You promised better pipeline, a cleaner CRM, and fewer late-night “where did that lead go?” panic emails next year. Good. This guide will get you there without buzzwords, or vague platitudes. It’s a practical, step-by-step plan you can start today (yes, today) so your Q1 doesn’t smell like 2024’s data dumpster fire.
This isn’t a checklist you print and forget. It’s a playbook: Triage, triage again, fix the real problems first, then tidy up. Expect decisions, compromises, and a little corporate bravery.
Someone will need to own it. Make that person you or make it someone you can glare at until it gets done.
First things first... who needs to be in the room
Before you touch anything: Gather three roles (one person can play multiple roles, but don’t make a single martyr do everything):
An Operations lead (HubSpot admin or Marketing Ops),
S data owner (Sales ops or a senior rep who cares about lists and deals),
A stakeholder (Sales leader or CMO who will sign off on rules and deletions).
If your org can spare a business analyst or developer for an afternoon, bring them. If not, at least brief the person who handles integrations... those are the things that’ll embarrass you later.
Triage: Find the things that actually hurt
Not all mess is equal. Start by identifying what’s actively costing you time or money. Focus on four pain zones: Duplicate records, stale contacts/companies, broken automations, and bad reporting.
Run these quick checks:
How many contacts haven’t been touched in 18 months? (That’s candidate stale.)
How many automations have run in the past 90 days vs how many workflows exist? (Alert: Unused workflows are future liabilities.)
Which lists have more than 30% exclusions or errors? (Lists that lie are worse than no lists.)
Are there integrations writing bad or duplicate data (Forms, events, Salesforce, ad platforms)?
The goal is to find the high-impact fixes first. Don’t get lost prettifying contact property labels while the lead-to-deal conversion is leaking like a sieve.
Step 1. Duplicate cleanup (but don’t be a trigger-happy scrubber)
Duplicates are the low-hanging fruit. HubSpot has built-in de-duplication for contacts by email, and companies by domain, but it misses clever duplicates (e.g., same person with work and personal emails, or +aliases).
Start with a conservative merge policy:
Identify duplicates by email and company domain,
Flag fuzzy duplicates (name + phone, email variations) for human review,
Merge confirmed duplicates, preserving the most complete record and timeline.
Important: Export a full backup of records you’re about to merge. Yes, export. If someone yells later (“where’s my notes?”), you can restore data or explain what changed. Also document your merging rules... future you will thank past you.
Step 2. Archive the dead (stale contacts & companies)
“Stale” is different by business, but a practical threshold is 12–18 months of no opens, clicks, site visits, form submissions, deals, or calls. Don’t delete on day one though... archive.
Create an “archived - inactive 18m” lifecycle stage or property and:
Move contacts to a low-cost marketing list (or suppress them from campaigns),
Set a re-engagement campaign that runs for 45 days with two honest offers,
If no response, move them to a final archive (or mark them for deletion after 90 days).
This keeps your database lean, reduces send costs, and improves deliverability, and you can still re-activate a lead if they come back.
Step 3. Stop the bad inputs at the source
Broken forms, weird API pushes, and over-eager Zapier paths make a mess faster than people clean it. Audit every inbound source:
Public forms,
Landing pages,
Chatbots,
Integrations (Salesforce, e-commerce, ad platforms),
Manual CSV imports in the last 12 months.
For each source, ask: What fields are we writing? Are we mapping them consistently? Who owns that source? Fix the ones creating garbage: normalise property mappings, add validation on forms, and lock down who can import.
If you have external teams hitting HubSpot (agencies, contractors), revoke access and set up a controlled import process. No more “we’ll just upload a CSV.”
Step 4. Workflow triage: Keep the useful, kill the rest
Workflows that don’t run aren’t “assets.” They’re technical debt. Filter workflows by “last run” and owner. Then:
Archive workflows that haven’t run in 90 days and have no business purpose,
Fix workflows throwing errors (those red logs scream for attention),
Consolidate overlapping workflows (multiple flows doing the same thing = chaos),
Label workflows clearly: Purpose, owner, last modified date.
Add a naming convention: [team] - [purpose] - [owner initials] - [YYYYMMDD]. It’s boring, but future you will not have to guess who killed the lead.
