Our first installment of our “Improving Your HubSpot ROI” series discussed the importance of organizing your approach and aligning your sales and marketing teams. While these two steps will go a long way to maximize your HubSpot usage, successful marketers use a few other steps to get the most bang for their buck.
Hopefully, if you followed the advice in this post, you’ve already asked the tough organizational questions that help structure your marketing goals and plans. But the organizing isn’t quite done yet. Our next step to improving your HubSpot ROI involves your legacy prospect and customer database. That’s right—it’s time to get lean and clean.
First things first: You need to assess the condition of your database. Here are nine questions to get you started.
If you have to comb through all the unusable leads to get to those that actually matter, you’re already setting yourself back. Once leads no longer are accurate or ready to be engaged, there’s no reason to keep them in your database.
One inaccurate record is bad enough, but if you have duplicate records that are so conflicting, you can’t even tell what data is correct and you’re really in trouble.
Considering how often people change jobs or retire, chances are some of your contact information is out-of-date.
Since one of the biggest advantages of HubSpot’s software is conducting highly targeted campaigns, you want your database to be in the best shape possible to launch effective campaigns.
If you’ve divided your databases by divisions or product lines, you’ll need to start making a plan for merging this information and determining how best to use them separately.
You may have evolved what you track in your database over time. If so, you’ll need to make sure all of your entries have remained consistent and accurate throughout various transitions.
The more information you’ve collected, the more informed your marketing and lead nurturing process will be. Knowing whether or not you have this information—as well as where it is stored so you can use it effectively—can put you on the right track from the start.
Once you’ve gone through the process of answering the above questions and cleaning your database, it’s time to get it loaded into HubSpot’s Sales and Marketing software.
Integrating all the pieces of your marketing platform helps ensure that no details are overlooked and you’re in the best position for success.
Still not convinced it’s important to have a lean and clean legacy prospect and customer database? This next section is for you.
If you want to make your investment in HubSpot software worthwhile, improving the accuracy, organization and health of your database is one of the most important things you can do. It might seem like having outdated entries isn’t that big of a deal—after all, you can still find the quality leads, so what does it matter if they’re surrounded by a few outdated entries?
Well, it turns out it actually matters quite a bit. Companies spend an estimated $100 per record maintaining their database. That means if you have 100,000 records and even just 10 percent are inaccurate, you’re spending $1 million more than necessary.
Aside from being a money saver, a lean and clean database also has the following benefits:
And, with all of those improvements, you’re also likely to see an improvement to your bottom line—which means you’ll see a higher HubSpot ROI.
Cleaning up and organizing your database is likely one of those tasks you intended to get around to, but always seems to fall to the bottom of the to-do list. By making it a priority sooner rather than later, you can start reaping the benefits of streamlined processes and healthy data storage today.
Ready to get more out of your HubSpot investment? Learn even more tips with our free eBook, Improve Your HubSpot ROI: 100+ Questions to Ask.
