The Ultimate HubSpot Audit Check List for Sales & Marketers

A comprehensive HubSpot audit checklist assists in reviewing and analysing your marketing and sales pipeline while establishing best practices for an optimised CRM system. While each portal differs, certain foundational areas warrant inspection during any audit process.

1. Contact & Company Clean up

Regular database maintenance enhances reporting accuracy, minimises unwanted mail, and optimises email deliverability.

• Identify and eliminate duplicate contacts
• Maintain a list of hard bounces and remove them
• Verify contacts have accurate lifecycle stage assignments (Subscriber, Lead, MQL, SQL, etc.)
• Confirm all leads have assigned owners
• Establish standard filters and views for efficient contact management

2. Buyer Persona Implementation

Segmenting audiences by interest and behaviour enables personalised content delivery and improves conversion metrics.

• Develop buyer personas within HubSpot — whether interest-based, role-based, or personality-driven (avoid creating excessive personas)
• Assign contacts to their corresponding personas
• Create persona-specific lists segmented across three buying cycle stages (Awareness, Consideration, Decision). Three personas require nine separate lists for proper personalisation
• Build automated workflows to assign personas and trigger personalised nurture campaigns
• Periodically assess whether existing personas still represent target audiences
• Identify and integrate new personas as needed
• Update personas with recently acquired demographic and psychographic data

3. Check Your Lead Generation Marketing Campaigns

Evaluate cost-per-lead metrics across different channels (paid search, paid social, organic, display, retargeting).

Track these key performance indicators:

• Average leads generated on daily, weekly, and monthly intervals
• Click-through rate and conversion rate
• Cost per lead by channel

4. Leads to MQLs Conversion Rate Performance

Monitor follow-up touches, engagement levels, time-to-sales, and close rates. Improve conversion by:

• Outlining email nurture paths
• Building email sequences
• Creating workflows to trigger automated nurturing

5. Email Health Check

Email quality directly impacts marketing and sales effectiveness. Monitor open rates and click rates to maximise performance. Misuse of GDPR compliance, excessive mailing frequency, or purchasing lists damage email reputation and deliverability.

Infrastructure considerations include:

• MTA/IP Reputation (blacklist/whitelist/greylist status)
• Forward/Reverse DNS validation
• SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication
• Received-route analysis

Best practices:

• Connect your email sending domain to HubSpot for branded links
• Maintain clean contact and company records
• Sustain email engagement through sunset policies that remove stale contacts
• Personalise subject lines, previews, and body content
• Review underperforming emails from the past 30 days and test alternative headlines
• Implement dynamic content in landing pages and emails for different personas
• Consider a dedicated IP address for enhanced email reputation (additional cost applies)

6. Workflow Audit

Evaluate workflow performance based on engagement metrics and email statistics. Sort workflows by total enrolled to identify the most active ones and review the performance tab for errors (such as failed contact property copy commands).

Additional considerations:

• Set clear workflow goals and remove contacts once goals are achieved to accurately measure nurturing success
• Organise workflows using folders and establish consistent naming conventions by function

7. Review Forms and CTAs

Analyse lead capture asset performance using HubSpot's analytics tools. Organic search typically converts at 1-2%.

• If conversion falls below this benchmark, add CTAs and gated content to high-traffic pages
• For underperforming forms, remove unnecessary fields to reduce friction
• For weak CTAs, test variations by adjusting colour, copy, and placement (changing one variable at a time)

8. SEO Strategy and Topic Clusters

Utilise HubSpot's pillar page and topic cluster tool to establish topical authority. (Users without Marketing Professional can employ free keyword research tools instead.)

This strategy involves creating related sub-posts around a primary pillar page, with sub-pages linking back to the main article. Target pillar keywords with approximately 500-750 monthly searches, preferably in less competitive niches. Develop 4-5 sub-pages addressing related topics, ensuring proper title and description tags. Aim for articles exceeding 1,000 words to improve search engine visibility and organic traffic.

Regularly review topic cluster performance and document recommendations, particularly those flagged as high-impact.

9. Review Your Sales Emails and Sequences

Analyse sequence engagement metrics:

• Total enrolled: Number of contacts in the sequence
• Open rate: Percentage who opened at least one email
• Click rate: Percentage who clicked a link
• Reply rate: Percentage who replied
• Meeting rate: Percentage who booked a meeting via HubSpot meeting link
• Unsubscribe rate: Percentage who unsubscribed
• Bounce rate: Percentage with bounced email addresses

Disable poor performers or improve content through A/B testing. Add sequence reports to your reporting dashboard.

10. Check Your Lead Scoring Triggers and Scores

As campaigns evolve, update lead scoring to accurately reflect sales readiness.

• Verify score weightings and add triggers for new campaigns
• Create MQL workflow triggers to alert sales teams to high-value leads
• For video content, score based on view count or watch duration (platforms like Wistia integrate well with HubSpot)