Step 5. Property tidy: Less is more
HubSpot instances accumulate properties like trophies from short, painful projects. Ask: Is this property used in lists, workflows, filters, or reports? If not, it’s probably a candidate for deletion or consolidation.
Process:
Export a list of custom properties and where they’re used,
Mark properties as “in use,” “duplicate,” or “orphaned”,
Merge duplicates and delete orphaned properties after a 30-day warning period.
Rename properties only if you can update all dependencies. Keep an audit sheet: Property name, apiName, purpose, owner, and last used.
Step 6. Standardise lifecycle stages and lead scoring
If Sales and Marketing disagree about what a lead is, nothing works. Agree on definitions for lifecycle stages (lead, mql, sql, opportunity, customer) and who moves the stages. Make them simple and enforceable.
For lead scoring: Keep it meaningful. Remove noisy signals (e.g., pageviews with low intent), prioritise fit and intent, and map scores to clear actions. Test scoring thresholds with a 30-day run and adjust.
Document everything and publish the definitions to Sales. Then make sure workflows align to these definitions, otherwise you’ll have people operating on different planets.
Step 7. Fix reporting so you can stop guessing
If your dashboards are full of “last 90 days” widgets that mean nothing, rebuild them. Identify five core metrics your execs actually use (e.g., MQL to SQL conversion, average sales cycle, pipeline by stage, lead source ROI, email deliverability). Build one clean dashboard that tells the truth.
When rebuilding reports:
Use consistent date ranges,
Standardise UTM tracking and source attribution,
Avoid duplicated metrics across dashboards (confusing).
If reports disagree, trace them back to source definitions, often the disagreement is a definition problem, not a math problem.
Step 8. Lock down access & reduce human error
Too many admins = too many ways to break things. Audit user permissions. Make a strict admin group and a broader editor group. Enforce:
Two-person approval for automation that can change lifecycle stage or delete data,
Limited API keys with named owners and expiration dates,
Logging and a change request process for major modifications.
Yes, it adds friction. You want friction for things that can break revenue.
Step 9. Communication and change management
Cleaning HubSpot is a political act. Tell people what you’re doing before you do it. Run a short internal campaign:
A kickoff email that explains why (no drama, just facts),
A 30-day “watch period” where changes are flagged but reversible,
Training docs and a recording for any new flows or dashboards.
Include a short FAQ: What will be deleted, who to contact if a record disappears, and where the backup lives. The goal is fewer surprise Slack freakouts.
(If you want, use this subject line: “FYI: HubSpot clean-up. What’s changing and why.” Short, direct, no panic.)
Step 10. Create a maintenance rhythm
Once clean, keep it clean. Schedule:
Monthly duplicate and error reports,
Quarterly property reviews,
Bi-weekly workflow review for any new builds,
An annual archive purge.
Make these tasks part of someone’s role and include them in your ops calendar. If it’s not scheduled, it won’t happen.
Final safety net. Backup & rollback
Before you delete or merge anything irreversible: Export. Full exports of contacts, companies, deals, and properties should be saved with a timestamp and stored in a shared drive. If an automated process goes sideways, you need a rollback plan and a contact who can execute it.
Also keep a change log: What was changed, why, who approved it, and links to the export. This is not busywork, it’s insurance.
Sample 30-/60-/90 day plan (high level)
30 days: Triage, duplicate merges, archive clearly stale records, stop bad inputs, start stakeholder comms.
60 days: Workflow consolidation, property cleanup, reporting rebuild, lock down access.
90 days: Finalise deletions/archives, train teams, schedule maintenance cadence.
Adjust timing to your org size; small teams move faster, big teams need more approvals. The point is momentum: Fix the biggest leaks first.
Wrap-up: What success looks like
Clean data, fewer manual fixes, reports you can trust, faster handoffs to sales, and a predictable ops rhythm. You’ll lose some vanity properties and bad automations, but you’ll get a CRM that earns its keep.
If there’s one last thing: Stop treating HubSpot like a dumping ground. Make it a system of record, not a personal playground. When people know there’s ownership, standards, and consequences, behaviour changes.
And Q1 will thank you for it.
