Fix Messy Data with these Timeless Solutions
The information you track about your prospects, customers, and other business relationships should be accurate, trustworthy, and as fully filled out as possible. Here’s how to get there and keep it that way.
Why worry about messy, unreliable, and incomplete data?
Everyone knows messy data is not a good thing. But here are a few explicit reasons why it’s actually a really bad thing and worth obsessing over.
Inaccurate, error-prone information can significantly harm your business. Because of a list built off bad data, you send the thing meant for only customers to a competitor. Based on a report, you decide to invest a ton of money into a channel you think is contributing a ton to revenue, but in reality isn’t helping at all. You don’t have the data to back up a tough conversation you need to have with an employee. The list is endless.
Incomplete, inconsistent, not up to date, incorrectly formatted data is a drag on what could be powerful sales and marketing. These are the things that aren’t going to massive screw up your efforts, but these things will drag your performance down.
I hate saying this, but you’ll probably benefit from an expert.
I say that because I honestly believe setting up all other Hubspot foundations do not require an expert to set everything up for you. You and a couple members of your team should be able to the basics.
Data management, however, is an area where I feel most businesses will benefit from someone overseeing your setup who’s an expert in Hubspot, data management, and your custom setup.
If you have any sort of deal flow, I’d argue you really can’t afford live without it.
It’s not that these are complicated tasks. It’s because there’s only so much time in the day, and if you’re managing people and directly responsible for revenue, doing things like a properties audit and cleaning up duplicates is going to be a huge drag.
If you want to do it yourself, here’s how
In any case, I wrote this article so you at least know what needs to be done, whether you have 10,000 contacts or 10M. The approach is largely the same.
Probably the most realistic recommendation I have is to first get the foundations covered as best as possible by yourself or with a little help. Then, find a really good solo Hubspot consultant familiar with doing this for other companies or a Hubspot consulting firm. They’ll be able to optimize your work and oversee the data. Engage with them at a reasonable rate, in exchange for ongoing, long-term work.
The top data management projects to consider
These are in no specific order, with the exception of #1. Some will be easier or harder to implement, but all should improve the database you rely on for sales and marketing.
1 - Make sure the most important information you track makes sense for the business
Establishing a baseline for how you want to group your records allows your team to consistently label records with essential information.
It’s hard to overstate how important it is to spend significant energy and get right from the start. Here are some considerations that may help identify the most critical data about your contacts, companies, and deals:
Record Type - Who are the various types of groups you sell to and/or have a relationship with? How are they best categorized?
Customer Status - Current, Never a Customer, Former Customer is a good place to start.
Contract End Date - This data point can be used to automatically drive your customer status property. There may be multiple contract end dates if you have multiple products.
Product Purchase - Building out your product library will help you track products as line items on deals and quotes. This also enables upsells and cross-sells.
Product Interest - Using a product interest property allows prospects to be tagged before having a deal created, so targeting marketing can be sent out.
Any other important items that need to be tracked
The biggest thing here is to try and keep these categories as clear as possible, gather insight from all relevant teams, and consistently fill and use these data points.
2 - Keep the custom properties you use. Delete the rest.
Properties are where the information about your contacts, companies, and deals is stored. Without accurate data in your properties, Hubspot is pretty much useless. If there’s unexpected or incorrect information, it can be downright harmful.
Properties are the most important thing about your Hubspot account because they enable you to use Hubspot to:
Target your audiences for email marketing
Develop reports to understand business health, team results, and individual activities
Run automation for notifications/reminders, data updates, sales and marketing nuture, etc.
This cannot be overstated. Properties are literally the backbone of everything useful that Hubspot provides. Meaning that if you have messy, inaccurate, unused properties - you’re making things hard on everyone and everything using Hubspot,
In an ideal world, each property in your system has a crystal clear definition and use case. Hubspot’s default properties come pre-loaded, but when it comes to custom properties created by employees, most refuse to take the extra 2 minutes and write a property description.
Unfortunately, most people don’t get their data fixed until something large and painful occurs.
How I like to run a properties audit
In my head, a properties audit involves reviewing all properties and how they are used, with the goal deleting everything that is not used and optimizing everything that’s left over. I aim to clear things out as much as possible.
One of the first places to look is at custom properties that aren’t being used by any other assets. Often times, these properties were created a long time ago for a specific purpose that is no longer relevant.
