer organized for good!