3 Common HubSpot Mistakes & How To Avoid Them

HubSpot is an all-in-one customer relationship management (CRM) platform that’s designed to help businesses seamlessly with:

✔️ Inbound marketing
✔️ Sales
✔️ Customer Service
✔️ Content management
✔️ And more

Companies that invest in HubSpot set themselves up to scale operations quickly and get a solid return on investment. But, a few simple mistakes could prevent your team from maximizing the power of HubSpot and impact growth.

So here are three common HubSpot mistakes we see companies make. And we’re giving you solutions for each so you can avoid them, and get the most out of such a powerful tool.

Mistake #1: Not automating your marketing

There’s a big difference between one-off marketing campaigns and automated nurturing campaigns. One-off campaigns are great for product launches or site-wide sales, but there’s a time and place for them. They are not optimal for nurturing leads as they are designed to get one message to a large audience.  

Automated campaigns, on the other hand, do the opposite. These are real-time interactions, personalized to each prospect, lead, or customer.  Automated campaigns allow:

• Testing and tweaking touchpoints along the customer journey
• Measuring long-term performance
• Scaling without increased bandwidth

Don’t forget to include multiple channels in your automated marketing campaigns! Plenty of campaigns solely focus on email marketing, and neglect other available channels.  Here are some other marketing tactics that can be automated:

✅PPC campaigns
✅Texts / SMS
✅Direct mailers

Mistake #2: Automating too much

While some teams don’t automate enough, others automate too much. This can manifest in a few different ways:

• Unclear nurture processes
• Touchpoints that aren’t mapped out
• Multiple workflows that target the same audience

Not only do these issues cause internal headaches to manage, they also increase difficulty to ultimately determine what's moving the needle. This makes it more challenging to run tests,  identify areas of opportunities, and report out results.

So instead of over-engineering elaborate workflows for every lead capture form—identify your target audience, walk through the customer lifecycle, and design automations that address each stage's goal.

Mistake #3: Not maintaining your contact database

Your insights are only as good as your data. If you don’t properly manage contacts as they enter your HubSpot database, you’ll end up with information that’s skewed. This can lead to missed leads, duplicate contact records, or even paying for a larger database than you need.

To fix this, first look at how contacts enter your HubSpot database. Some common examples include:

• Trade show imports
• API connections
• Sales email communication

Next, implement a system for segmenting and tracking contacts to keep your database clean.  Whether it's using HubSpot's lifecycle stages and lead status properties or creating custom properties, every contact should be accounted for.

And lastly, stay on top of your database by:

✅Reviewing HubSpot’s list of duplicate contacts and companies
✅Planning regular database checks if you’re using an API and outside database

Summary

HubSpot is a powerful tool and can make scaling easier. But, a few simple mistakes could cause your team headaches and slow you down. Here’s a quick recap of ways you can improve how you use HubSpot (and avoid common mistakes):

• Invest in marketing automation (and go beyond just automating email marketing)
• Map out workflows before you build them
• Keep your contact database clean and free of duplicates
• Use HubSpot’s internal notification triggers to stay on top of leads and deals

Book a consultation with us to learn more about how to maximize your HubSpot account and grow faster than ever.