How to Clean Data in HubSpot with the Operations Hub

17 Nov 2022

Without a clean database, your marketing campaigns, reports and deals will lead to skewed figures and questionable estimations - a little counterproductive when you consider that critical business decisions and investments are made based on the data you collect. Yet, many companies keep making do with dirty data because they can't find an efficient way to maintain and update their CRM. That's where the HubSpot Operations Hub can quickly become your best friend. Automating the data cleaning process and actively keeping on top of all the new information your marketing efforts gather will help you maximise results and scale your business without chaos.

How can bad data affect your business?

You chose the HubSpot CRM because you wanted to leverage the power of data. But, without a solid data hygiene strategy, you may end up with:

Irrelevant campaigns that aren't effectively personalised.
Inaccurate lead scoring due to poor information in the CRM.
A high-friction sales process as your team wastes time and effort on cold leads.

All of these issues could tarnish your reputation as customers will quickly get the sense that you're not really paying attention to them on an individual level and that your business is disorganised or unprofessional.

What is data cleaning?

The process of correcting or getting rid of incomplete, corrupted and duplicate data is known as data cleaning (or data scrubbing).

The goal is to create a dataset that's accurate and applicable.

Correcting mistakes and standardising how data is entered into your CRM will help contextualise key information and ensure you're making powerful data-based decisions for your business. Ultimately, customers and employees will benefit from a more productive and focused buyer's journey.

Dive deeper into data cleaning by watching a recent HubSpot User Group we hosted. The BEE team shows you how to spring-clean your data and apply some essential best practices.

How to Clean Data in HubSpot

What is the Operations Hub?

Part of the HubSpot platform, the Operations Hub provides a suite of tools that will supercharge your HubSpot CRM. You can sync, clean and curate customer data — the Operations Hub allows you to automatically fix date properties, format names, and cut down on the time-consuming manual data cleanup activities that prevented you from reaping the benefits of a fully optimised CRM.

Designed to simplify data management and make it easier for everyone in your company to access and utilise data, you'll benefit from improved integrations, process automation, robust data quality and prep tools. The Operations Hub will help you to create an aligned strategy for cleaning and connecting data to key systems.

How the Operations Hub helps you achieve clean data

Clean data is essential for an effective data analytics process. Operations Hub provides you with the tools and features you need to create a robust system that you can manage and maintain in-house. Here are three key elements that help you do this.

Data Sync
Connect your business apps to HubSpot with the Operations Hub's Data Sync tool — no coding required. You can access future and historic data between the application and HubSpot. Real-time, continuous synchronisation is possible in both directions, or you can customise the integration to sync only the data you want.

This feature is available on the free version of the HubSpot platform and helps to make filtering and data syncing an intuitive and straightforward task. A recommended best practice is to do a monthly check of connected apps and sync activities and address any alerts.

Programmable Automation
Traditionally, HubSpot automation meant that you could only add steps using the drag-and-drop features. The Operations Hub Programmable Automation feature (available in the pro version), however, allows you to add custom code in workflow steps. Use a single tool to automate processes without the lockins of other rigid solutions. The added bonus is that HubSpot's CRM keeps your data secure and protected since everything happens on the platform, preventing the risk that comes with exposure to third-party services.

Data Quality Automation
Large contact lists are nearly impossible to manually clean — its time consuming, inefficient, and not scalable. The pro version of the Operations Hub allows you to use workflows to clean up your data. For example, you can include proper capitalisation of names, format phone numbers and fix date properties. Ultimately, your correctly formatted data will be reflected across all the other business applications you use, ensuring that a high standard of data quality is applied, saving your team time and eliminating friction.

When automation is turned on, any current records with formatted issues will automatically be corrected — this means proposed changes to a record with an issue will always be accepted.

If you're taking a data-driven approach to your sales and marketing, the quality of your data will determine how successful each action you undertake is. Operations Hub can help you manage the vast amount of data your business takes in and ensure that it's clean, connected and usable.

Challenging app integrations and difficulty standardising processes are some common friction points for HubSpot users, but with the Operations Hub, it's now easier than ever to ensure everything is running smoothly, and common data issues (think names with lowercase letters, formats and duplicates) are nipped in the bud as part of your data optimisation system working quietly in the background. You can enrich the customer data you already hold using third-party data to trigger actions and control the data that gets synced to records within HubSpot. Interested in learning more about our tool enablement services for digital marketing? Let's start a conversation here.