Your HubSpot Is a Mess

Duplicate contacts, broken workflows, reports that lie

It always looks fine at first

I opened a client’s HubSpot last year. Dashboard looked clean. Pipeline stages made sense. A few active workflows. Reasonable enough.

Then I exported the contact list. 23% had no email address. Another 18% were duplicates. Same person, three or four records, scattered across different lifecycle stages. One contact had been marked as both a customer and a subscriber simultaneously.

I checked the workflows. Eleven active. Seven hadn’t enrolled anyone in over four months. One was supposed to assign leads to sales reps, but it was sending every lead to a rep who’d left the company in March.

The reports said marketing generated 500 leads last quarter. Sales said they’d received 200. Both numbers were technically correct. Neither was useful.

How it gets this bad

Nobody wakes up and decides to ruin their CRM. It happens slowly.

I walked into one portal where marketing had created 34 custom properties, sales had created 28, and a previous agency had added another 15. Nobody had coordinated. Three different fields all tracked “company size” with slightly different names and completely different formats.

Another client had built their HubSpot setup in 2019 and never touched the architecture since. Five years of HubSpot feature releases, none of them adopted. They were running a modern car on a five-year-old engine.

The most dangerous HubSpot portal is one that mostly works. Nobody fixes what isn’t obviously broken.

And that’s the real pattern. There’s no single owner. Marketing uses it. Sales uses it. Ops touches it occasionally. Everyone’s problem, nobody’s job.

What the work actually looks like

This isn’t a settings tweak. It’s not a weekend project. Here’s what I actually do when I go into a portal that needs real work.

First, I document everything. Every property, every workflow, every integration, every automation rule. You can’t fix what you haven’t mapped. I’ve found workflows that nobody on the team even knew existed. Still running, still doing things, just quietly creating chaos.

Then I figure out the data model. What objects do you actually need? What properties matter? How should they relate to each other? This is the boring architectural work that determines whether everything else holds together or falls apart in six months.

Cleaning the data is next, and it’s the part nobody wants to hear about. Merging duplicates. Standardizing formats. Deleting garbage records that inflate every report. Tedious. Non-negotiable. I cleaned one portal where 40% of records were either duplicates or junk. Their lead numbers dropped, but suddenly every metric meant something.

After that, I rebuild workflows from scratch. Not patching old ones. Starting fresh with consistent logic, proper enrollment criteria, and documentation for each one. Same with integrations. I map the actual data flow between systems and build proper sync logic instead of Zapier zaps held together with hope.

Last piece: training. The cleanest portal in the world degrades in months if the team doesn’t understand how to use it. I make sure they do.

How long this takes

Depends on how deep the rot goes.

A portal that mostly works but needs optimization: two to three weeks. Functional but messy, the kind with duplicate contacts and undocumented properties everywhere: four to six weeks. Fundamentally broken, where the data model itself is wrong: eight to twelve weeks.

I’ve done all three. The hard part isn’t the work. It’s being honest about which category you’re in.

Is it worth it

Here’s what I’d ask: how much time does your team spend fighting HubSpot every week? How many leads disappear into bad data? How often do you look at a report and think, “I don’t trust this number”?

If any of those make you wince, the cost of fixing it is almost certainly less than the cost of pretending it’s fine.

Typical path: a Fixed Project for the rebuild, then Embedded support if you want someone keeping it clean. Let’s take a look.