How long has it been since you took a long, hard look at your CRM?
Chances are that through a series of misuses due to staff turnover, changing business goals, and new strategies, your CRM HubSpot might start to resemble a crime scene.
Given the critically central role played by CRM in any modern business, we can expect a punishment for each crime committed in the form of business impact, which we will highlight in the following article.
- Data Murder (Poor Data Hygiene): the most heinous crime in a CRM system is the entry of poor, inaccurate, or outdated data; this can lead to misinformed decisions, ineffective marketing strategies, and lost sales opportunities.
- Process Tampering (Inefficient Workflows): if HubSpot’s workflows and processes are not set up efficiently or are overly complex, it can lead to lost productivity, hot leads and opportunities falling through the cracks of your CRM, and frustration in your revenue teams.
- Communication Obstruction (Lack of Integration): this is when your CRM isn’t integrating well with other tools, which can lead to siloed information, inefficiencies, and a disjointed customer experience.
- Lead Abandonment (Poor Lead Management): Failing to properly track and nurture leads you spent so much effort and marketing dollars to generate is a major crime; this can be due to a lousy nurturing strategy, poor contact segmentation, and counterproductive incentive structures. Lead abandonment and neglect can result in lost sales, decreased conversion rates, and a poor return on investment for marketing efforts.
- Reporting Fraud (Inaccurate Reporting): if the CRM’s reporting tools look like Al Capone’s accounting books, you might be basing your business decisions on the wrong data. The best-case scenario is that your data is accurately collected, but it’s being misinterpreted; this can lead to misguided strategies, wasted resources, and an inability to accurately gauge your marketing campaigns and sales activity performance.
- User Disengagement (Lack of User Adoption): this is when team members don’t fully use or engage with HubSpot, sometimes even running their own personal Excel CRM or reporting; this leads to incomplete data, underutilization of HubSpot’s capabilities, legal data handling liabilities, and lost opportunities when these team members leave.
- Training Negligence (Inadequate Training): inadequate training on HubSpot’s tools results in a slow ramp-up of new team members, underperformance, frustration, and a poor return on the CRM investment.
- Toxic Waste Dumping (CRM assets hygiene): having too many unused lists, “copy-of-copy” of forms, landing pages, marketing emails, sales email sequences, workflows, unused templates, and reports. Your HubSpot portal starts resembling a spaghetti bowl, and you don’t know where to start deleting stuff; this slows down your marketing and sales teams, and, as a direct consequence, campaigns take longer to plan and launch.
In each of these scenarios, the impact on the business can be significant, ranging from lost revenue and poor customer experiences to internal inefficiencies and a damaged reputation. Addressing these “crimes” promptly and effectively is crucial for maintaining a healthy, productive HubSpot portal environment and a clear path ahead that helps you move faster to your business goals.
