How to Standardize Industry Values in HubSpot

The Industry property on HubSpot company records is one of those fields that starts clean and deteriorates over time. When you first set up your portal, maybe you had a tidy dropdown with 15 or 20 industry options. Then someone imported a list from a trade show with 200 different industry values. Then a data enrichment tool pushed in its own industry taxonomy. Then reps started typing in free-form values because the dropdown didn't have what they needed.

Now you have "Technology," "Tech," "Information Technology," "IT," "Software," "Internet," "SaaS," and "Information Technology and Services" all representing roughly the same thing. Your segment reports are fragmented, your lead routing workflows make incorrect assignments, and your marketing team can't get a clean count of how many tech companies are in your pipeline.

This guide walks through how to audit your industry data, create a clean standard, and apply it across your entire company database.

Why industry standardization matters

Inconsistent industry values create problems across multiple functions:

Segmentation is unreliable. If "Technology" and "Information Technology" are separate values, a list of "all tech companies" will miss half the records. Marketing campaigns targeting a specific industry reach only a fraction of their intended audience.

Reporting is fragmented. A "Deals by Industry" report with 150 industry values is useless. When the same industry is represented by 8 different strings, the report shows 8 small slices instead of one meaningful segment.

Lead routing fails. If your lead routing workflow sends technology companies to a specific rep based on "Industry is equal to Technology," contacts at companies with "Industry is Information Technology" go to the wrong rep or fall into a catch-all bucket.

Enrichment conflicts. Third-party enrichment tools (Breeze Intelligence, formerly Clearbit, as well as ZoomInfo and Apollo) each use their own industry taxonomy. If you don't normalize their values to your standard, every enrichment run introduces new variations.

ABM targeting is imprecise. Account-based marketing campaigns that target specific industries need clean segmentation. Inconsistent industry values mean your target account lists are incomplete.

Auditing your current industry data

Before you can standardize, you need to understand the current state.

Step 1: Export your industry values

Go to the Companies index page in HubSpot and export all companies. Include at least the Company Name, Company Domain, and Industry columns. Open the export in a spreadsheet.

Step 2: Get a unique list of industry values

In your spreadsheet, create a pivot table or use the UNIQUE() function on the Industry column to get a list of all distinct industry values in your portal. Sort this list alphabetically.

In most portals, this exercise is eye-opening. You'll see:

• Direct synonyms: "Financial Services" and "Finance" and "Banking"
• Specificity variations: "Technology" and "Enterprise Software" and "B2B SaaS"
• Formatting differences: "Real Estate" and "real estate" and "Real estate"
• Typos: "Heathcare" and "Helthcare"
• Free-form entries: "We sell stuff online" or "Not sure"
• Enrichment-specific values: "Internet Software & Services" (LinkedIn's taxonomy) or "Computer Software" (Breeze Intelligence's taxonomy)
• Blank values: A significant percentage of records with no industry at all

Step 3: Count records per value

Next to each unique industry value, add a count of how many company records have that value. This tells you where the volume is and helps you prioritize. If "Technology" has 2,000 records and "Information Technology and Services" has 3, fixing the latter is low-effort cleanup; fixing the former would be a mass reassignment.

Step 4: Identify your target taxonomy

Decide what your standardized industry list should look like. There are a few approaches:

Use HubSpot's default list. HubSpot ships with a default industry dropdown that includes approximately 150 values. This is a reasonable starting point and aligns with what most integrations expect.

Create a custom list. If HubSpot's default list is too granular or doesn't match your business, create your own. A good custom industry list has 15-30 values that are mutually exclusive and meaningful for your segmentation needs.

Use an external standard. NAICS codes, SIC codes, or LinkedIn's industry taxonomy are external standards you can adopt. These work well if you need consistency with external data sources.

The best choice depends on your business. A B2B SaaS company selling to technology companies might want a more granular tech taxonomy ("Enterprise Software," "DevTools," "Cybersecurity") and a less granular non-tech taxonomy ("Manufacturing," "Healthcare," "Finance"). A company selling across industries might want a balanced, medium-granularity list.