After that, I have a goal of:
Identifying the data points that are essential to the business. I try to do as much as possible without talking to anyone in this step. To do this, I simply hone in on the custom properties used by assets and dive into each asset (e.g. list, workflow, report, etc.) If this isn’t providing the business value, it’s slated to be reviewed.
Deleting all custom properties that are no longer relevant. This involves talking to different teams and confirming irrelevant data. It involves merging duplicate fields and their data. It involves manually reviewing spreadsheets. Tough, but worth it.
After that, I’m left with a simple, streamlined set of data I’ve confirmed is essential to the business. Time to celebrate a bit and trudge on.
3 - Know who and what has edit access to your properties
When it comes to Hubspot, humans, workflows, or other apps that are connected to Hubspot have the ability to change things. You should be aware of each:
Employees change data - Employees need to be trained on how you expect them to label different types of prospects and customers, and why. It’s very easy to see if people are updating and how they’re updating. I recommend finding a Hubspot expert to give them a thorough introduction to Hubspot and then ongoing training on how you expect them to help manage your data.
Workflows change data - Workflows need to be thoughtfully constructed, as it’s extremely easy for them to do unexpected damage. They can cause all kinds of unexpected data changes you’ll be chasing down and losing sleep at night for weeks and months on end. This will continue to occur until you fix it or you get someone to fix it. It pays to go to the experts on this one.
Connected apps change data (e.g. Zapier, ZoomInfo, Salesforce, etc.) - These are integrations, meaning other applications that have access to Hubspot and more of than not often, able to edit properties. Every integration should be tailored to the fullest extent. Often times this is just taking an hour to map data from the other system to the right Hubspot properties. With more robust ones (e.g. Salesforce), I would recommend getting professional help from someone that has significant experience in setting up that integration for Hubspot.
How to isolate and fix data change issues
Generally, you’ll find that a few workflows or integrations are causing the bulk of the issues. There is no one “always correct” way to isolate and fix, but here are some tips:
Isolate the issue by clicking “details” next to the property that was updated unexpectedly. You may want to pull up a selection of records and write down what’s causing the issue for each, in case there are multiple sources incorrectly changing data.
Review what caused the changes that occurred. You’ll quickly be able to identify what caused the change - a person, a workflow, or a connected app/integration.
Isolate integration-specific issues by looking at original or latest source details - Integrations will often create contacts and those contacts will be labeled with an Original Source = Offline Sources. Using the drill-down properties, you should be able to figure out the variety of integrations creating contacts and work backwards from there.
An integration will often leave traces of their source in the original or latest source drill-down 1 and 2 properties
Fix the issue by going into the integration or workflow - Choose one integration or workflow and go into it. In other words, consider each to be a separate project. With workflows, you might find that when an action is occurring in the workflow it’s causing an update. With integrations, you might find a similar thing is occurring. Or that you have mapped properties incorrectly
How to improve workflows and integrations for the long term
Solving these items for the long-term is ideal for a sustainable setup that requires little troubleshooting. You want to compare current state to goal state, and then make the updates. Here’s a very high level approach:
Zoom out and consider all of the different systems and people that are creating and updating contacts.
Delete any systems or automation that’s not needed.
For what’s left:
Draw out what’s happening and the specifics of updates.
Draw out what should be happening, and the specifics of those updates. Agree on this with all relevant people.
Make the relevant updates and ensure all is working how intended.
3 - Require sales data input per stage
Making sure all relevant data is filled out when a deal is moved to a specific stage is one of the easiest, most impactful things you can do in a Hubspot account. It has the capacity to fix your deal data issues overnight.
Exactly how to do so is detailed in the second step of my pipeline development guide for sales operations.
For each stage, you’ll want to select the entry criteria required for a deal to move into that stage
4 - Run customer status automation
This will allow you to email, report, and run automation on current and former customers. In my mind, everyone you sell to in your database is either a current customer, a former customer, or they’ve never been a customer. Not having automation built for these things is a direct cause of messy data.
Helpful “current customer” automations
When any deal closes, make them as a current customer.
Helpful “former customer” automation
When their renewal deal has closed lost, make them a former customer.
When their contract end date has passed, make them a former customer.
I’m sure there are more that make sense for your business. In my mind, the simpler they are, the more comfortable you can feel about relying on them.
5 - Consistently merge away duplicate contacts and companies
Hubspot’s built-in duplicate management tool should be reviewed, manually, by a human.
This is doubly important to do if you have a the auto-create and associate contacts setting on, because although this is a great setting, it’s not perfect.
