We’re gonna start this one with a difficult truth:
HubSpot isn’t the problem.
HubSpot gets blamed for being “too expensive”, “too complex” or “not delivering ROI”.
Reality is, more often than not, it’s a messy setup that’s the problem. And, as I’m sure you know, HubSpot’s only as good as the setup behind it.
If foundations are messy, you’ll see issues everywhere:
- Leads going unclaimed
- Reports getting ignored
- Data that can’t be trusted
- Teams working outside the system for convenience
- Duplicated tools
- Wasted licences
In this blog, we’ll go through the 4 most common hidden costs associated with HubSpot, and what you can do to fix them, starting with…
Hidden cost 1) Wasted spend
Most wasted HubSpot spend comes from a mix of good intentions and a rushed implementation.
You buy HubSpot to simplify the mess. Then the setup isn’t done right. Lo and behold, it doesn’t work right.
Businesses often “solve” this issue by chucking in more tools, which makes things more complex and… you get the deal.
Wasted spend usually falls into one of three buckets:
- Unused features and licences: If the setup doesn’t match how your team actually works, they’ll avoid HubSpot and default to spreadsheets, inboxes and notes (that almost certainly will get lost). You end up paying for features nobody wants to touch.
- Extra tools bought as “fixes”: When something doesn’t work, adding additional tools can be a temporary fix, but it just adds up to wasted money (especially if HubSpot could just do whatever it is for you).
- Overlapping tools and split systems: Marketing uses HubSpot, sales use a different CRM, campaigns and reporting live elsewhere. As you might expect, this is expensive, but it also slows everyone down (nobody has a single view of your pipeline).
What can you do to sort this out?
Do a “stack overlap sweep”. It’s quick and easy, and should only take about 30 minutes.
Get your sales lead and marketing lead together and list every tool (outside of HubSpot) that you use for: CRM, email marketing, sales outreach, forms/landing pages and reporting.
Next to each tool, write down why you need the tool and what it does for the business. Now look – could HubSpot do it instead? This list now becomes your cut list or your configuration to-do list. Set things up properly in HubSpot, or look for proper HubSpot onboarding support to get things right.
Hidden cost 2) Poor data
Data cleansing? Boring.
Until it decides how successful your year end’s gonna be.
If your CRM data is no good, two things will happen:
- Your campaigns won’t land like you want them to
- Your people will lose trust in HubSpot, thinking that it’s worthless (when the real issue is your data)
Common HubSpot data problems we see all the time are:
- Duplicate contacts and duplicate companies
- Lifecycle stages used differently by different people
- Properties created in a rush with no ownership, definition or logic
- No agreed single source of truth
When your data’s no good, teams stop believing what they’re seeing, which has a knock-on effect.
Marketing teams lose confidence. Sales teams don’t trust the leads marketing are passing on. Marketing don’t trust sales to follow up. Leadership stops trusting the reports…
…It gets messy fast. And it’s not just irritating, it’s seriously expensive. The UK government estimate that organisations spend between 10-30% of their revenue on handling data quality issues.
This is why professional migration and data clean-up projects are so important. If you’re not sure where to start with this, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’d be happy to advise you on logical next steps to improve your data quality (without spending a fortune).
Hidden cost 3) Missed opportunities
While not a cost, per se, missing out on opportunities still hurts your bottom line.
Obviously.
It’s especially frustrating when HubSpot’s specifically meant to stop you from missing deals in this way.
The platform is meant to remove friction. It’s there to route leads instantly, keep deals moving, nudge reps at the right moment and track progression from first touch to sale.
If the setup’s wrong, it’ll do the opposite. It delays things, makes too much noise and lets good opportunities slip away without anyone noticing.
The most common area we see these gaps is in the automation side of HubSpot:
Automation workflows
Automation should keep things moving. If it’s poorly designed, nothing happens when a deal goes quiet.
No reminders, no tasks, no prompts based on what the prospect is doing. Worse, bad workflows can spam the wrong people or hand leads to sales too early or too late.
By using HubSpot as an all-encompassing platform, we can easily identify where these bottlenecks lie and ultimately add automation to address them.
However, as we keep saying, if your system isn’t set up correctly, it’s like looking for an orange in an apple orchard. And that leads us nicely onto our final hidden cost: reporting.
Hidden cost 4) Reporting that looks fine, but tells the wrong story
Dashboards can create false confidence. You have charts, funnels and attribution. You feel good about it; it feels like things are progressing nicely. But there’s something nefarious lurking underneath your nice shiny dashboards.
That’s because dashboards built on flawed data produce flawed decisions, even when they look polished. You end up optimising for activity, and missing out on all the impact
Common HubSpot reporting problems include:
- Attribution that doesn’t reflect reality because sources and campaigns are inconsistent
- Funnel reports that do not match what sales see every day
- Revenue reports nobody trusts because deal data is incomplete, or stages are misused
- Vanity metrics are being treated as performance indicators
What you need to do next
Do a “deal truth check” on your last 10 closed-won deals. Pick 10 deals that closed. For each one, answer two questions using HubSpot only:
- Where did this deal first come from?
- What influenced it between first touch and close (content, emails, ads, pages)?
If you can’t answer those questions clearly using HubSpot alone, your tracking isn’t set up properly yet. That means the reports may look convincing, but they’re not reliable enough to use when deciding where to spend budget. This check quickly shows whether your dashboards help you make decisions, or just make things look tidy.
When’s the right time to sort this all out?
Most teams only look to fix their HubSpot when they’re either at their wits’ end, or they simply can’t continue without sorting it out.
This, as you might have guessed, is way too late.
The smarter time to fix it is before you scale: before a big campaign, recruitment drive or some other big event in your business. If you leave things for too long, your people will begin to loathe HubSpot – changing their opinions later on will be really difficult.
I understand that this is a lot to take in, and it can be intimidating staring down the barrel of everything that needs doing. Don’t worry, we’re here to help.
The first, most logical step we recommend is a free HubSpot audit. This is how you can learn what’s working and what isn’t. Our HubSpot experts will give your environment a once-over and identify what needs to improve (and what’s the highest priority).
Looking for a little more info? Here are 10 checks every business needs to make when auditing their HubSpot.
