What I Fix First in Any Messy HubSpot Database (Before Touching a Single Workflow)

You don’t build a house on a cracked foundation, yet that’s exactly what a lot of companies do when it comes to their HubSpot portal. Instead of cleaning up the basics, they jump into building new automations, nurture campaigns, or complex reports—only to find that none of it works right.

I’ve seen dozens of messy portals across numerous industries, both B2B, B2C, and nonprofits. And the problems are almost always the same, no matter what the industry.

Here’s what I fix first, every single time.

1. Standardize Job Titles

Contact segmentation is useless when your job title field is a free-text Wild West.

You’ll see things like a Vice President abbreviated (VP), hyphenated (Vice-President), or punctuated (V.P.) All of these formats are correct but in a CRM, this diversity makes it impossible to segment a list by job titles or run accurate lifecycle analytics.

✅ Fix: Normalize common roles into a standardized format. OR, based on what titles are making decisions on purchasing your product or service, you can create a new field with job title categories, such as C-Suite, VPs, Directors, etc.

2. Merge Duplicates

Duplicate contacts = fractured engagement history, missed attribution, and sales reps stepping on each other’s toes.

It’s especially common when sales or marketing teams import contact lists (such as a conference list), sales reps enter leads manually without checking that the contact may already exist in the database, or your CRM is connected to event platforms, form fills, or chatbots. Honestly, creating dup contacts or companies are almost impossible to avoid.

✅ Fix: Use HubSpot’s deduplication tool + set a cadence for ongoing cleanup. (I usually merge dups at least once a quarter.)

3. Fill In Obvious Missing Fields

Your lead scoring, workflows, and personalization break down when key fields such as job titles, emails, industry, lifecycle stage, and company size are left blank.

✅ Fix: I fill in the obvious gaps by looking up missing personal info on the company website, LinkedIn profile, or other platforms. Those areas I can’t fill in I generate a gap analysis for your sales and marketing team to review and fill in.

4. Clean Up Lifecycle Stages

One of the most abused features in HubSpot is the lifecycle stage field. When this field is not updated based on where the individual is in their sales journey, this wrecks reporting, automation triggers, and marketing ROI analysis.

✅ Fix: Rebuild lifecycle definitions to match your actual buyer’s journey. Then audit and reassign stages across your contact base before turning workflows back on.

5. Update Non-Marketing Contacts

Companies on the edge of their HubSpot tier limit often find themselves panicking about contact count. But here's the trick: just leverage HubSpot’s new non-marketing contact tool.

✅ Fix: Reclassify contacts as non-marketing if they’ve bounced, unsubscribed, if they are internal contacts that should not receive promotions, or are clearly inactive but should not be pulled from the database altogether. Doing this will gives you breathing room without losing valuable contact history.

6. Clear Out the Zombie Lists

I often find hundreds of lists unlabeled, unused, or copied from an old campaign, making it a bear to easily find the list you might need at the moment.

✅ Fix: A low-risk way to declutter and make your portal way easier to navigate is to just archive or delete duplicate lists, test lists, unused lists (over 9 months), or static lists with 3 or less contacts. assets. (Oh, and that goes for properties, objects, and images in the library as well!)

7. Clean up Forms

You’d be surprised how many forms route to nowhere—or how many notifications send alerts to people who don’t work at the company anymore.

✅ Fix: Check which forms are live on your site, confirm they’re linked to the right workflows, and then update notification settings, as appropriate.

8. Tag Internal Contacts

Dashboard reports and charts get skewed when staff activity is included in campaign stats.

✅ Fix: Tag staff with a custom “Internal = Yes” property OR create a new field that identifies them from those whose activity should be tracked (volunteers, prospects, customer/member, or lapsed customer/members). Then update your dashboards and workflows to exclude them.

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The Bottom Line

Before you spend time building new lead nurture sequences or fancy dashboards, get the basics right.

Cleaning your database:

• Makes your automations work

• Restores trust in your reports

• Helps sales and marketing move faster

• Often extends your HubSpot contract life without paying more

At Huzzah Marketing, we specialize in untangling messy HubSpot portals so you can stop duct-taping your CRM and start using it like the revenue engine it’s meant to be. Email us at kim@HUzzahLLC.com to start with a no-judgment audit that will show you exactly what’s costing you deals, data, or marketing performance.