As your business grows, so does your contact database—which makes having good data hygiene practices more important than ever. Clean, organized data allows you to segment more effectively, personalize outreach, report accurately, and ultimately grow your business more efficiently.

Whether you’re already using HubSpot or you’re just getting started, maintaining your CRM should be a regular priority. Below are some of the best practices for keeping your HubSpot CRM data healthy and up to date.

1. Standardize Naming Conventions

When different team members use different labels for the same things, your CRM becomes messy quickly. To avoid this:

• Create and document naming conventions for properties, lifecycle stages, deal names, and workflows.
• Ensure everyone is trained on the same system.
• Use dropdown or radio select fields whenever possible to prevent inconsistent manual entry.

2. Use Required Fields Strategically

While you don’t want to overwhelm your team (or your leads) with too many required fields, a few well-chosen required fields on forms and in contact creation help keep your data consistent and complete.

Think about what information is truly essential for your team to qualify or follow up on leads—and set those as required. Consider pairing required fields with validation rules to further improve consistency and accuracy.

3. Merge Duplicate Contacts

Duplicates lead to disjointed communication and inaccurate reporting. HubSpot's duplicate management tool can help identify and merge contacts that share similar information (like email or name).

Make it a habit to check for and merge duplicates weekly or monthly, depending on your contact volume.

4. Deactivate Old or Inactive Contacts

Keeping inactive contacts in your CRM bloats your database, hurts email deliverability, and skews performance metrics.

• Create a list of contacts who haven’t engaged in a certain time period (e.g., no opens or clicks in 6–12 months).
• Consider sending a re-engagement campaign to win them back.
• Remove or unsubscribe those who don’t respond.

5. Audit Custom Properties

As teams grow and evolve, it's common for CRMs to accumulate custom properties that are outdated, unused, or unclear.

On a quarterly basis:

• Review your list of custom properties.
• Remove or consolidate unused ones.
• Update property descriptions to improve clarity and consistency.

6. Leverage HubSpot Workflows for Automation

Automation can help you enforce data hygiene best practices with minimal manual effort. For example:

• Use workflows to auto-format phone numbers or standardize property values.
• Create internal notifications if a key field is missing from a new contact.
• Automatically assign contacts to the correct sales team or pipeline based on their attributes.

7. Align Your Team

The best tech stack in the world won’t help if your team isn’t aligned. Ensure everyone understands:

• The importance of clean data.
• How to use and update HubSpot properly.
• Who is responsible for ongoing data management.

Consider creating internal documentation or training sessions to support team-wide consistency.

Collaborate With a HubSpot Expert

Maintaining good data hygiene in HubSpot isn’t a one-and-done task—it’s a continuous process. But with regular upkeep and the right systems in place, you’ll spend less time cleaning up messes and more time driving results.

Need help getting your HubSpot portal organized? Contact us today to book a HubSpot audit today.