How to Do HubSpot CRM Data Cleansing Under 24 Hours

It’s hard to find your things in a messy room.

Likewise, it’s hard to find the right data in a messy CRM.

But not just data finding, an untidy CRM also makes things difficult for you.

Your conversion rate suffers, productivity decreases, and you get inaccurate insights and irritated customers.

So to avoid it, you must clean up your CRM. And this post will tell you how you can clean up your HubSpot CRM in less than 24 hours.

Let’s get started.

HubSpot CRM Data Cleansing: What It Means?

HubSpot CRM data cleansing is a process of cleaning and decluttering your HubSpot CRM.

The objective of HubSpot CRM cleansing is to eliminate all the unnecessary data to optimize your CRM. This is done by deleting, merging, or editing redundant data in your CRM to ensure whatever it has is fresh, relevant, and accurate.

But as we hear about HubSpot CRM clean up, we think it is a time-taking process requiring a few business days to get done correctly.

But that’s not the case. If done right, you can finish HubSpot CRM clean up under 24 hours with ease.

And I’ve discussed the same in the next point.

How to Perform HubSpot CRM Data Cleansing Within 24 Hours

To clean up your HubSpot CRM, you have to act upon the things below. Let’s talk about them in detail with how much time they take.

1. Audit Your Database

Time required: 6 hours

The first step is auditing your HubSpot CRM data. This is like researching before writing an article. The deeper your research, the better your article.

Thus, before starting your HubSpot CRM data cleansing, you can conduct a CRM audit.

In this audit, you analyze all the assets you created in your HubSpot CRM like:

• Lists
• Chatflows
• Snippets
• User Engagement
• Email Campaigns
• Reports
• Integrations
• Forms
• Pipelines
• Workflows, etc.

After checking all these assets, you can create a spreadsheet or note down the actions you want to perform in your CRM.

2. Delete Sleeping Contacts

Time required: 30 minutes

Many contacts in your HubSpot CRM must not be engaging with your brand but occupying space in the database.

Such contacts are called sleeping contacts. And you have to eliminate them from your HubSpot CRM since they’d be of no use to your brand.

Here are the steps to do it:

• Navigate to Contacts > Contacts in your HubSpot account.
• Click on the All filters button there and select the Last Activity Date property.

• If you want to remove the contacts inactive for the last 6 months, select the date for 6 months or before.
• All the contacts that are inactive for the last 6 months will be displayed.
• Select and delete them from the CRM.

Along with the sleeping contacts, many users in your HubSpot CRM must have outdated contact info.

Reports say, 25 to 33% of email addresses become outdated each year. Moreover, 18% of the phone numbers change every year and 15% of the users change their email one or more times in a year.

Therefore, it’s crucial to delete or update such records as well. So identify these records and eliminate them from your HubSpot CRM.

3. Fix Duplicate Records

Time required: 1 hour

Duplicate records can mess up your HubSpot CRM badly. Thus, you have to remove or merge such duplicate records in your HubSpot CRM data cleansing.

To do this, you can navigate to Contacts > Contacts and click on the Action dropdown there. Then click on the Merge Duplicates button and you’ll see the list of all the duplicate contacts.

If you want to Merge both contacts, click on Review and then Merge. Else you can just click on Reject.

4. Delete Bounced or Unsubscribed Contacts

Time required: 30 minutes

Bounced or unsubscribed contacts are simply futile for your brand. Hence, there’s no point in keeping them on your HubSpot CRM.

So this is another point that should be in your HubSpot data cleansing checklist. Here are the steps for it:

• Go to Marketing > Email in your HubSpot CRM.
• In the left sidebar, you will see an Email Bounce Tools dropdown.

• Click on it and you’ll see 3 different options there:
  • Create a list of hard bounced contacts: A complete list of hard bounced contacts will be created in your HubSpot CRM.
  • Add hard bounced contacts to existing list: All the bounced records will be added to an existing list in your CRM.
  • Export unsubscribes and bounces: A list of unsubscribed and bounced contacts will be exported and emailed to you.
• Choose the option as per your requirements and then act on it accordingly.

Once you get a list of all such contacts, remove them from your HubSpot CRM.

5. Review and Fix Data Fields

Time required: 2 hours

Data fields are responsible for storing all the data of your HubSpot CRM records.

But not all the data fields contain relevant data. And in reality, most of the HubSpot fields remain vacant.

Thus, you need to find out and fix the data fields in your HubSpot CRM.

For this, you can navigate to Settings > Properties in your HubSpot CRM. You’ll see the list of all the HubSpot properties created in your HubSpot CRM.

Review all of them and remove, edit, or merge them as needed.

I also talked to Dan Moyle from Impulse Creative and here’s what he says on HubSpot CRM clean up.

When cleaning up your HubSpot CRM, I often focus on the fact that the Company Object centers on the brand domain (or website). If you have duplicate Companies, it’s likely because of a past import where the database did not include a column for the company website. This is critical for maintaining a cleaner database of Companies.

Dan Moyle, Accredited HubSpot Advisor

6. Standardize Your Data

Time required: 30 minutes

Data standardization helps you collect data in the right format so that you don’t optimize them after collecting it. Thus, you need to fix the format of data input.

