Teardown: a portal full of the usual mess
I set up a test HubSpot portal and loaded it with the problems I see most often: 258 contacts, 32 companies and a few deals. Then I surveyed it the way I'd survey yours, fixed it, and surveyed it again.
It's a test portal, not a client, so I can show everything. The numbers below are straight from it.
Survey sheet Test portal
- ✗Contacts with no owner257
- ✗Ways of spelling 3 countries10
- ✗Duplicate companies11
- ✗Companies with no industry29
- ✓Lifecycle stage setall
What the survey found
Five problems worth fixing, and two things that were fine. Fine gets reported too.
The country problem, up close
This is the one I find in almost every portal. Country is a free text field, so every import and every form adds its own version.
Filter a list on "United Kingdom" and you get 29 people out of 108. Build a UK campaign on that and three quarters of the audience never gets it.
The fix
1. Filter each spelling and bulk edit it to one value.
2. Switch forms to HubSpot's country dropdown so it can't drift again.
3. Add a workflow that tidies any stragglers from imports.
About 20 minutes for this portal. A couple of hours for a big one, mostly checking edge cases.
The fix list
Worst first, with how long each would take on this portal.
| Fix | Why it matters | Time | Severity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Give every contact an owner, and add a rotation so new ones get one automatically | Unowned leads don't get followed up, and agents route work by owner | 15 min | High |
| Standardise country to one spelling per country | Lists, reports and territories are quietly wrong | 20 min | High |
| Merge the 11 duplicate companies | Split history, double counting, confused reps | 20 min | High |
| Fill in industry on the 29 companies missing it | Needed for segmenting, scoring and AI | 30 min | Medium |
| Add job title to forms | Stops the gap growing | 10 min | Low |
Part two: after the clean-up
I worked through the fix list on the same portal, then re-ran the same checks. About an hour and a half, start to finish.
| Check | Before | After | What I did |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contacts with no owner | 257 of 258 | 0 | Assigned every contact an owner. This portal only has one user; in a real one I'd split them by territory or team and add a rotation for new ones. |
| Spellings of 3 countries | 10 | 3 | Standardised 233 contacts to United Kingdom, Ireland and United States. The 25 blanks stay blank: there was nothing reliable to fill them from, and guessing is worse than empty. |
| Duplicate companies | 11 of 32 | 0 | Merged 12 records into their originals (the 11 domain pairs plus a stray "Hull Uni" with no domain). Contacts and history moved across. 32 companies became 20. |
| Companies with no industry | 29 of 32 | 2 of 20 | Filled in industry where the company made it obvious. Two are left for the owner to confirm, because a wrong industry is worse than a missing one. |
| Contacts with no company | 0 | 0 | Already fine, and still fine after the merges. |
What I noticed along the way
Two companies had an industry filled in that doesn't match their name: an analytics company down as biotech, and a health company down as software. A count-based check can't see that. A person reading the records can, which is why the survey has both.
Job titles (62 missing) I left alone on purpose. That's a form fix, not a data fix: make it a field people fill in and the gap stops growing.
Still to do in a real Reset
1. Swap the country field on forms for a dropdown so it can't drift again.
2. Add an owner rotation for new contacts.
3. Turn on duplicate rules for companies on import.
Fixing the data is half of it. The other half is stopping it coming back.
What would yours show?
The free health check runs the same kind of survey on your portal: a score out of 100 and the three biggest problems.