While HubSpot is a powerful platform, it is not immune to common data quality challenges. From duplicate records and incomplete information to inconsistent formatting and outdated data, these issues significantly impact your ability to personalize campaigns, accurately segment your audience, and make informed strategic decisions.
But here's the good news: Identifying and resolving these common data quality issues in HubSpot isn't just possible—it's essential for unleashing the full potential of your CRM. While companies may have unique data issues from their internal policies, integrations, and importing processes, many of the problems they face are similar.
Let’s explore the most prevalent data quality problems plaguing HubSpot users, their far-reaching consequences, and the best HubSpot data management solutions that can transform your data management approach.
The Impact of Common Data Quality Issues in HubSpot
Data quality issues in HubSpot can significantly hinder your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts. Let's explore the most common problems and their far-reaching consequences:
- Inability to personalize campaigns because of incorrect or incomplete data. Personalization is key to effective marketing, but poor data quality can derail your efforts. This can lead to decreased engagement rates and potential customers feeling like just another number.
- Challenges in segmentation and reporting. Inaccurate data makes it difficult to segment your audience effectively. Imagine trying to create a list of C-level executives in the tech industry, only to find that many job titles are inconsistently formatted. This can cause missed opportunities and wasted resources on poorly targeted campaigns.
- Higher risk of duplicate contacts and inaccurate records. Duplicate records can cause numerous issues, from sending multiple emails to the same person, to sales reps stepping on each others toes, to skewing your metrics. For instance, if you have three separate records for "John Smith," "J. Smith," and "John S.," you may overestimate your total number of leads and underestimate your conversion rates.
- Difficulties with lead scoring and routing. Incomplete or inaccurate data can throw off your lead scoring system. A high-value lead may be overlooked if crucial fields like company size or industry are missing. This could result in sales teams wasting time on low-quality leads while neglecting potentially lucrative opportunities.
- Inaccurate reporting leads to poor decision-making. When your data is unreliable, so are your reports. If your CRM shows inflated customer numbers because of duplicates, you might overestimate your market penetration and make misguided strategic decisions. This can have long-lasting impacts on your business growth and resource allocation.
- Affected morale of employees who must manually update data. Having processes blocked and constantly cleaning up messy data can be demoralizing for your team. Sales reps may spend hours reconciling conflicting information across multiple records instead of focusing on closing deals. This impacts productivity and can lead to frustration and burnout among your staff.
Addressing these common data quality issues can unlock the full potential of your HubSpot CRM, enabling more effective marketing campaigns, accurate reporting, and improved overall business performance.
Common Data Quality Issues in HubSpot
HubSpot is a powerful CRM platform, but like any database, it's susceptible to various data quality issues. Let's explore the most common problems that HubSpot users encounter and how they impact your marketing and sales efforts:
Duplicates: Multiple Records for the Same Contact or Company
Duplicate records are perhaps the most pervasive data quality issue in HubSpot. They can occur when leads fill out multiple forms, are imported from different sources, or are manually entered by team members. Duplicates can lead to embarrassing communication mishaps, such as sending the same email twice to a prospect, or conflicting information across records. This skews your reporting and can damage your relationship with potential customers.
Missing Associations: Disconnected Records Across Objects
When contacts, companies, deals, and tickets aren't properly associated, you lose valuable context. For example, if a contact isn't linked to their company record, your sales team may miss out on crucial account information during outreach. This lack of association can hinder account-based marketing (ABM) efforts and lead to disjointed customer experiences.
Incomplete Data: Essential Information Gaps
Incomplete records, such as contacts missing email addresses or phone numbers, can severely limit your ability to reach out and engage. Imagine trying to run a phone campaign only to find that half of your target list is missing phone numbers. This wastes time and reduces the effectiveness of your marketing and sales initiatives.
Inconsistent Formatting and Standardization: Variations in Data Entry
When data is entered inconsistently, it becomes difficult to segment and analyze. For instance, creating accurate lists or automating processes based on this field becomes challenging if phone numbers are entered in various formats (e.g., (123) 456-7890, 123-456-7890, 1234567890). Often, integrations require a specific format.
Outdated Information: Stale Data That Is No Longer Accurate
As your database grows, some information inevitably becomes outdated. People change jobs, companies relocate, and contact preferences shift. Using outdated information can lead to wasted resources, decreased engagement rates, and potentially damaged brand reputation if you consistently reach out with irrelevant or misdirected communications.
