Spring Cleaning Your HubSpot CRM: A Seasonal Guide

Every HubSpot portal accumulates cruft. It happens slowly — a test contact here, an unused property there, a workflow that nobody remembers creating. Over the course of a year, this gradual buildup degrades your data quality, inflates your contact billing, and makes your CRM harder to navigate. Spring cleaning is the antidote.

Unlike ongoing data maintenance (which catches problems as they arise), a spring cleaning is a dedicated project to deep-clean your entire portal. Think of it as the CRM equivalent of going through every closet in the house instead of just tidying the living room.

This guide provides a structured approach to spring cleaning your HubSpot CRM. It is organized as a one-week project, but you can adjust the pace based on your portal's size and your team's availability.

Before you start

Set expectations with your team

Notify your sales, marketing, and service teams that you will be running a CRM cleanup. During the cleanup, they may notice changes — records being merged, properties being updated, inactive workflows being disabled. Give them a heads-up so they do not panic.

Create a cleanup workspace

Set up a Google Sheet or Notion page to track your progress. Create columns for: task, status, notes, number of records affected, and date completed. This becomes your audit trail and makes it easy to report what you did.

Export a full backup

Before making any changes, export your key data:

• All contacts with all properties
• All companies with all properties
• All deals with all properties
• A list of all active workflows and their enrollment counts

Store these exports in a clearly labeled folder. This is your safety net for the entire cleanup.

Week 1, Monday: Contact cleanup

Contacts are the foundation of your HubSpot portal. They are also where the most data quality problems live.

Purge undeliverable contacts

Start with the obvious: contacts who cannot be reached. Pull these lists:

• Hard bounced emails — HubSpot tracks this automatically. Go to Contacts > Lists and find the "Hard bounced" system list. These contacts have permanently invalid email addresses.
• Globally unsubscribed contacts with no deals — Contacts who have opted out and have no associated revenue are usually not worth keeping. They inflate your contact count and can never receive marketing email.
• Contacts with no email address — Unless they have deal associations or other valuable data, contacts without email addresses have limited utility in HubSpot.

Export each list before taking action. Then delete the contacts that genuinely have no value. Be conservative — it is better to keep a contact you are unsure about than to delete one you need later.

Merge duplicates

Go to Contacts > Actions > Manage Duplicates. HubSpot identifies potential duplicates, but you need to review each pair manually. For a portal with 50,000+ contacts, this can take an hour or more. Focus on the highest-confidence matches first.

After merging HubSpot's suggested duplicates, run a search for common duplicate patterns:

• Contacts with the same email but different capitalization
• Contacts with the same first and last name at the same company
• Contacts with email addresses that differ by a single character (typos)

Clean up formatting

Run a formatting cleanup pass on key contact properties:

• Email addresses — Remove leading and trailing whitespace. Fix common domain misspellings.
• Phone numbers — Standardize to a consistent format. If your team uses E.164 international format, convert all numbers.
• Names — Fix all-caps and all-lowercase names. Remove extra spaces between names.
• Job titles — Standardize common variations. "VP of Sales," "Vice President of Sales," "VP Sales," and "VP, Sales" should be one value.

A bulk find-and-replace tool makes this practical. Without one, you are looking at CSV exports and re-imports for each property.

Week 1, Tuesday: Company cleanup

Merge duplicate companies

Company duplicates are pervasive. HubSpot creates companies automatically from contact email domains, so you often end up with "acme.com" and "Acme Inc" and "ACME Corporation" as separate records.

Go to Companies > Actions > Manage Duplicates. Merge the obvious duplicates. Then search for companies with the same domain but different names.

Standardize company names

Decide on a convention and apply it. Common decisions:

• Include "Inc" or "LLC" or not?
• Use the legal name or the brand name?
• Capitalize "THE" in company names or not?

Pick your standard and run find-and-replace operations to fix the most common variations.

Clean up industry values

Export your companies and look at the unique values in the Industry property. You will almost certainly find duplicates and near-duplicates. "SaaS," "Software as a Service," "Software/SaaS," and "Cloud Software" are all the same thing in different clothes.

Create a mapping from messy values to clean values. Then apply the changes — either through import or find-and-replace.

Fill in missing data

Identify companies missing critical fields: industry, employee count, website, and phone number. HubSpot's company insights fill in some data automatically, but gaps remain. For your top 100 accounts, manually verify and complete the data.