Use Hubspot’s duplicate management tool to review potentially duplicated contacts and companies
How often does this need to be done?
Depends on how long you or your admin wants to do merge sprints for.
If you don’t have a ton of contacts being created each day, you might be able to get away with reviewing this every month.
If you do have a ton of contacts being created each day, you might need to spend 30 minutes per day on this.
Are there better ways to manage duplicates?
Probably, but they require more expertise. Insycle, for example, is a powerful tool that many Hubspot experts swear by.
6 - Eliminate free text entry wherever possible
A well-thought out dropdown or date picker property is a beautiful thing. It instantly organizes and makes the information you collect able to be filtered and leveraged at scale.
Its effectiveness comes from its restrictiveness - with a dropdown, the person putting in the data doesn’t have endless options. This is 95 times out of 100 a good thing, particularly if the options are well thought out.
Free text is mostly not useful, but occasionally it’s better
The only time it’s not a good thing is when you want don’t want to restrict and you’re not worried about categorizing. I’d say 5% of the time you will want this. Obvious free text entry items include:
“How can we help you?” or “How did you hear about us” type questions on forms
Notes about specific items
How to clean this up
Make it a goal to standardize data input with dropdowns, checkboxes, or dates whenever possible.
If you have or think you need a free text property, you should really first try to consider all the possible options / range of input, and organize them into dropdown options.
If something is free text, just assume you won’t be able to report on it or run automation off it. It’s really a waste because reporting and automation are pretty much what you’re paying for when it comes to Hubspot. Avoid free text whenever possible.
If you absolutely have to have a free text property, just know that in most cases, it’s never going to be standardized and it’s never going to be useful.
7 - Use Hubspot Insights for instant data enrichment
Hubspot collects a ton of information about all kinds of companies, many of which will be leads for your business. If they have the information, they’ll share it with you via the default company properties powered by Hubspot Insights.
You can use Hubspot Insight properties to power things like:
Use a company’s annual revenue to route and assign contacts to the right sales person
Target contacts working for companies in the Energy industry
Use the location of your current customers to build informative reports
If you overwrite these properties with information you know to be better, they will stop being filled in by Hubspot Insights.
That’s pretty much the rundown on the Hubspot Insights data enrichment tool.
Have a look at which Hubspot’s Insight properties that may be most useful for your business.
Need to go further with data enrichment?
Once you’re aware of what Hubspot has to offer at the Company-level, there are other data enrichment tools to consider. Clearbit and ZoomInfo are a couple examples that are more powerful than Hubspot Insights and should play nicely with Hubspot.
These and others can be found in the Hubspot App Marketplace
Hubspot’s App Marketplace will have a additional data enrichment tools to consider
8 - Standardize your deal names
You don’t want your sales reps naming deals. You’ll end up with messy deal names. Here’s how to standardize your deal names:
Agree on a standardized naming convention for your deal names. It’s possible this may differ depending on whether it’s a new business or renewal deal.
e.g. Company Name
e.g. Company Name - Product Interest
e.g. Company Name - Amount
Build a deal-based workflow that pulls this data into the deal name upon creation. Confirm it’s working as expected.
Enrollment trigger should be when the specific data you’re trying to standardize with is known on the deal (e.g. When Company Name and Amount is known)
Action - Set deal property “Deal name” to “[Company Name] - [Amount]”
9 - Run formatting workflows
Hubspot’s Operation’s Hub gives you the ability to instantly standardize data via workflow actions. They’re simple to turn on and manage, so they’re definitely worth checking out.
Some examples include:
Phone number formatting
Job title formatting
Address formatting
Capitalizing first letter formatting
See Hubspot’s complete list of formatting capabilities
Format data actions are easy to set up and extremely helpful for ongoing data management
Takeaways on data management
Finalizing how you categorize the people and groups that you do business with should be priority. Get this right and building out a robust data management program becomes as easy as a step by step task list. If you don’t get the core data right, it’s going to add more friction to the process and will never be right.
Ongoing data management is often worth hiring for. It’s best done by someone who 1. knows Hubspot well and 2. who knows how to manage data. Getting your data in line will make your business run better, no question. But it requires daily or weekly management and there’s only so much time and attention in the day.
Pick and choose which data management updates should be prioritized. Treat them as separate, isolated projects. Some will be easy and provide a ton of value right away. Some may be blocked by other projects. Simple and high impact is a good a place to start as any.