These issues don't exist in isolation — they often compound each other, creating a snowball effect that can significantly affect your operations. For example, duplicate records with inconsistent formatting and outdated information can make getting an accurate view of your customer base nearly impossible.
Fortunately, tools like Insycle offer comprehensive solutions to address these common HubSpot data quality issues. With features like automated deduplication, data standardization, and the Customer Data Health Assessment, Insycle can help maintain a clean, reliable HubSpot database.
By proactively addressing these issues, you can ensure that your HubSpot CRM remains a valuable asset for your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
How Insycle Addresses Common Data Quality Problems in HubSpot
Insycle offers a comprehensive solution to tackle HubSpot's most prevalent CRM data quality challenges, empowering businesses to maintain clean, efficient CRMs. Let's explore how Insycle's features address each of the common issues we've discussed.
Automated Deduplication
Insycle's powerful deduplication engine goes beyond simple exact-match detection. It uses advanced functions to identify and merge duplicate records based on customizable criteria. For instance, you can set rules to match contacts with similar names and email addresses, even if they're not identical.
In this example, one of the rules set is to find contacts with a first name that matches the first five characters.
This bulk process can also be automated to run on a set schedule (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly) saving countless hours of manual review and significantly reducing the risk of duplicate-related errors in your marketing and sales efforts.
Data Standardization and Formatting
With Insycle, you can create templates to standardize data formats across your entire HubSpot database. Whether it's phone numbers, addresses, or job titles, you can ensure consistency with just a few clicks.
Insycle offers numerous pre-built templates for formatting phone numbers using popular standard formats.
Or, for specific use cases, you can build custom templates.
In the example below, we are formatting phone numbers. First, we remove the “0” prefix in front of phone numbers. Then, we are removing non digits, adding the prefix “+61” (Australia’s country code), and telling Insycle where to separate the
You can use Insycle to standardize any text field in your database. For example, you could standardize industries for segmentation.
Or even standardize job titles:
Insycle allows you to control and standardize your data to improve segmentation, reporting, and decision-making.
Association Management
Maintaining proper associations between contacts, companies, and deals is crucial for effective account-based marketing (ABM) strategies and maintaining holistic views of your accounts. Insycle provides powerful tools to automatically create or update these associations based on your specific criteria. This ensures your HubSpot objects are correctly linked and your teams have a complete picture of each account.
Insycle's association management features allow you to:
- Set up flexible matching rules using any HubSpot field
- Create and update associations in bulk
- Automate the association process on a schedule
- Preview changes before they go live in HubSpot
With Insycle, you can set up an automated daily process to associate these "orphaned" contacts with the correct companies.
Customer Data Health Assessment
One of Insycle's standout features is the Customer Data Health Assessment. This comprehensive audit tool automatically scans your HubSpot database for over 30 common data quality issues.
It provides a detailed report on the state of your data, highlighting areas needing attention and tracking improvements over time. Then, by clicking a single button, you will be taken to the correct template to fix any problem tracked in the Health Assessment.
This ongoing assessment ensures you're always aware of your data quality status and can take proactive measures to maintain it.
Automation
Insycle allows you to set up automated data cleansing routines that run on your defined schedule. This means your data quality improvements aren't just one-time fixes but ongoing processes that keep your HubSpot database in shape. You can create custom templates for your specific data quality needs and have them execute automatically, freeing up your team to focus on strategic tasks rather than manual data maintenance.
By using these powerful features, Insycle transforms the daunting task of maintaining HubSpot data quality into a streamlined, automated process. This saves time and resources and ensures that your marketing, sales, and customer service teams always work with the most accurate and up-to-date information possible.
Prevent Common Data Quality Issues in HubSpot Using Insycle
Data quality issues in HubSpot can significantly hinder your marketing and sales efforts, but they don't have to be a permanent roadblock. By adopting Insycle's powerful suite of tools, you can transform your HubSpot database from a source of frustration into a valuable asset that drives your business forward.
Insycle's comprehensive approach to data management addresses all the common data quality problems in HubSpot we've discussed. From automated deduplication and data standardization to maintaining proper associations, Insycle provides a robust solution for keeping data high-quality in your HubSpot CRM.
Remember, high-quality data isn't just about having accurate information — it's about empowering your teams to make better decisions, create more personalized customer experiences, and drive more effective marketing and sales campaigns. Take the first step towards transforming your HubSpot data quality today.
