HubSpot Optimisation Quick Guide

Answering a few questions could help you determine if your platform requires optimisation. Are your marketing and sales team aligned or do they just share a platform? Is your data healthy? Are your communications timely? Are your leads being converted? If something feels wrong, or too manual, there’s room for optimisation. 

Quick Win 1: Clean up lifecycle stages and lead statuses

Clearly defining your lifecycle stages vs lead statuses is a quick way to see improvements in your portal. With reporting, automation and lead progression all hinging on tidy and consistent lifecycle stages and lead statuses - when these are messy or misused, everything downstream is affected poorly. 

So, what is the difference between them? Lifecycle stages are used to track how contacts or companies move forward in your process (contacts lifespan with your business). The Lead Status property describes the sub-stages within a Sales Qualified Lead lifecycle stage; these sub-stages are used by sales teams to track their outreach.

Existing defaults for lifecycle stages and lead status will live in your HubSpot but if these don’t match your internal terminology or simply don’t make sense to your business - change them and get rid of the stages you don’t use! 

If you don’t understand the difference between Lifecycle Stages and Lead Status, it’s more than likely your team will not be using them correctly. That’s why this part is important to get right.

Quick Win 2: Automate internal notifications for sales handoff

Relying on manual emails or message threads to complete a marketing to sales handoff leaves you open to delays in outreach and missed opportunities. The longer a lead is left without outreach, the less likely they are to follow through with a purchase, it’s as simple as that.

Setting up automations that are triggered by lifecycle stage or deal stage to send internal notifications to sales teams can ensure no leads slip through the cracks -  increasing conversion rates. Automation is a quick and easy way to transform your sales handoff. 

Set up workflows to:

• Send notification when an MQL/SQL is created 
• Create task for sales teams 
• Send a Slack message when a form is submitted
• Notify sales teams when a deal is created 

💡Include deadlines in tasks and useful information, so the sales team doesn't need to search for anything. It’s at their finger tips.

Quick Win 3: Set up a basic lead scoring model

How does your sales team know which leads are most likely to convert? Who do they prioritise? HubSpot’s AI lead scoring can help your team understand which leads to focus on and disregard those that may not be a great fit. A basic lead scoring model can be set up on a contact and/or company basis (a total of 5 lead scores can be set). There’s two types of scores you can create: ‘Engagement Score’ to see high intent leads most likely to convert and/or a ‘Fit Score’ to see who's the best fit for your company. 

Contacts are scored based on their actions (engagement score) or characteristics (fit score). Once your contacts start adding to their scoring, you can set up workflows to automatically push contacts through lifecycle stages based on their engagement scores or create a custom property that combines both scores to get an overall lead score (we can help with this!). 

💡Top tip: set up scoring thresholds and automate assignment of lead labels based on these. Sales teams will know which leads are cold, warm or hot!

Quick Win 4: Build a simple closed-won reporting dashboard

Sales teams are most effective when they can see the impact of their efforts. Tracking performance over time and understanding what’s driving results creates visibility. A well-designed closed-won dashboard celebrates wins and outlines patterns so that sales teams can sell smarter. 

Without a clear line of sight into what’s working, your team risks focusing on activity over outcomes, missing trends, and repeating inefficiencies. Creating a central dashboard that includes reports highlighting closed won deals, deals by rep and total revenue generated, makes it visible and actionable for sales teams to understand what is working. 

Create a dashboard that includes: 

• Total revenue this month/quarter/year.
• Deals won by rep.
• Average deal size.
• Win rate by source or lifecycle stage.

💡Include this dashboard in the Sales Workspace to make it easily accessible to your team! You can set up an automation that sends the dashboard out weekly to team members for visibility too.  

Quick Win 5: Start using AI tools 

AI tools can save your team countless hours a week. Imagine what they can do with those additional hours? Strategic decisions and planning wouldn’t be taking a back burner anymore - it could be at the forefront of your business. 

HubSpot Breeze CoPilot and Agents can help you with content creation, sales activities, or prospecting. The key is to start small and test. Create a landing page or case study using HubSpot Content Agent, give it a go - see how productive it is after a week. If you don’t see the value (which we doubt you won’t!), there's no harm done! 

Download Our 1-Page Cheat Sheet

Throwing more contacts, content, or cash into a messy HubSpot portal won’t move the needle. Instead, tighten up the essentials first. With this guide, start actioning some quick wins to help optimise your HubSpot; in just a few changes, your CRM can shorten sales cycles, improve reporting visibility, reduce manual tasks and align marketing and sales - it’s the ultimate guide to improving your portal. 

Need a one-page version of this to print or share with your team? Perfect for your next team meeting or portal tidy-up session.