If you manage a credit union marketing team that's been using HubSpot, chances are high that you've considered conducting an audit to optimize for CRM best practices. However, to ensure that your team is making the most of their use of HubSpot, it's crucial to not only implement changes based on audit reports but to also fully understand the implications of those changes. This means taking the time to implement them correctly and ensuring that they align with your overall marketing strategy.
By following best practices when implementing your changes, you'll maximize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and achieve greater success in reaching your target audience. In this article, we'll provide you with a comprehensive guide on what the best practices are for integrating CRM audit changes.
Analyze & Align on Your CRM Audit Results
Your first step should be to analyze the CRM audit results provided by your team or partner agency. If you conducted the audit yourself, you should identify the most important areas that require improvement and align your efforts with your overall marketing strategy.
For example, if you discovered that your account has outdated, incorrect, or incomplete contact records, this indicates a data quality issue, which can lead to communication errors and missed opportunities to engage with the right contacts. By resolving this—and similar issues—quickly, you can maximize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts in reaching your target audience.
If a partner agency conducted your audit, they should provide you with a roadmap to implementing these changes. For example, when we conduct our HubSpot Portal Audit, we provide a step-by-step guide to implementing our recommended changes so you can get your CRM system firing on all cylinders and ensure you aren't missing any marketing opportunities.
Create a Plan
Once you’ve identified the areas that need improvement, create a plan. If you discovered one major, pressing issue, such as outdated contact records, prioritize that first. If there are multiple areas that need improvement, create a plan that outlines which changes to implement first and prioritize them based on their potential impact on your credit union. Examples of high-impact changes include:
- Marketing contact management
- Custom property organization and descriptions
- Online application tracking
- Core platform integration
- CRM customization for sales and service teams
When creating a plan, be sure to include specific tasks and responsibilities for each team member involved in the process. It's important to communicate this plan clearly to everyone on the team to ensure that they are on the same page and understand their role in the implementation process. By having a clear plan in place, your team can avoid confusion and ensure that the changes are implemented correctly and efficiently.
To continue our example, once you've identified all your contacts that need cleaning up and you have a firm understanding of the scope of the project, you can begin creating and delegating clean up tasks to team members to start resolving. Be sure to set deadlines for each task to ensure timely completion and monitor progress throughout to ensure members are comfortable with the tasks and everything is moving on track.
For example, a potential plan to clean up duplicate contact records would include the following steps:
- Identify and Analyze Duplicate Contacts:
- Run a search query in HubSpot to identify potential duplicate contact records based on criteria such as email address, name, or phone number.
- Review the duplicate contacts and determine which ones need to be updated, merged or deleted.
- Create Cleanup Tasks:
- Create tasks to delegate the cleanup process to team members.
- Assign specific tasks to individuals responsible for merging or deleting duplicate contact records.
- Set deadlines for each task to ensure timely completion of the cleanup process.
- Monitor Progress:
- Regularly review the progress of the cleanup tasks.
- Follow up with team members to ensure they are on track and provide assistance if needed.
- Keep track of completed tasks and update the status accordingly.
- Verify Cleanup Results:
- After the cleanup process is complete, perform a final check to ensure that your contacts are updated.
- Run another search query in HubSpot to verify that no additional duplicates remain.
- Implement Preventive Measures:
- Identify the root causes of the errors in your contact records (e.g., data entry errors, integration issues).
- Implement preventive measures such as data validation rules, training programs, or system integrations to minimize future occurrences of errors in your contact data.
Determine Your Timeframe
After creating a plan, you can determine a timeframe for implementing the changes. This will help ensure that your team stays on track and meets their goals. It's important to establish realistic deadlines based on your team's bandwidth and availability. By doing so, you can avoid overloading your team with too many tasks at once and ensure that each task is completed thoroughly.
Additionally, setting a timeframe will help keep everyone accountable and motivated to complete the implementation process in a timely manner. This practice ensures that the implementation goes smoothly without compromising the quality of your work.
We recommend creating checkpoints throughout the implementation process to ensure that everything is going according to plan. For example, once your team has removed outdated contact records, you can conduct a review to ensure that all contacts in your CRM are up-to-date and no further work is needed in this area. You can also set a date in the future to check back in and reassess whether additional contacts need to be removed. We recommend performing an audit on a quarterly basis, however, this can fluctuate depending on the amount of data within your portal.
Monitor Your Progress
Monitoring your progress is a best practice when implementing changes from your HubSpot audit because it allows you to track the effectiveness of the changes and decide on further improvements to adjust your strategy accordingly. For example, if you conduct an audit at the end of the year, you should be checking if your credit union has seen any improvement in your HubSpot analytics, website traffic, and conversion rates on a monthly basis during the following year. If there are no signs of a positive change, there may be deeper issues that need to be addressed.
Ensure Your HubSpot Marketing Hub Is Firing on All Cylinders
Remember that one of the best ways to maximize the efficiency of HubSpot is to ensure you’re implementing audit changes correctly and in a way that aligns with your credit union's overall marketing strategy. By following the above best practices for implementing HubSpot changes post-audit, you will make sure that your credit union sees improvement in its marketing performance.
Are you a credit union looking to streamline your processes and grow your membership? At GreenHouse, we offer a HubSpot Portal Optimization Audit that's targeted for sales, marketing and service teams in the financial industry. We'll perform a deep dive into your portal and will walk you through the audit to help your portal get back on track. Click here to learn more about our HubSpot CRM support and how we can help your portal thrive!
August 25, 2023
