Every HubSpot account I open looks different on the surface. The dashboards are different colours, the pipelines have different names, the contacts are in different states of disrepair.
But the mistakes? The mistakes are nearly always the same seven.
I've audited a lot of HubSpot accounts now, across very different businesses, and I've started keeping a tally. Some are scaled-up service businesses doing seven-figure revenue. Some are early-stage startups still finding their feet. The pattern is the same. Different industries, different price points, same broken plumbing underneath.
Here's what keeps coming up.
When SMEs buy HubSpot, they usually do it for one of three reasons. They've outgrown a spreadsheet. They've been told they "need a CRM". Or someone sold them on the idea that automation would magically fix their pipeline.
What happens next is predictable. The trial gets set up by whoever happens to be free that week. A few fields get added. A pipeline gets sketched out. Maybe an automation or two gets switched on because someone watched a HubSpot Academy video on a Friday afternoon. And then it stops.
Eighteen months later, I get the call. Usually it's because reporting has stopped making sense, or because the sales team have lost faith in the pipeline, or because email performance has fallen off a cliff. The symptoms vary. The root cause is almost always the same set of foundational mistakes.
1. Lifecycle stages set up backwards. People mark contacts as "Customer" the moment they enquire, which means every report on conversion is broken from day one. I've seen accounts where 80% of the database is tagged as "Customer" and the actual paying customer count is a tenth of that. Every funnel report that exec team looks at is meaningless. Nobody notices because the numbers look big.
2. No lead source tracking. Without it, you cannot tell which marketing channels are actually working. Most accounts have this field, but it's empty or set to "Other" on 80% of records. The result is you've spent five years building up a CRM and you still cannot answer the most basic marketing question: where did this customer come from?
3. Duplicate contacts everywhere. Same person, three records, all with slightly different data. Different email addresses, slightly different name spellings, different phone formats. Nobody owns the cleanup. Every email send goes out two or three times to the same person. Every report double-counts. Trust in the data quietly evaporates.
4. Automation loops that nobody's checked in months. Workflows still firing for products that no longer exist. Sequences still emailing people who unsubscribed two years ago because someone built a workflow that bypassed the unsubscribe logic. Welcome flows triggering for existing customers because the entry criteria were never tightened up. This is the one that genuinely embarrasses people when I show them what's running.
5. Pipelines built for the salesperson, not the customer. Stages like "Hot lead" and "Warm lead" that mean different things to different people, with no exit criteria. A deal sits in "Negotiation" for six months and nobody can say what would actually move it to "Closed Won". Pipelines should be built around the customer's buying process, not the seller's mood.
6. Forms that don't talk to the CRM properly. Submissions land, but the data doesn't map to the right properties. Job title goes into a generic notes field. Industry isn't captured at all. The form looks fine to the customer, but everything downstream is broken. Segmentation becomes impossible because the data isn't where it needs to be.
7. No reporting structure. Dashboards full of widgets that nobody looks at, while the three numbers that actually matter aren't on a screen anywhere. Or worse, dashboards built by an admin two years ago that the leadership team have stopped trusting because the methodology was never documented.
Most SMEs treat these mistakes as low priority. Things to sort out one day, when there's time. The truth is they're costing real money every month they're left.
Bad lifecycle data means marketing spend gets attributed to the wrong channels, so budgets shift in the wrong direction. Duplicate contacts inflate your HubSpot bill (you pay per marketable contact) and damage your sender reputation. Broken automation creates customer experience disasters that you find out about when someone forwards you the angry email.
When I worked at The Jockey Club running CRO across a £40m+ ecommerce estate, the difference between a clean data foundation and a messy one was measured in seven figures of revenue. The stakes are smaller in an SME, but proportionally the same. A 5% lift in lead quality, applied to a year of marketing spend, pays for the cleanup ten times over.
The good news is that none of this requires a six-month transformation programme. Most HubSpot accounts I work with can have these seven issues meaningfully addressed in a focused week or two of work.
The order I usually run it is:
That's a sequence, not a menu. Doing them out of order tends to mean redoing earlier steps.
If your HubSpot account has been running for more than a year and nobody's properly audited it, there will be at least three of these in there. Probably more.
The good news is that fixing them is rarely a six-month project. The bad news is that nobody's going to do it for you unless you make the time, or bring in someone whose job it is.
What does your HubSpot account look like under the bonnet? If you've inherited a setup that nobody trusts, get in touch. Happy to take a look.