How to Clean Up Your HubSpot CRM Data

Many law firms struggle with keeping their CRM clean and accurate. It can be difficult to ensure information is entered properly, not duplicated, and comprehensive. Many sales and marketing departments simply don’t have the time or resources to scrub their CRM data – but they need to. 

Have you heard the phrase “garbage in, garbage out”? That means that your outreach efforts will only be as successful as your data is clean. That’s why we want to give you a refresher on cleaning up your HubSpot data.

5 Steps for Cleaning Up Your Law Firm’s HubSpot CRM Data

Keeping your CRM data as clean as possible is vital to the success of your firm. If your database is difficult to navigate or inconsistent, it will negatively impact business development efforts, marketing tactics, and client loyalty. We can’t stress enough how important it is to take the time to ensure your CRM data is up to par. If you are in need of a refresher, follow these steps.

Related: A Law Firm Guide to Digital Marketing Analytics

1. Review your data and determine what needs to be addressed

Before digging in too far, you’ll want to evaluate the overall health of your data. Is everything up to date? Is it being used? Are you capturing relevant information? Figure out what data is worth keeping and what can be scrapped. Do these things immediately: 

1. 1. Remove contacts that have hard bounced or previously unsubscribed. 
   2. Scan for duplicates and figure out where they’re coming from. If you have a Professional or Enterprise version of HubSpot, you can use the duplicate management tool for this. 
   3. Look for duplicate properties which might be causing issues. Again, with the Professional or Enterprise versions, you can use workflows to copy data from one property to another. 
   4. Start filtering contacts who have not engaged. Review indicators like the last marketing email opened to gauge a contact’s last interaction. 

2. Create standards for how you will input data

Once you’ve completed the steps above, you can start to get into a routine with your team. You’ll need to create a standard procedure for how everyone puts data into your CRM. Focus on which information must be captured when people create a new contact. One way to standardize is to set property fields that will appear when manually creating contacts or companies. This will ensure new data is more consistent. You can take things a step further with a Professional or Enterprise version of HubSpot. In these instances, you can make certain fields mandatory during manual creation. You should also plan to apply this strategy when contacts are created through form submissions by including key fields in the forms you create. Check contacts against these key fields by creating a list where you can look for certain values. For example, if you hope to find contacts that do not have a value for the property “job title,” you can create a list with the criteria “job title is unknown.”

3. Determine who cleans

Many firms don’t have a dedicated CRM manager, so it will be up to your team to assign someone to regular maintenance. You could also prioritize this as a team activity, ensuring members take the time to review the data that their team is responsible for. Much of this will depend on how much data you’re handling – but the point is that there should be a point person for keeping things neat and tidy. 

4. Use a schedule

How often will you perform this cleanup maintenance? Once you know who will be responsible, you need to figure out how often. We suggest creating a schedule that is documented somewhere. Some firms like to do this once per year while others clean their CRM data once per quarter or even once per month. How often you need to do it depends on things like the quantity of data you have and how many people input contacts regularly. 

5. Take advantage of integrations for a little extra help

There are some data management integrations that can give you a little extra strength in this area. Here are a few of our favorites: 

1. 1. Insycle data management – This tool allows you to automate HubSpot data cleansing throughout your database. Users can make use of bulk merging of duplicate records, flexible record matching when importing data, and standardizing values. 
   2. Leadspace – Especially helpful for managing the lead lifecycle, this tool helps maintain accurate data by optimizing lead routing with lead-to-account matching.
   3. Property Capitalize – Use this integration to correct the title cases in any existing or future records. 

Takeaway: 

Use these steps to complete a thorough clean-up of your current database. However, the work doesn’t stop there. As step 4 implies, you’ll need to complete this process on a regular schedule to ensure the integrity of your data over time. Though it can seem cumbersome at first, we promise it’s worth it! 

If you feel confident in your CRM data, you might be ready to take advantage of marketing automation. If so, watch our webinar: What is Marketing Automation and How Can it Benefit Your Firm? It covers information on using marketing automation to gather leads, automate marketing activities, and use digital analytics to analyze performance.