Week 1, Wednesday: Deal and pipeline cleanup

Close dead deals

Pull a list of open deals with no activity in the past 60 days. These are almost certainly dead. Have managers review them and close-lost any that are genuinely over.

Stale open deals are one of the biggest sources of inaccurate pipeline reporting. A "pipeline" that includes deals from 6 months ago that nobody is working is not a pipeline — it is a graveyard.

Standardize deal names

If your deals are named inconsistently, now is the time to fix it. Establish a naming convention (e.g., "Company Name - Product - Close Quarter") and apply it to existing deals.

For hundreds of deals, a bulk find-and-replace on common patterns can fix the worst inconsistencies. For example, if some deals have the old product name and some have the new one, standardize in one pass.

Verify deal amounts and close dates

Sort by deal amount and look for outliers. A $0 deal is missing data. A $10M deal in a pipeline with a $50K average is probably a typo. A deal with a close date two years in the past is definitely stale.

Review pipeline stages

Check if your pipeline stages still reflect your actual sales process. Stages that nobody uses should be removed or renamed. Stages that have too many deals piled up might indicate a process bottleneck that needs addressing.

Week 1, Thursday: Property and automation hygiene

Delete unused properties

Go to Settings > Properties. For each object type, sort by fill rate (ascending). Properties with data in less than 1% of records are candidates for deletion.

Before deleting, check for dependencies:

• Is the property used in any workflow?
• Is it referenced in any list criteria?
• Is it used in any reports or dashboards?
• Is it part of a form or a view?

HubSpot catches some of these during deletion, but not all. Check manually for critical properties.

Consolidate redundant properties

Look for properties that track the same data point. "Company Size" and "Number of Employees" and "Employee Count" can be consolidated into one. Choose the canonical property, migrate data from the others, update any references (workflows, lists, forms), then delete the redundant ones.

Audit workflows

Review every active workflow. For each one, check:

• When was it last enrolled a contact? If it has not enrolled anyone in 90+ days, it may be obsolete.
• Does it reference properties or lists that still exist?
• Is the logic still relevant to your current process?
• Does it conflict with other workflows?

Disable workflows that are no longer needed. Do not delete them yet — disable first and confirm nothing breaks over the next week.

Review active lists

Check your active lists for stale or broken criteria. Lists that reference deleted properties, use outdated values, or have overly complex logic should be updated or converted to static lists.

Week 1, Friday: Content and final review

Clean up blog content

If you use HubSpot's CMS for your blog, run a content audit:

• Check for blog posts with broken internal or external links
• Update outdated CTAs embedded in older posts
• Fix any content that references old branding, discontinued products, or outdated information
• Check meta descriptions for posts that rank well — are they optimized?

A bulk find-and-replace is efficient for updating old URLs, product names, or branding across many blog posts at once.

Review forms

Check your active forms for:

• Fields that are no longer relevant
• Required fields that should be optional (or vice versa)
• Missing validation on email and phone fields
• Redirect URLs that point to old or broken pages

Clean up the file manager

HubSpot's file manager accumulates old images, PDFs, and documents over time. Delete files that are not used on any live page. Organize the remaining files into a clear folder structure.

Final verification

At the end of the week, run a final check:

1. Spot-check 20 contact records for data accuracy
2. Verify that key workflows are still firing correctly
3. Confirm that your main reports and dashboards look accurate
4. Send a test email to verify formatting and deliverability

After the cleanup

Document what you did

Write up a summary of the cleanup: what was changed, how many records were affected, which properties were deleted, and which workflows were disabled. Share this with your team so everyone knows the current state of the CRM.

Schedule the next one

Spring cleaning should not be a one-time event. Schedule a quarterly check-in to run through the highest-impact items (duplicates, stale deals, unused properties). A lighter monthly check on contact quality keeps problems from accumulating.

Set up ongoing prevention

The best cleanup is the one you do not have to do. Put safeguards in place:

• Property validation rules on forms to enforce correct formatting
• Workflow-based data quality checks (flag records missing key fields)
• A documented process for creating new properties (to prevent duplicates)
• Regular duplicate merge reviews (monthly at minimum)

A clean CRM is a competitive advantage. Reps trust the data, automations work correctly, reports reflect reality, and leadership makes decisions based on accurate numbers. The annual deep-clean is how you get there and stay there.

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