When Was the Last Time You Cleaned Up Your HubSpot CRM?

A messy HubSpot CRM kills productivity.

Marketing Ops teams depend on accurate, structured data to drive segmentation, workflows, and revenue reporting. But when your CRM is cluttered with duplicates, broken pipelines, unused properties, and outdated contacts, every campaign becomes a guessing game.

And the cost is real. According to Gartner, poor data quality drains companies an average of $12.9 million every year. If your sales team can't trust the data, they're flying blind. If your marketing automation pulls from bad inputs, you're wasting budget.

How confident are you in the condition of your HubSpot CRM right now?

This guide breaks down exactly how to clean it, including contacts, properties, pipelines, workflows, and lists, while protecting the data you still need. It's built for Marketing Ops teams that are tired of patchwork fixes and ready for a CRM they can rely on.

Signs You Need a HubSpot CRM Cleanup

Bad HubSpot CRM data builds up gradually. Until reports break, lists fail, and your sales team stops trusting the system. These are the early warning signs that your HubSpot portal is overdue for a full cleanup.

Duplicate Contacts and Companies

Duplicate records inflate your contact count, mess with attribution, and confuse handoffs between teams. HubSpot's duplicate management tool can surface obvious matches, but it often misses contacts with variations in name or email format. Without a strategy to merge duplicates properly, you're likely fragmenting your pipeline visibility and lifecycle tracking.

Outdated or Incomplete Contact Data

Hard-bounced emails, invalid numbers, and missing names reduce deliverability, skew segments, and bloat your CRM with irrelevant contacts. Contacts who haven’t engaged in over a year should be audited. Most of them are dead weight and need to be deleted from your database to maintain a clean contact list.

Bloated Properties and Duplicate Fields

Too many teams adding custom properties without governance leads to property sprawl. You end up with fields like “Lead Source”, “Source Type”, “Original Source,” and “Source_Category”, all trying to track the same thing. This kills reporting consistency and breaks integrations. A cleanup means reviewing each HubSpot property and archiving or consolidating the ones that no longer serve a clear function.

Abandoned Workflows and Broken Pipelines

Old workflows often continue running long after their purpose ends. They often trigger outdated logic, misroute leads, or skip key handoffs. The same goes for broken pipelines and stages that no longer match your sales process, can trap deals, and hide conversion leaks. A complete audit is required to standardize your workflows and realign pipeline logic with how your team actually sells.

Reporting Gaps and Inconsistencies

If your dashboards fluctuate wildly or KPIs feel off, the root issue is often the condition of your data. HubSpot reports rely on accurate properties, complete records, and clean lists. Bad data stems from inconsistent imports, poor field formatting, or broken automation logic.

How to Prepare Before Cleaning Up HubSpot CRM Data

Before you clean up a messy HubSpot CRM, you need a plan. Rushing into cleanup without structure often leads to deleted contacts, broken workflows, or lost property data. Preparation protects your HubSpot CRM data and sets you up for a smooth, successful cleanup.

Back Up Your HubSpot CRM Data

Start by exporting all contacts, companies, deals, and property configurations. This backup acts as a safety net in case something breaks during cleanup. Use HubSpot’s native export tools or ask your CRM manager to help organize the files. If you’re unsure how to format them, use SmithDigital's HubSpot Admin Support to keep your data clean, mapped, and recoverable

Keep a record of all custom fields, lifecycle stage mappings, and active form fields. You should also save snapshots of any complex workflows, using screenshots or templates, so they can be rebuilt later if needed.

Involve Key Stakeholders Across Teams

Cleaning up your HubSpot portal is not a solo job. Involve Marketing Ops, Sales leaders, Service team members, and any other power users. These stakeholders know which contact properties matter, which lists are still in use, and which workflows impact customer retention.

If you clean in isolation, you risk deleting integrations, breaking routing rules, or erasing valuable contact history. Good cleanup starts with a shared understanding of what needs to stay and what can go.

Set Clear Goals for the Cleanup Project

Treat the cleanup like a project with specific outcomes. Set measurable targets such as:

1. 90% of contact records with valid email or phone fields
2. 30% reduction in unused or duplicate HubSpot properties
3. 100% accuracy in lifecycle stage assignment
4. Consolidation of redundant lists and archived workflows

These benchmarks help you prioritize what to clean and allow you to track progress. More importantly, they help you align cleanup to what actually drives performance, such as segmentation, reporting accuracy, and automation efficiency.

