HubSpot is a powerful engine for driving growth across marketing, sales, and customer success. But like any robust platform, it’s only as effective as the strategy behind it. For CMOs and marketers, these during onboarding or early implementation can lead to poor data, ineffective campaigns, and missed revenue opportunities.
Here are 10 common mistakes new HubSpot users make, and how your team can sidestep them for maximum ROI.
Many new users start with HubSpot just for email campaigns, underutilizing the full CRM, automation, and analytics capabilities. And while the email editor in HubSpot is really easy to use, it’s a pity of all the other powerful tools you have in your portal.
The Fix:
Embrace the all-in-one nature of the platform. Activate key hubs — Marketing, Sales, Service — where it makes sense, and build a roadmap to unify your teams within HubSpot.
Like with any other platform: jumping into the system without a defined lead management process results in chaos. You end up with duplicate contacts, missed handoffs, and unclear reporting. When that happens, people in your organization inevitably start wondering if starting with the platform was the right choice.
The Fix:
Before building, align sales and marketing on lifecycle stages, deal pipelines, lead scoring, and MQL criteria. Document your ideal customer journey. Don’t forget to include your sales colleagues when you do all this, it will lead to better results.
Many new HubSpot users overlook lifecycle stages, treating them as optional fields rather than essential components of their lead management strategy. This often results in chaotic databases where contacts are lumped together without context, making it difficult to track progression, measure funnel performance, or align marketing and sales efforts. Without clear lifecycle stages, teams lack visibility into where prospects are in the buyer journey.
The Fix:
Define what each stage means internally, ensure consistent data entry (automated where possible), and use lifecycle stage transitions as key triggers for segmentation, nurturing, and reporting. Properly implemented, lifecycle stages are a powerful framework for driving conversion and improving cross-team collaboration.
Relying solely on default fields limits personalization and insights. You can do so much better. Your prospects expect a personalized approach, and that means you need to store and use relevant properties. It will also enable your team to make better, data-driven decisions for your next campaigns.
The Fix:
Create custom properties that reflect your business logic. For example a contract start date, tech stack, or customer tier. Keep data structured and consistent over time. And if you need to add extra properties, make sure it doesn’t already exist.
Sales and marketing use different tools, track different metrics, and usually blame each other for pipeline gaps. but in reality, they both play for the same team, and should therefor have the same goals. So get both teams out of their silos and get them to work together.
The Fix:
Unify teams within HubSpot. Use shared dashboards, SLA workflows, and lifecycle reporting to build a single source of truth and foster accountability. This helps you get sales and marketing alignment.
I get it: it’s very tempting to do a lot of different things in just 1 workflow. It is certainly possible. But building complex, multi-branch automations early on can break easily and confuse stakeholders. Especially in the beginning, when you don’t really know what you’re doing.
The Fix:
Start simple. Test and refine workflows. Build modular automation for scalability: think onboarding, re-engagement, nurture, and alerts. You can always add elements to existing workflows if necessary. Just remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Uploading purchased lists or mass-blasting contacts leads to high bounce rates and poor sender reputation. That’s what happens in many Hubspot accounts, because users don’t look after the lists that exist in their portal. Segmentation goes down the drain, and you end up sending mass emails that just don’t work.
The Fix:
Use permission-based, opt-in strategies. Build smart Lists that segment by firmographics, behavior, and lifecycle stage for targeted nurturing. Take some time to regularly check your list health and intervene when necessary.
Marketing or sales teams often launch campaigns without knowing how success will be measured. I get it: you want to get started and get results as soon as possible. Your boss is pushing to see results. But it’s not the right way.
The Fix:
Define clear KPIs upfront: SQLs, pipeline contribution, MQL-to-Customer conversion rates, and campaign ROI. Benchmark these, iterate, and optimize as you move forward.
Often, teams don’t really look at permissions. When someone new joins the team, the easiest thing to do is just grant them admin rights. But letting every user have admin access opens the door to errors and accidental data loss. Fixing that is a nightmare.
The Fix:
Implement role-based permissions. Establish governance for users, naming conventions, folders, and data entry rules. Make sure someone takes ownership to get this right and to step in when rules are not followed or when changes are needed.
Marketers flying blind on campaign performance miss critical insights into what’s working. And besides, your bosses will want to know how your campaigns are doing, what the ROI on the Hubspot investment is and how it’s impacting revenue and profits. Doing marketing without data and reporting is a losing game.
The Fix:
Use HubSpot’s reports to analyze which channels, content, and touchpoints are driving pipeline. Build dashboards to inform strategic decisions. You can automatically send these to the right stakeholders, and change dashboards over time when needed.
HubSpot can be a game-changing platform for your organization’s growth, IF implemented strategically. Avoiding the common mistakes mentioned above will help your marketing team operate more efficiently, deliver stronger results, and give your revenue team the clarity and alignment they need.
We cleaned up some Hubspot messes before, so we have experience optimizing for better results. Let’s talk!