Here’s the list of the datasets you can standardize:

• Names: Capitalize the first letters of the first and last names.
• Email address: Check if they are correct.
• Phone: Ensure they’re correct and are in the right format.
• Zip codes: Look if they really exist or not.
• Whitespaces: Trim the whitespaces or any unnecessary characters.

Fixing and standardizing the input will ensure that you don’t collect incorrect information. This will make the HubSpot data clean up easier for the next time.

7. Keep The Lifecycle Stages Updated

Time required: 1 hour

The lifecycle stages in your HubSpot CRM help you monitor the progress of a buyer’s journey.

Hence, it becomes crucial to update them regularly on different events. For example, if a blog subscriber signs up for a webinar you’re hosting, you’ve to make sure she’s moved to the Lead stage from the Subscriber.

For this, you can create a simple HubSpot workflow:

• Go to Automation > Workflows in your HubSpot CRM from the navigation menu.
• Click on Create Workflow button and select From Scratch.
• Select Contact-based and Blank workflow and click Next.
• Click on Set up triggers and select Contact Properties in the filter type.
• Then search and select the Lifecycle stage and add the trigger accordingly.

Complete the workflow based on your needs and test it if it’s working fine.

8. Review and Edit Your HubSpot Forms

Time required: 1 hour

Check your HubSpot CRM for unnecessary or unused forms. You can look for the forms that are not getting any submissions or are not used on any of your website pages. Once you find them, remove them.

Here are the steps for it:

• Go to Marketing > Forms in your HubSpot CRM.
• Look for the forms based on the Last Modified date, Submission rate, and Appeared on pages criteria.
• If there are some forms having low submission rates,are outdated, or appearing on no pages, edit or delete them.

After this crucial step in your HubSpot data cleansing process, you can move to the next step of deleting your lists.

9. Delete Unnecessary HubSpot Lists

Time required: 1 hour

Like forms, you also have to review your HubSpot lists. And if there are any lists in your HubSpot CRM, you can remove them.

• Go to your HubSpot account and navigate to Contacts > Lists.
• You’ll see the list of all the lists and check if they’re used somewhere, and have some records or not.
• If you find any of the unused or inactive lists, eliminate them.

10. Use HubSpot Integrations for Ease

Time required: 2 hours

Not just manually, you can do the HubSpot CRM data cleansing on autopilot with some tools.

For this, I’d recommend some tools like:

• Insycle: Helps you with data management like deduplicating, standardizing and more.
• Neverbounce: Good for list cleaning and email verification.
• Leadspace: Helps you sustain customer data accuracy and relevancy.
• HubSpot Operations Hub: Comes with automated clean up features.

If you collect large amounts of data, these tools become a must for you.

11. Repeat With A Schedule

HubSpot CRM data cleansing is not just a one-off task. It’s a recurring job you have to perform at set intervals.

According to reports, 70% of the CRM data deteriorates every year. This means, you have to audit and clean it annually as well.

So, I would recommend you to perform a HubSpot audit every 3 months and HubSpot data cleansing every 3-6 months.

Why Do You Need to Clean Up Your HubSpot CRM?

I’d not discuss the benefits of HubSpot CRM data cleansing. Instead, I’ll just share some of the risks and demerits you will face if you don’t clean it up.

• Fewer Deals Closing

You know you’ll be left with an outdated HubSpot CRM if you don’t clean it up regularly. And outdated information about your users will never help you convert them.

Hence, you have to perform HubSpot data cleansing at regular intervals to make sure you close more deals.

• Inaccurate Personalization

Inaccurate data leads to inaccurate personalization.

Statistically speaking, 74% of customers feel frustrated if a website’s content is not personalized.

So not cleaning up your HubSpot CRM will prevent you from personalizing the content. As a result, you’ll start missing the conversion opportunities as well as those soaring returns.

• Revenue Leakage

Bad data results in a $15 million loss every year for brands.

Therefore, without HubSpot CRM data cleansing, you may start losing revenue. And this would start increasing your financial costs as a collateral damage.

• Decreased Productivity

An untidy CRM filled with bad data leaves your representatives with the wrong information at their disposal. And since you cannot convert with the wrong data, your reps will waste their efforts and time.

This will result in a decline in your productivity. Thus, the HubSpot CRM data cleansing becomes more crucial for your brand.

• Irritated Customers

Bad data not only hurts your business, but it also impacts the other side of the coin, the customers. If you target your customers with wrong data, your customers will also feel irritated.

This leaves a dent in your brand reputation since your customers start thinking that you don’t know them properly.

• Inaccurate Insights

If you store bad data, you’ll track bad data.

And if you track bad data, you’ll get the wrong insights and misjudge the scenario. This will result in bad decision making and bad decisions won’t get you the right results.

This makes HubSpot data cleansing more important for you.

Over to You…

That was all on HubSpot CRM data cleansing.

It might look like a trivial and time-eating process, but it is quite important for your business and can be done in a single day.

Now it is not something tricky and can be done with some knowledge of the platform. But many of the brands still avoid doing it themselves.

And for such brands, we take the responsibility of cleaning their HubSpot CRM and optimizing it for maximum productivity.

So if you want experts’ hands to clean up your HubSpot CRM, you can talk to us anytime.