Annual HubSpot Data Review: The Complete Checklist

The end of the year is when HubSpot portals are at their worst. Twelve months of form submissions, imports, integrations, and manual data entry have taken their toll. Deal pipelines are bloated with opportunities that went cold months ago. Contact lists include thousands of people who never opened an email. Custom properties that were created for a Q2 campaign are still cluttering the sidebar.

An annual data review is your chance to take stock of everything, clean up the accumulated debris, and set yourself up for accurate reporting and effective operations in the year ahead. This checklist is comprehensive by design -- it covers areas that quarterly audits may touch lightly but rarely examine in depth.

Part 1: Contact database health

Full contact audit

Pull your total contact count and break it down by lifecycle stage. Compare these numbers to last year's annual review (if you have one). Key questions:

• How many net-new contacts were added this year?
• What is the ratio of marketing contacts to non-marketing contacts?
• What percentage of total contacts are in each lifecycle stage?
• How many contacts have no lifecycle stage set?

A healthy portal typically has a funnel shape: many subscribers and leads, fewer MQLs and SQLs, and a smaller number of customers. If your distribution is inverted or flat, it suggests lifecycle stage management needs attention.

Deep engagement analysis

Go beyond the "last activity date" filter and look at engagement patterns:

Email engagement tiers. Segment your contacts into engagement buckets:

• Highly engaged: opened or clicked in the last 30 days
• Moderately engaged: opened or clicked in the last 90 days
• Low engagement: opened or clicked in the last 6 months
• Unengaged: no email interaction in 6+ months
• Never engaged: subscribed but never opened a single email

The "never engaged" segment is particularly interesting. These contacts either have invalid email addresses, were imported without proper opt-in, or simply do not recognize your brand. They are candidates for a re-permission campaign or removal.

Website engagement. Check how many contacts have visited your website in the last year. Contacts with no website visits and no email engagement are almost certainly dead weight.

Contact data completeness

Create a detailed completeness audit:

1. Define your "ideal contact profile" -- the set of properties every contact should have filled. This varies by business but typically includes: email, first name, last name, company, job title, phone, lifecycle stage, lead source, and country.

2. For each required property, calculate the fill rate (percentage of contacts that have a value).

3. Identify the biggest gaps. If only 40% of contacts have a phone number, that is a data collection problem worth addressing.

4. For properties with high fill rates but inconsistent data, plan a standardization pass. Country fields, phone formats, and job title variations are the usual suspects.

Suppression and exclusion list review

Check your email suppression lists, unsubscribe lists, and any manual exclusion lists:

• Are there contacts on suppression lists who should have been fully deleted?
• Are there contacts who unsubscribed but are still in active lists?
• Are your GDPR consent records up to date?

Part 2: Company and deal records

Company data accuracy

Top accounts review. For your top 100 companies by revenue, verify:

• Company name is current (check for mergers, acquisitions, rebrands)
• Domain is current
• Industry classification is accurate
• Employee count and revenue range are reasonably current
• The correct contacts are associated

This manual spot-check is time-consuming but essential. Automated enrichment tools do not always catch recent changes, and your most important accounts deserve accurate data.

Company deduplication. Run a thorough duplicate check. HubSpot's built-in tool catches obvious duplicates, but also look for:

• Companies with the same domain but different names
• Companies with similar names but different domains (could be subsidiaries)
• Companies created by different integrations that represent the same entity

Company property standardization. Common issues that accumulate over the year:

• Industry values that have drifted from your standard taxonomy
• Company names with inconsistent suffixes (Inc., LLC, Ltd., etc.)
• Address formatting inconsistencies

Deal pipeline review

Pipeline stage analysis. For each pipeline, examine:

• How many deals are in each stage?
• What is the average time in each stage?
• Are there stages that almost every deal passes through and stages that are rarely used?
• Do the stages still accurately reflect your current sales process?

If your sales process evolved during the year (and it probably did), your pipeline stages may need updating. Do this carefully -- changing pipeline stages affects historical reporting.

Close rate calculation. Calculate your actual close rate by stage for the year. Compare it to last year. If close rates dropped significantly at a particular stage, that stage may need process changes or the data entering that stage may be lower quality.

Revenue reconciliation. Compare your HubSpot closed-won deal totals to your actual revenue figures from accounting. Discrepancies reveal data quality issues: deals that were not updated to closed-won, incorrect deal amounts, deals recorded in the wrong period.

Ticket and support data

Ticket closure rates. Check for tickets that are still open from earlier in the year. These are either genuinely unresolved (escalate them) or were resolved but not closed in HubSpot.

