In the HubSpot ecosystem, clean data isn't just about tidiness—it's the cornerstone of effective marketing, sales, and customer service. Poor data quality can derail personalization efforts, distort crucial reports, muddle segmentation, and hurt lead management.
Enter HubSpot data quality automation using HubSpot workflows.
With automated data quality management in HubSpot, you can automate many simple data quality tasks without the tedious manual labor. While workflows can’t handle every data management task, they are a useful tool for taking what would otherwise be manual processes off of your plate. Imagine effortlessly standardizing contact details, enforcing field formatting, and ensuring that the data that needs to be shared between record types, is—all while you focus on driving growth and closing deals.
However, standard HubSpot subscriptions can only help solve so many issues with automation. Others, such as bulk deduplication, advanced association, and the ability to fully enforce data standards across your CRM are locked behind add-on subscriptions that also require development resources.
Let’s start by digging into what data management tasks HubSpot workflows are great at.
Efficient data management is critical to maximizing the potential of your CRM, and HubSpot workflows can help streamline many of your data-cleaning processes, allowing CRM admins and employees to spend their time on more important tasks.
Automating these tasks allows companies to reduce manual labor, ensure cleaner data, and improve their marketing, sales, and reporting outcomes.
But, as with any system, there are quirks and considerations in building these automated workflows. Sometimes, even a task such as standardizing a field can be incredibly difficult, because you have to take into account the dozens of different variations that need to be accounted for to standardize them. The process of building automated data management systems in HubSpot isn’t a one-and-done project. It’s consistently improving over the long haul, identifying and closing gaps.
Let’s dive into key data cleaning and management tasks that HubSpot workflows are an ideal option.
One of the most common data issues is incomplete records. Using HubSpot workflows, you can automatically identify contacts or companies with missing key information—such as phone numbers, email addresses, or job titles—and trigger reminders or tasks to collect the missing data. You can also use integrations with data enrichment tools like ZoomInfo to fill in the gaps automatically.
For example, if you wanted to flag contacts that were missing a street address and assign a task to enrich the record with the correct address, you could setup a simple workflow like this:
Inconsistent data can cause issues across marketing and sales activities. For example, variations in how dates, names, or addresses are entered can make segmentation and reporting difficult. HubSpot workflows can be set to reformat data, ensuring consistency automatically.
Let’s look at an example of using workflows to standardize state data:
As you can see, even an example that seems clear cut such as this one, requires a lot of consideration about the different formats existing data in the field could take. And the example above doesn’t even have typos and other errors that will be present in any text field. Then multiply that by fifty states. And then consider that you have hundreds or thousands of fields in your CRM, across every record type,that you might want to standardize.
HubSpot workflows enable you to automate updates to contact lifecycle stages based on specific criteria, such as engagement levels, deal stages, or actions taken on your website. This helps keep your data up to date and accurately reflects where each contact stands in their journey with your company, and is one of the most common and practical uses of HubSpot workflows.
For example, you might update lifecycle stages based on whether or not a deal has a listed deal size, indicating discussions have been had.
Keeping your CRM free of dead leads is crucial for clean data. You can automate workflows to tag or delete contacts that have not engaged with your business in a specified time frame. This keeps your contact database lean, improving the performance of your marketing and sales efforts.
For example, you might want to purge contacts that haven’t engaged with your company in the last year, and are unlikely to in the future.
By leveraging these data cleaning and management automations within HubSpot, businesses can maintain high data integrity, reduce manual work, and ensure that their CRM is always optimized for success. Proper data management allows teams to focus on strategy and execution rather than time-consuming manual updates, ultimately leading to better marketing campaigns, more accurate reports, and improved overall productivity.
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While HubSpot workflows offer powerful automation capabilities, they present significant challenges with manual data cleaning. These challenges can hinder the efficiency and effectiveness of your CRM operations:
While workflows may be a helpful piece of the data management puzzle, they are not the most efficient solution for comprehensive data cleaning and maintenance.
Fortunately, advanced automated data cleaning solutions are available that integrate seamlessly with HubSpot, offering more robust, efficient, and scalable approaches to maintaining high-quality CRM data. These solutions can help overcome workflow limitations, ensuring your data remains clean and reliable without constant manual intervention.
Next, let's explore how you can use Insycle's HubSpot workflow integration to clean, standardize, and organize data automatically as new records enter your CRM, and before communications with them begin.
Insycle templates are highly customizable, but connecting a HubSpot CRM database immediately grants you access to more than 30+ pre-built templates, solving the most common data quality issues in any CRM, spanning a range of categories:
Not only does Insycle allow you to fix all of these issues, but it tracks the prevalence of the 30+ data issues in your database, scanning your database nightly and producing a complete data quality audit.
Insycle's powerful automated data cleaning solutions integrate seamlessly with HubSpot workflows, significantly enhancing your CRM's data management capabilities within HubSpot.
