Is Your HubSpot Setup Actually Working?

Everything looked fine on the surface

I walked into a client’s HubSpot portal last year. Everything seemed normal. Clean dashboard, workflows running, reports generating on schedule.

Then I started pulling threads.

23% of their contacts had no email address. They had 47 active workflows, 19 of which hadn’t fired in over nine months. There were custom properties named things like “test_do_not_use_2” and “Sarah’s field.” Nobody named Sarah worked there anymore.

The portal looked alive. It was mostly dead weight.

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Here’s what I check first

After doing this across 50+ portals, I’ve landed on five areas that tell you almost everything.

Duplicates

Go to Contacts → Actions → Manage duplicates. Count them.

If you’re under 50, you’re fine. If you’re over 500, your data has a problem, and you probably already suspected that. Most portals I see land somewhere in the 200-800 range. The cause is almost always the same: multiple form submissions, a bad integration, and CSV imports from that one time someone “just needed to get these contacts in quickly.”

Workflows

Open your workflow list and sort by last triggered. Everything that hasn’t run in three months is a zombie. It’s not hurting anything directly, but it’s making your automation impossible to understand.

If you can’t explain what a workflow does from its name alone, it’s already a problem.

I’ve seen portals with 60+ active workflows where the team could only explain half of them. The rest were from a previous agency, a former employee, or “we think it handles something with lifecycle stages.”

Properties

Go to Settings → Properties and look at the custom ones. How many are there? How many have zero values?

Every portal I audit has properties nobody can explain. They accumulate like sediment. Each one made sense to someone at some point. If you’re over 300 custom properties, you’re carrying a lot of dead weight. If you can’t explain what each one does, you have a documentation problem.

Integrations

Settings → Integrations → Connected apps. Check when each last synced. Look for error notifications.

The scariest finding isn’t a broken integration. It’s one that’s “sort of working,” syncing some records but not others, silently dropping data. You won’t notice until you need a number and it’s wrong.

Reports

Pull the same metric from two different dashboards. Do the numbers match?

If they don’t, and you can’t explain why within 30 seconds, your reporting is decorative. You’re making decisions on vibes dressed up as data.

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How portals get this way

It’s never one decision. It’s organic growth over years. Different people adding things without coordination. An agency sets it up, then leaves. Nobody documents how it works. “Marketing ops” becomes everyone’s secondary responsibility, which means it’s nobody’s primary focus.

Then HubSpot ships 40 new features a year and your 2021 setup just… doesn’t use any of them.

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What I’d do

If most of this sounds fine, schedule a quarterly check and keep going. Document what you have. You’re ahead of most.

If two or three areas made you uncomfortable, pick the worst one and fix it first. Don’t try to boil the ocean.

If four or more areas are flagged, stop trusting your data for decisions until it’s cleaned up. Seriously. Bad data with good dashboards is worse than no data. It gives you false confidence.

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Want to screen-share through yours? Book an hour and we’ll walk through it together.