7 Common Hubspot Setup Pitfalls: How to Avoid them and Why Hiring a Strategic HubSpot Consultant Matters

Introduction: Setting up HubSpot, the powerful all-in-one marketing, sales, CRM, and customer service platform, is an exciting step toward maximizing your company's growth potential. Often businesses try to set it up themselves and recruit an in-house resource too early, which can lead to several common issues that hinder your HubSpot implementation and ROI. In this blog, we will explore common challenges that often occur, and we will provide actionable tips to address these issues effectively to ensure you can achieve accurate reporting, maintain clean data, and get the most out of your Hubspot implementation by getting the setup and process right at the start.

1. Data Inconsistencies and Duplicate Reporting: One significant challenge many find is pulling reliable reports due to data inaccuracies. This is often caused by incorrectly set up workflows and sometimes a need for better understanding of how certain fields will be used in reporting later. Lack of maintenance and Data imported in a hurry without knowing essential import requirements often results in duplicate companies and contacts. This leads to data inconsistencies and inaccurate reporting, as duplicate entries may count as separate entities, skewing your metrics. A HubSpot consultant can advise on deduplication strategies and establish data maintenance best practices to maintain clean and reliable data.

Actionable Tip: Regularly perform data deduplication exercises and establish monthly data maintenance protocols to prevent duplicate entries and ensure accurate reporting.

2. Missing Data and Lack of Senior Management Training: Without proper senior management training, valuable data is often missing from HubSpot. Senior executives often play a crucial role in driving sales and fostering customer relationships. A strategic HubSpot consultant can design customized training programs to ensure senior management is equipped with the necessary skills to use HubSpot effectively and input crucial data for reporting and decision-making.

Actionable Tip: Arrange comprehensive training sessions for senior management to ensure their active involvement in HubSpot and accurate data input.

3. Inability to Send Targeted Emails: Many face challenges in sending targeted emails to specific subsets of their database. For example, to send emails to the C-suite, you need to capture job titles and seniority information during form submissions and create workflows to tag relevant contacts accordingly. Often businesses will have over 1,000+ unique job titles in the database, so creating a seniority keyword framework & workflow will allow you to send personalized and targeted emails to specific segments of your database. It is also useful for Leadscoring.

Actionable Tip: Get help to develop a segmentation strategy, make sure you capture relevant data through forms and create workflows to tag contacts based on job titles and seniority.

4. Underutilization of Advanced HubSpot Features: HubSpot offers a wide range of advanced features and tools that can drive significant growth. However, a junior or mid-weight resources can often lack the knowledge and understanding to leverage these features effectively. Getting help from a HubSpot expert can help you unlock the full potential of HubSpot by identifying and implementing advanced features tailored to your business needs.

Actionable Tip: Engage a HubSpot consultant to assess your setup against your business requirements and ask them to recommend advanced features that align with your growth objectives.

5. Inefficient Integration with Other Systems: Integrating HubSpot with other systems, such as a Salesforce CRM or customer support platforms, usually requires expertise to ensure smooth data flow and synchronization. Don't ask Junior resources to do this on their own. There is deep technical knowledge needed for seamless integration. 

Actionable Tip: Spend time assessing your integration needs and getting guidance to ensure your data remains synchronized across platforms.

6. Ineffective Lead Scoring and Qualification: Developing a robust lead scoring and qualification system requires a deep understanding of your sales process, funnel stages, target audience, buyer personas, and lead engagement patterns. Mid-weight resources often need help to design an effective lead scoring framework. A HubSpot consultant can help you create a lead scoring model that accurately identifies and prioritizes high-quality leads for your sales team, improving conversion rates and revenue generation.

Actionable Tip: Spend time understanding what criteria the sales team uses when determining whether a lead or company fits the ideal customer profile. I'd recommend getting a HubSpot expert to develop a lead scoring model that aligns with your business goals and accurately qualifies leads. Also, consider doing this in Phases.

7. Lack of Proactive Monitoring and Optimization: A common pitfall of relying solely on often overstretched or junior resources to proactively monitor and optimize your HubSpot setup on an ongoing basis. Data is constantly changing, and issues can arise quickly & often out of sight. An external freelance Hubspot expert can teach you the everyday things to look for and ensure junior resources have the correct list of tasks to complete regularly.

Actionable Tip: Get a list of regular monitoring and optimization tasks and make sure they have the time and support to know which to prioritise. Regularly spot check your for common issues like duplicate companies due to additional domains or territories. Parent & subsidiary companies, non work email addresses. . Do an export of all contact, company & deal data. Do some analysis using pivot tables to check dirty data isn’t creeping in.

Conclusion: While hiring an in-house junior or mid-weight resource early in your HubSpot journey may be tempting, the potential pitfalls can outweigh the benefits. It's worth engaging a strategic HubSpot consultant first, so you gain access to expertise, strategic thinking, and actionable guidance to avoid common challenges and maximize your HubSpot investment. With their assistance, you can ensure accurate reporting, maintain clean data, send targeted emails, optimize lead nurturing, leverage advanced features, integrate systems seamlessly, improve lead scoring, and foster effective collaboration. Getting the setup and process right at the start with the support of a HubSpot consultant will set your business on the path to success and unlock the full potential of HubSpot for accelerated growth.

Further Reading

Sarah Joy