Insycle's Recipes feature can be directly inserted into HubSpot workflows for contacts, companies, deals, and custom record types. A Recipe is a collection of templates, which can then be executed in a specific order, automated to run on a set schedule, or injected directly into HubSpot workflows. This allows for automated, low-maintenance data quality management in HubSpot, triggered by specific events, such as the creation of a new record.
Here's an example of a Recipe for deduplicating contacts using multiple templates:
But you don't always have to build templates and recipes from scratch. Many of Insycle’s 30+ pre-built templates for HubSpot Insycle have been expertly packaged into pre-built Recipes, making it super easy to solve most of the issues in your HubSpot CRM account.
For example, when a new contact is added to HubSpot, it can trigger a workflow that initiates an Insycle Recipe (or recipes) to clean, format, deduplicate, and associate the contact data within seconds of the record being created and before your automated communications go out to new contacts.
With your most prominent data issues solved, you can turn your attention toward finding the errors that managed to squeak through, building helpful automation, and focusing on larger strategic initiatives.
Integrating with HubSpot workflows and bringing those comprehensive data cleaning solutions to your CRM is a game-changing feature. But it’s tough to describe just how powerful Insycle is without delving into its deep customization features.
Insycle’s 30+ pre-built templates that solve common data issues can help you to clean up a majority of the existing issues in your database. But every organization, across a myriad of data sources, always have unique data issues.
With Insycle, you have unparalleled control over how your data is analyzed and altered, across every module. This flexibility allows for more tailored data management solutions beyond what is realistically possible using only HubSpot workflows.
Let’s look at Insycle’s Merge Duplicates module, which allows for identifying and merging HubSpot duplicate contacts.
First and most importantly, Insycle allows you to identify duplicates in your database using any field as a potential matching field, while HubSpot’s standard deduplication features severely limit how duplicate records can be matched.
Additionally, you can filter your data using any record in your database. Want to handle your deduplication project one state at a time? One country? Want to prioritize records that have been created in the last three months or are currently assigned to sales reps? No problem.
Further, Insycle gives a ton of control over how that data in the field is analyzed. In the comparison rule, you can choose whether to use exact match or similar match, allowing you to catch more duplicates that share similar but not precisely the same data in your chosen fields. This is not possible using standard HubSpot automatic deduplication features, and massively expands the number of duplicates that you can catch.
Additionally, you can instruct Insycle to ignore certain data within your selected field. For example, in the email domain field, we are instructing Insycle to ignore the top-level domain (.com, .net, org, etc.). For phone numbers, you could ignore symbols, letters, and whitespace to only consider the underlying numbers included in the field. Or, you can provide Insycle with specific terms to ignore, such as “Co,” “Inc,” or “LLC,” in a company name.
And this type of advanced, high-level customization is available in every Insycle module, not just Merge Duplicates. The ability to slice, dice, analyze, and compare your HubSpot CRM data in advanced ways is at the core of Insycle.
However, advanced data bulk updating power also raises certain concerns. Everyone worries about pushing a bad update live that can’t be rolled back, losing thousands of valuable records in one fell swoop. CRM admins wake up screaming from nightmares about just that issue!
Luckily, Insycle has several safety net features to protect your data, even using Insycle through the HubSpot Workflow integration.
Insycle protects companies from the risk of data loss through several safeguards.
Before making any changes, Insycle lets you preview the effects of your data-cleaning operations.
Running an Insycle template in preview mode generates a CSV that shows exactly how your data would change should this template be pushed live. You get a top-down view of what records and fields will be affected, with a breakdown of each field both before and after the update.
This provides a control layer and prevents unintended data modifications. Previews are also highly useful for modifying existing templates and dialing in their functionality over time.
Insycle also provides a detailed activity tracker, allowing you to review all changes made to your data after an update runs.
Clicking on your operation's Run ID on the activity tracker page will open a CSV similar to the one generated when previewing, except this one shows changes that were actually made to your CRM data. You can also click on the template name to navigate to the template used in the operation, to analyze it and make any necessary changes.
You can adjust your Recipe before changing your live data if you see any issues.
Then, different modules within Insycle also contain their own safeguards, such as the Merge Duplicates module allowing you to set a maximum number of duplicates to merge in any one set of duplicates so that you never have to worry about accidentally merging non-duplicate records incidentally broad identification settings.
By leveraging Insycle's HubSpot Workflow integration for automated data cleaning, HubSpot users can overcome many of the limitations of HubSpot’s data management features in their standard plans.
HubSpot workflow data cleaning automation is crucial for maintaining high-quality CRM data and optimizing marketing and sales operations. While HubSpot offers some native data management tools, some gaps mean that workflows will always be a piece of a larger puzzle.
Insycle bridges this gap by providing powerful, automated data-cleaning capabilities that seamlessly integrate with HubSpot workflows. Insycle is a complete customer data management platform, giving companies full visibility into their data quality and the tools that they need to improve and maintain it.
Implementing Insycle's automated workflow data cleaning solutions allows HubSpot users to maintain high-quality data with less effort, freeing valuable time for strategic tasks. Learn how Insycle can become the most important tool in your data management strategy and maximize efficiency in HubSpot CRM.