My Top 2 Time-Saving, Data Quality Solutions for HubSpot

COVID-19 is changing the way businesses and people are functioning all around the world. In fact, most people in our industry, including myself, are working remotely. Marketers and salespeople are finding it more difficult to generate new opportunities because people and businesses have hunkered down and closed their wallets to focus on conserving cash. In my case, it’s given me a bit more time to complete the tasks that I’ve procrastinated on.

At Hashmap we leverage HubSpot as our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) sales and marketing application. HubSpot’s a true SaaS application, priced cost-effectively, simple to learn and use, and just works really well for us and thousands of other companies. Within it, we maintain all contacts, companies, opportunities, marketing campaigns, and other information that is vital to our daily operation as a boutique consulting services firm focused on data and cloud solutions.

Since starting at Hashmap last year, I have come to realize just how much data quality matters. With that, I would like to share the two main data quality problems that I ran into with our HubSpot service, and how I went about solving them.

To be clear, the issues have nothing to do with the actual HubSpot software but speak to the challenges of maintaining high levels of data quality in general for your organization.

Missing Information on Contact Records

When I first joined Hashmap in 2019, I quickly realized that basic information on a portion of the contacts within our HubSpot account was nonexistent. To be specific, many of our contacts were missing key information such as job titles, first names, and last names — an example is below.

While these types of contacts (ones with missing information) only made up a small portion of our overall records, it still affected our ability to automate and send targeted marketing emails.

This missing data created one huge problem for us — it limited our ability to accurately send and automate marketing emails with key information for our clients, prospects, and partners.

Accuracy of Personalization Tokens

HubSpot has a feature known as “personalization tokens”. These tokens allow a marketing or sales hub user to personalize content for contacts by cross-referencing the existing information within the service.

For example, “First name” tokens enable emails to address all contacts by their first name. Knowing that some of our contacts were missing their first and last names, I could not be certain any emails I sent were properly addressed to the recipient. If I sent out marketing emails to a group of contacts within a company or region and inserted a first name token and one hundred of those contacts were missing their first name, then one hundred contacts would end up receiving an email in the form of “Hello robert.smith@gmail.com” when it should have been addressed as “Hello Robert”.

Similarly, if contacts were missing job titles it would affect my ability to connect with them on a personal level. These may not seem like huge problems, but I really strive to have meaningful, personalize interactions with everyone that I reach out to.

Missing Information on Companies

The second major issue I ran into when first beginning to dig into the problems of our HubSpot account was in the data quality of companies (customers and prospects) that were in HubSpot.

One of the great features of HubSpot is it automatically cross-references email address URLs to create new companies. So if I want to add jane.doe@xcompany.com as a contact, HubSpot will generate a new company record for “X Company” and fill in basic information such as the logo, industry, revenue, description, the location of its headquarters, etc.

If I already have an existing company record for “X Company” then that new contact will simply be added to the existing company record. While this feature is very cool, it posed one serious problem for us because there are times where HubSpot in unable to gather data for smaller companies due to an inability to confirm the URL or create an accurate match.

Ultimately we ended up with a number of company records that were missing industry, city, state, and other core information that we use regularly for targeted sales and marketing campaigns.

An example is the first sample company in the screenshot below.

At first glance, this doesn’t look very problematic. If I want to attain relevant information on this company, however, I now have to go outside of HubSpot. I prefer being able to access all of the data that I need inside of HubSpot as our system of record for sales and marketing, so I found a solution.

Solving for Data Quality in HubSpot

As noted previously, the core issue of these two problems — the accuracy of personalization tokens and missing company information — is the fact that my data quality is not where it needs to be.

Inaccurate data within HubSpot will ultimately contribute to miscommunications that will affect future opportunities for our firm.

Applying Smart Lists for Better Data Quality on Contacts

While both the problems described are similar, each must be approached differently based on current HubSpot capabilities. For instance, if you have contacts missing first and last names, and also job titles, then the easiest way to update these contacts is by creating a smart list and filter them using specified criteria like the image below.

The first filter finds all contacts with first names that are unknown, the second filter finds all contacts with last names that are unknown, and the third filter finds all contacts with job titles that are unknown.

Once all of the data has been aggregated into the list, specify the columns you want to be displayed on your contact records, and download the smart list as an XLSX file so that you can update it with the relevant information via Excel. Once the appropriate changes have been made to the XLSX file, import it into HubSpot and the data on those specific contacts will be updated.

Applying Filters and a Little Excel for Company DQ

Notably, smart lists only display contacts so they cannot be used to show a list of company records. This means that companies can only be filtered in the company view.

Once the proper filters have been applied to the company view, those records can be exported and updated through excel and imported back into HubSpot in the same way as the contact records.

One important factor to note is that smart lists are not mandatory. The contact and company view in HubSpot have the exact same filters that are used in smart lists. I find smart lists much easier to use, however, when it comes to filtering records in HubSpot.

So Why Use Excel as Part of the DQ Process?

Right now you might be wondering why you can’t just update records within HubSpot — the answer is load time.

If I need to update the information on 50 records, I will have to click on that record and wait for the page to load. The average time I calculated for a HubSpot page to load was around six seconds. So if I have to wait six seconds to update a record and another six seconds to return to the previous page, I have burned a total of 12 seconds for each record I need to update (this is in addition to the time required regardless to make the record changes for the necessary fields).

This might not sound like a large amount of time, but 12 x 50 = 600 seconds which is 10 minutes of additional time burned updating records in HubSpot. If you have more than 50 records to update, this number increases linearly and can really take up a big portion of your day.

With this in mind, make sure you always export your data if you need to update records in bulk.

Wrapping Up

I hope my experience and approach helps you manage your data quality more efficiently within HubSpot. Maintaining clean data will help you have more impactful interactions with your contacts, and it will keep you from having to do huge bulk updates.

And remember to be sure and spend some time each day to cleanse out bad records so that you don’t fall behind.

Feel free to share on other channels and be sure and keep up with all new content from Hashmap here.

Luke Kline is a Sales Development Representative with Hashmap using HubSpot every day while helping customers drive meaningful business outcomes in Data, Cloud, IoT, and AI/ML solutions and services.