The 10 Question HubSpot Self Audit for Fran Dev
Conduct your own audit of HubSpot. Is your Franchise getting what it needs?
In This Executive Brief
Technical audits of HubSpot—checking what features you’re not using, what’s configured wrong, what you’re paying for but not getting—are useful. But they’re not the most important audit.
The most important HubSpot audit is one you can conduct without any help: Asking whether it is delivering the business value you need. Here are 10 questions you can ask to start your own audit.
Why This Matters
The 10 questions in this Brief let you audit your own HubSpot implementation by diagnosing where you’re getting leverage and where you’re not. Answer them honestly. Investigate the “no” answers. That’s where you’re missing business value.
This is far more important than whether you have a specific setting configured correctly (which is what most HubSpot audits focus on).
Some gaps you can fix yourself. Some need franchise-focused HubSpot expertise. But knowing where the gaps are is how you start getting real value from the tool you’re already paying for.
The 10 Question Self Audit
For Franchise Sales
Is there a single report that captures signings projected for this month that everyone uses and agrees on?
There should be only one source of truth in your sales process. The data. Not 5 different spreadsheets. Not guesses. Not feelings. And no “that report is wrong” allowed. If the data is right, the report is right.
A well defined process that is being followed produces franchise sales outcomes and data that tells you exactly what is going on.
Without that, you end up with 10 different stories about how things are going, no accountability and no ability to forecast outcomes.
Does the sales team have actionable insight about the state of the pipeline?
Knowing how many open leads you have in each stage of the pipeline is important but not enough to run an effective due diligence process.
If HubSpot is well configured, you’re automatically collecting all the data your Reps need to understand what’s going on in your Franchise Sales pipeline:
Which Prospects are actively engaging in the diligence process
Which Deals have stalled
Where your Deals are bottlenecking
Which Prospects in your pipeline are the best fit for your Franchise
etc.
Without that data at their fingertips prospects fall through the cracks, your process becomes reactive, your pipeline is black box, and your leadership has no visibility into what is impacting your signings.
Can you see the contributions of Broker networks and individual brokers and are you nurturing relationships with those Brokers?
Developing mutually beneficial relationships with Brokers requires more than the occasional update about a current lead. And you need more visibility that how many current leads are sourced from Brokers.
How leads has an individual Broker brought your Franchise?
How many of those have you Won?
Which Brokers have the most Wins? The highest Win Rate?
Have any consistent producers gone silent?
Are you regularly communicating with your Brokers?
Are you regularly communicating 1:1 with your best Brokers?
If you don’t have the data, you have to go on guesses. That’s no way to grow your Franchise or to develop strong, mutually beneficial relationships with Brokers.
For Marketing
Can Marketing see Lead volume by Lead Source, Vendor, and critical dimensions?
Hopefully you have new leads coming in from lots of different sources. Your Franchise website, paid search ads, paid social ads, AI, LinkedIn, organic social media, etc. You also have vendors managing some or all of those channels.
You need to know a lot about lead sources to understand what is happening, diagnose problems, and find opportunities. It isn’t enough to just know a lead is from a paid source or not. Or which vendor. Getting a picture of how a lead interacts with your marketing isn’t optional.
If you haven’t done the foundational work to collect this data, you’re going to struggle the second anything changes.
Can Marketing see the Won Deals and Conversion Rate by Lead Source and by Vendor?
The comprehensive visibility into lead source, vendor, and other critical dimensions we just discussed also give you the ability to report on which of them produce the most Won Leads. Its an obvious connection, if you need to be doing both of these things well.
Which Sources or Vendors have the best Win Rate?
Which have the best Cost per Won Territory?
Which contribute the largest percentage of your signings?
Which are the fastest to Win? The slowest?
Lots of Franchises struggle to connect specific lead data to signings or settle for only reporting on whether a Closed Won lead was Broker or “Organic” (e.g. not Broker). That’s not enough data to make decisions that can drive growth.
Can Marketing see Qualified Leads by Geography?
Your Franchise probably has geographies where you’re focused on growth. This strategy needs to make it into Marketing strategy and into your HubSpot implementation and data.
Once a lead has been qualified and their Territory of Interest has been vetted, reporting this data back to Marketing can help them focus their nurturing, geotarget ads and campaigns, and evaluate which approaches work best in specific geographies.
This is an area where Franchises often fail to close the loop and miss opportunities to target their campaigns more effectively.
Can Marketing dynamically tailor website, email, and nurturing content and experiences for Leads?
Personalization rules the world of modern marketing. HubSpot can dynamically personalize what prospects see and receive based on their profile, market, engagement history, where they are in the sales process, and a lot of other data and that is how you engage modern franchise prospects:
Landing pages that reflect the market the lead is in
Targeted “next steps” content for prospects on your website
Forms that adapt to what you know about leads
Dynamic emails that address where they’re at in their journey
If you’re treating your best-fit prospects exactly the same as your worst-fit prospects, you’re doing your leads and your franchise a massive disservice.
For all Teams
For your teams operating in HubSpot, are their Top 3 KPIs available in HubSpot Dashboards?
The systems that teams work in should always collect the data that (1) is necessary to do their jobs and (2) reveals their outcomes. All data essential to your teams’ work should be in HubSpot for easy reporting.
A Dashboard for each team that displays their top KPIs and drill downs with supporting materials (trends, historical context, breakdowns) gives your Franchise to tools and visibility to keep everyone on the same page.
If your teams don’t have HubSpot Dashboard that reflect their top KPIs, that’s a signal that your data and process is disconnected, messy, and unreliable.
Is the unstructured and qualitative data that predicts outcomes being captured in HubSpot?
AI tooling gives your Franchise massive power and leverage when combined with data like call transcripts and summaries, emails, notes, etc. Useful data used to be buried in those places but can now be used to drive outcomes for your franchise sales:
Content personalization
AI lead scoring
Updating records automatically
And a lot more
If you’re not making sure this unstructured data is getting into HubSpot and adopting new AI tools, you’re losing leverage in your diligence process, missing out on opportunities to improve your outcomes, and falling behind.
Are team members using HubSpot AI every day to work better?
HubSpot has LOTS of AI features that improve day-to-day work. Breeze Assistants can answer questions about your FDD or explain processes and policies. AI tooling can create landing pages and content. It can help summarize the status of records. Agents that help with repetitive tasks. The list gets longer every week.
If your team isn’t AI-savvy and adopting time-saving tools, you’re going to face real challenges.
How to Conduct Your Audit
Go through each question.
Answer honestly.
Dive in with your admin or get help from me at FranDev Lab to uncover why you aren’t getting what you need from HubSpot. Sometimes the fixes are simple, but sometimes they belie and deeper problem with how HubSpot is setup and used.