How To Bulk-Standardize Industries for Contacts and Companies In HubSpot

You dive into your CRM, only to find a mess of industry entries: "Technology," "Tech," “Software,” "Information Technology," and a dozen more variations. While these all represent the same sector, their differing formats create significant headaches. This is the reality for many HubSpot teams dealing with non-standardized industry classifications, and it’s a much bigger issue than it seems on the surface.

When industry classifications aren’t standardized, personalization becomes a nightmare. Tailoring communications to specific sectors is key to effective marketing and sales strategies. However, with so many variations, ensuring that your messaging reaches the right companies in the right way is nearly impossible. Non-standardized industries lead to inconsistent and impersonal customer interactions, reducing engagement and potentially losing valuable leads.

Effective segmentation also relies on clean, standardized data. When industries vary wildly, creating targeted segments becomes an uphill battle. Your carefully crafted segments lose their precision, and the effectiveness of your campaigns diminishes. Instead of hitting the bullseye, you’re throwing darts blindfolded, hoping something sticks.

Accurate reporting is the backbone of strategic planning and performance measurement. Non-standardized industries wreak havoc on reports, leading to inconsistent data that can misguide your strategies.

With unstandardized industries for both HubSpot contacts and companies, many critical tasks across your organization become more difficult.

The RevOps Impact of Not Having Standardized Industry Formatting

Non-standardized industries can cause a cascade of problems in your RevOps ecosystem:

1. Personalization pitfalls: When industry classifications lack consistency, personalized campaigns based on sectors become a hit or miss. If you attempt to target "Technology" companies but your database includes variations like "Tech" and "Information Technology," your personalization efforts will fall flat, leading to poor engagement and potential unsubscribes.
2. Segmentation roadblocks: Inconsistent industry formatting makes segmenting your database time-consuming and error-prone. You'll spend hours trying to identify and group together all the variations of a single industry, only to end up with incomplete and inaccurate segments that hinder your targeting efforts.
3. Duplicate data: Non-standardized industries contribute to duplicate companies in your CRM. If "Tech Corp, Technology" and "Tech Corp, Tech" exist as separate records, your database will inflate, leading to skewed metrics and wasted resources when engaging with these companies.
4. Lead scoring inaccuracies: Inconsistent industry names make it difficult to assign accurate lead scores based on a company’s sector. If your scoring model assigns different values to "Information Technology" and "IT," you'll have unreliable prioritization of leads, causing your sales team to focus on the wrong prospects.
5. Reporting discrepancies: Reporting on industry-based metrics becomes challenging when listed industries aren't standardized, in the same way that segmentation is affected.

To fix these problems, you must take a systematic approach to standardizing industry classifications in your CRM. Next, we'll walk through how to do industry standardization in HubSpot.

How to Standardize Industries in HubSpot

Standardizing industries manually in HubSpot can be a tedious and error-prone process. Here are the steps involved:

1. Navigate to the Contacts or Companies section in HubSpot.
2. Filter records based on industry variations you want to standardize, including all potential variations and broad filters like “includes” to catch as many variations as possible.
3. Export the list as a CSV file.
4. Open the CSV file and manually standardize the industry names by editing the entries one by one.
5. Save the edited CSV file.
6. Navigate back to HubSpot and import the updated CSV file.
7. Use the "Update existing contacts" option during importing to overwrite the old industry names with the standardized versions.

While this manual approach can work for small datasets, it has several significant limitations for larger companies with even bigger databases:

• Eats up your team's time: Manually editing industry names one by one in a spreadsheet is incredibly time-consuming, especially for databases with thousands of contacts. And attempting to design Excel formulas to identify every potential variation and standardize in bulk can be difficult.
• Creates more errors: Human error is inevitable when manually editing large datasets. The average human-entered data error rate is 1-5%, according to the Journal of Accountancy. Typos, missed entries, and inconsistencies can easily creep in, undermining the standardization effort.
• Feels demoralizing: Spending hours on tedious data entry tasks can demoralize your team, leading to low morale and potential mistakes due to fatigue or lack of focus.
• Requires ongoing manual maintenance: As you add new contacts to your database, you must regularly repeat the industry standardization process, compounding the time and effort required.

These limitations directly tie back to the RevOps impacts discussed earlier, such as:

• Inability to personalize campaigns based on industries
• Difficulties with lead scoring and routing
• Inaccurate reporting, leading to poor decision-making

Manual standardization isn't scalable or sustainable for maintaining data quality in a growing HubSpot CRM database. It's error-prone and time-consuming, leading to missed opportunities, inefficient processes, and a negative impact on revenue operations.

Let's explore an alternative option to automate industry standardization in HubSpot.

How Insycle Automates Industry Standardization

Why struggle with the unreliable, time-wasting task of manually standardizing industries? It's time to upgrade your workflow with a solution that can automate the process to free your team of headaches and wasted hours of manual data cleaning.

Insycle, a customer data platform that integrates with HubSpot, has a Transform Data module for bulk standardization of industry names and other free-text fields.

With Insycle, you can set filter criteria to narrow down the records you want to update. Then, you can choose the industry names to standardize and define the formatting rules.

You can also preview the changes to ensure they meet your expectations.

After previewing how the update will look, you can then run your template in update mode to push the changes live. Then, Insycle will run through and fix all of your records within minutes, shaving hours off your process.

But don't stop here. Insycle’s HubSpot automation features are where the time, revenue, and headache savings lie. Let’s take a look.

Industry Standardization Automation in HubSpot

The real beauty of Insycle lies in its automation capabilities. After setting up your standardization rules using the Transform Data module, you can save them as a template and schedule them to run automatically on a set schedule—hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly.

For example, every Saturday afternoon, while your teams are at home, Insycle is at work, ensuring new and updated records adhere to your standardization rules. No more manual updates, no more inconsistencies creeping in over time.

Insycle also integrates with HubSpot Workflows, incorporating industry standardization into your existing processes and ensuring properly formatted data throughout the customer's journey with sales, marketing, and customer service, even before your first communication with the customer.

By leveraging Insycle's schedule automation and Workflow integration features, you eliminate the pain points of manual industry standardization:

• No more tedious, time-consuming manual updates
• Reduced risk of human error and inconsistencies
• Increased efficiency and productivity for your teams
• Consistent, reliable data for personalization, segmentation, and reporting

With Insycle, industry standardization becomes a seamless, automated process that runs in the background, allowing you to focus on what matters: driving revenue and making data-driven decisions.

Get Industries Consistent with Insycle's Automated Formatting

In the world of RevOps, data is king. By leveraging powerful data tools like Insycle, you can automate industry standardization, remove manual updates, and ensure your data remains consistent, reliable, and ready to drive revenue.

But Insycle's benefits extend past industry standardization. Insycle can tackle various data quality challenges in HubSpot, from deduplicating contacts and merging records to standardizing job titles, states, and countries. Adopting a comprehensive data management solution allows you to unlock the full potential of your HubSpot database, enabling personalized campaigns, accurate reporting, and data-driven decision-making.

Ready to learn more? Take the first step towards RevOps excellence and discover how you can revolutionize your HubSpot data management today.