Step-by-Step HubSpot CRM Cleanup Process

A messy CRM won’t fix itself. A structured process prevents data loss and drives real progress. Each phase below tackles one of the core breakdown points, starting with duplicates and ending with segmentation.

Step 1: Contact and Company Deduplication

Start with HubSpot’s built-in duplicate management tool to catch exact matches on name and email. But that only scratches the surface. You may need deeper HubSpot data cleansing. This allows you to define strict rules based on lifecycle stage, owner, or source, and merge records safely.

Before merging, always test your rules on a sample set. If records conflict on critical fields, assign them for manual review. Once cleaned, your CRM becomes usable again for segmentation, attribution, and pipeline forecasting.

Step 2: Property Cleanup and Field Standardization

Too many custom fields lead to reporting failure and integration chaos. Go to your HubSpot property settings and audit every contact and company field. Identify duplicate properties, archive what’s unused, and map similar fields into one consistent format.

Use clear naming conventions. For example, “Marketing_Lead_Source” is better than five vague versions of “source.” Label internal-only fields, so teams don’t enter bad data. Standardizing the input reduces confusion, improves filtering, and sets the foundation for cleaner reporting.

Step 3: Pipeline and Deal Hygiene

Open deals with no recent activity skew forecasts and waste attention. Run an audit across your pipelines to find stuck or dead deals. Close them out or reassign them. Then review every stage label. Does it match the actual sales process? If not, update it.

Document the entry and exit criteria for each stage. Clean pipelines restore visibility into lead movement, deal health, and conversion gaps.

Step 4: Workflow and Automation Audit

Inactive workflows often continue executing behind the scenes, causing cluttered records and inaccurate field updates. Open every workflow, check when it last ran, and whether it still supports a live campaign. Deactivate anything stale.

Make sure triggers match intended actions. For example, form submissions should update only relevant fields or lists, not every contact object. Use internal notes to document workflow logic. Clean workflows allow you to scale automation without breaking core processes.

Step 5: List and Segment Management

Outdated lists hurt campaign performance and email deliverability. Delete static lists that haven’t been used in the last 12 months. For smart lists, validate that each one powers a real campaign, nurture sequence, or reporting view.

Check your outbound lists for compliance. Remove bounced or unsubscribed contacts. Segment only on accurate, permission-based fields. Cleaning your CRM lists improves campaign precision, reduces spam risk, and helps you create a list strategy that reflects real intent and engagement.

When to Hire CRM Cleanup Help

Internal CRM cleanup has worked for a while. But as your HubSpot portal grows and becomes more complex, small fixes stop working. If your Marketing Ops team is spending more time untangling problems than building effective campaigns, it’s time to bring in expert support.

Signs You Need External Help

There’s no single trigger that means it's time to hire out, but these signals are hard to ignore:

• Repeated cleanup attempts haven’t fixed core data issues
• Automations, lifecycle stages, or lead routing fail frequently
• Reporting is incomplete or no longer trusted by leadership
• Multiple teams are creating conflicting fields, workflows, or segments
• Manual cleanup tasks are eating hours every week

These issues block growth, delay execution, and erode team confidence.

What SmithDigital Delivers

SmithDigital offers HubSpot Admin Support for Marketing Ops teams that need fast, reliable CRM cleanup. We audit your entire portal, prioritize what matters, and fix broken systems without disrupting your active workflows.

From contact properties to pipeline stages, user permissions to reporting fields. We clean, document, and stabilize the foundation of your CRM so your team can focus on execution, not error correction.

Why Waiting Costs More

Bad data compounds over time. Every week you delay cleanup means more misrouted leads, more wasted team hours, and less confidence in your system. Cleaning your HubSpot CRM is not just a maintenance task. It’s how you protect your campaigns, align your teams, and unlock performance.

Stop Managing Around the Mess. Start Fixing It.

A clean HubSpot CRM gives your Marketing Ops team real leverage. With consistent data and working systems, your reports become trustworthy, your automations run as intended, and your team spends more time executing, not troubleshooting.

If you're still working around broken workflows, cluttered fields, or bad segmentation, you're leaving revenue on the table. These problems slow down every campaign, weaken every report, and create friction between teams that should be aligned.

Most CRM issues aren’t technical. Rather, they’re operational. Fixing them requires experience, structure, and the discipline to stop patching and start rebuilding. Book a Free HubSpot Discover Call to see how SmithDigital can help you clean up your CRM and keep it that way.