Ticket categorization. If you use ticket categories or types, review the values for consistency. Over time, teams create new categories without retiring old ones, leading to fragmented reporting.

Part 3: Properties and data structure

Full property audit

This is one of the most valuable parts of the annual review and one that gets skipped most often.

Count your properties. How many custom properties exist on each object type? It is not unusual for portals to have 200+ custom contact properties after a few years. Many of them are unused.

Categorize each custom property:

• Active and essential. Used in workflows, reports, forms, or daily by the team.
• Active but low-value. Has data and is occasionally referenced, but is not critical.
• Dormant. Has not been updated in 6+ months and is not used in any active automation or report.
• Orphaned. Created for a specific campaign or project that has ended. No current use.

Archive or delete properties in the "dormant" and "orphaned" categories. Before deleting, export the property data in case someone asks for it later.

Property naming audit. Check that custom properties follow a consistent naming convention. Properties named "Campaign_Q2_2025_Source" and "lead_source_webinar_sept" and "MQL Date (New)" are harder to manage than a consistent scheme like "Lead Source - Campaign", "Lead Source - Webinar", etc.

Property group organization

HubSpot lets you organize properties into groups. After a year of ad-hoc property creation, your groups are probably messy. Reorganize them so that related properties are in the same group and the groups have clear, descriptive names.

Part 4: Automation and integration review

Workflow audit

For each active workflow:

1. Is it still needed? If the campaign or process it supports has ended, turn it off.
2. Is it working correctly? Check error rates and recent enrollments.
3. Is it performing well? Check goal completion rates.
4. Does it conflict with other workflows? Look for workflows that modify the same properties on the same records.

Compile a list of all active workflows with their purpose, trigger criteria, and last enrollment date. This document is valuable for onboarding new team members and for next year's audit.

Integration inventory

List every connected integration and app:

• What data does it sync or modify?
• Is it still in active use?
• When was it last reviewed for security and permissions?

Disconnect any integrations that are no longer in use. Each connected app with CRM access is a potential data quality risk and a security surface.

Form audit

Review all active forms:

• Are the fields still relevant?
• Are dropdown options up to date?
• Are progressive profiling settings appropriate?
• Are there forms still live that should have been taken down (event registrations, expired offers)?

Part 5: Compliance and governance

Data retention review

Check your data retention policy against your actual data:

• Are there records that have exceeded their retention period?
• Are there contact records for individuals who requested deletion?
• Are there personal data fields that should have been cleared?

If you do not have a data retention policy, the annual review is the right time to create one.

GDPR and privacy compliance

• Verify that consent records are accurate and up to date
• Check that your privacy policy URL in HubSpot settings points to the current version
• Review any data subject access requests (DSARs) received during the year and confirm they were fully processed
• Ensure that GDPR delete was used (not just regular delete) for any contacts who requested erasure

Access and permissions review

Check your HubSpot user list:

• Are there user accounts for people who have left the organization?
• Are permission levels appropriate? (Are there too many super admins?)
• Are API keys and private apps still needed and properly scoped?

Deactivate accounts for former employees immediately. Review API key permissions and rotate keys if they have been in use for more than a year.

Part 6: Reporting and metrics baseline

Establish your year-end baseline

Record these metrics as your end-of-year baseline:

Compare these to last year's baseline. The trends tell you whether your data management practices are improving.

Report accuracy check

Pick three to five key reports your team relies on and verify their accuracy:

• Do the filters still match the intended audience?
• Are the data sources still relevant?
• Do the numbers align with other data sources (accounting, product analytics)?

Fix any report configurations that have drifted and document what the reports measure so the next person to run the audit can verify them.

Making it actionable

An annual review that produces a 50-item to-do list and no follow-through is worse than no review at all. Prioritize ruthlessly:

1. Fix now (this week): Data accuracy issues that affect current reporting or active campaigns. Security issues like orphaned user accounts.
2. Fix this month: Stale deal cleanup, duplicate merging, property archival.
3. Fix this quarter: Workflow optimization, form updates, integration review.
4. Plan for next year: Data retention policy creation, naming convention documentation, process changes.

For the bulk data standardization tasks -- fixing formatting, standardizing values, cleaning up text fields -- a search-and-replace tool turns what would be days of manual work into a few focused sessions. The time savings are most dramatic during the annual review, when the volume of accumulated inconsistencies is highest.

---

The annual data review is the most thorough checkpoint your CRM gets. Done well, it produces a clean database, accurate reports, and a clear understanding of your data's strengths and weaknesses. The checklist above is comprehensive, but you do not have to do everything in one sitting. Break it into focused sessions across a week or two, and you will start the new year with a CRM you can actually trust.