Building the mapping table

Once you have your target taxonomy, create a mapping from every existing industry value to a target value. This is the most labor-intensive part of the process, but it's the foundation for everything that follows.

Your mapping table should look like this:

A few guidelines for building this mapping:

• Map typos aggressively. "Heathcare" is obviously "Healthcare."
• Map vague entries to the closest match. "We sell stuff online" might map to "E-Commerce" or "Retail."
• Decide on a "catch-all" for unmappable values. "Other" or "Unclassified" works for values that genuinely don't fit any category.
• Involve your sales and marketing teams. They use these segments daily and will have opinions about how to categorize edge cases.

Executing the standardization

With your mapping table complete, it's time to apply it. There are three approaches, depending on scale.

Approach 1: Update the dropdown, then bulk replace (recommended)

First, update the Industry property's dropdown options in HubSpot to match your target taxonomy:

1. Go to Settings > Properties > Company Properties > Industry
2. Remove values that are being consolidated (HubSpot won't delete values that are in use, so you'll need to update the records first, then remove the old values)
3. Add any new values that don't exist yet

Then, for each row in your mapping table where the current value differs from the target value, run a search-and-replace operation. Here's what standardizing an industry value looks like:

• Search for "Information Technology" in the Industry property
• Replace with "Technology"
• Preview the changes to confirm the right records are affected
• Apply

With a tool like SearchReplace, each mapping row takes about 2-3 minutes. For a mapping table with 50 entries (after removing rows where current = target), that's roughly 2 hours of focused work. Compare that to manually editing each of the thousands of affected records.

Approach 2: CSV export/import

Export all companies, make the mapping changes in your spreadsheet (using VLOOKUP or a series of find-and-replace operations), and re-import. This works but comes with the standard CSV risks: column mapping errors, formatting issues, and no preview step.

Approach 3: Workflows (for ongoing normalization)

HubSpot workflows can automate industry value normalization for new records. Create a workflow that triggers when the Industry property is updated, checks if the value matches a known non-standard entry, and replaces it with the standard value.

This is useful for prevention but impractical for initial cleanup — building workflow branches for 100+ value mappings is tedious and hard to maintain.

Handling the "Unknown" problem

After standardizing your industry values, you'll likely still have a significant number of company records with no industry value at all. This is a separate problem from inconsistency, but equally important for segmentation.

Options for filling in missing industry values:

Manual research. For high-value accounts, look up the company and manually set the industry. Prioritize companies with active deals or those in your target account list.

Data enrichment. Tools like Breeze Intelligence (formerly Clearbit), ZoomInfo, and Apollo can enrich company records with industry data. Run the enrichment, then apply your mapping table to normalize their values to your taxonomy.

Inference from other properties. If you have company description text, website category, or other properties that hint at the industry, you may be able to infer and set the industry for a subset of records.

Accept some unknowns. Not every company record needs an industry value. Stale records from years ago, one-person freelancers, and inactive prospects may not warrant the effort.

Maintaining standardization over time

Cleanup is only half the battle. Without maintenance, your industry data will drift back to its previous messy state within months.

Lock down the property

After standardizing, change the Industry property to a dropdown (if it isn't already) with only your approved values. This prevents free-form entry and limits future inconsistency to the options in your dropdown.

If the property is already a dropdown but has too many options, prune it to your target taxonomy. HubSpot won't let you remove a dropdown option that's still in use on records, so standardize first, then remove the old options.

Normalize enrichment data

If you use enrichment tools, configure them to use your mapping or create a workflow that normalizes their values after they write to HubSpot. Enrichment tools are the most common source of non-standard industry values in otherwise clean portals.

Monitor for drift

Set up a quarterly review process:

1. Export unique industry values and compare against your target taxonomy
2. Check for any new non-standard values that were introduced
3. Run cleanup operations on any new variations
4. Update your mapping table to account for new values you hadn't seen before

Document your standard

Create a simple document that lists your approved industry values and the rationale for each. Share it with anyone who imports data, configures integrations, or manages enrichment tools. This document is your first line of defense against future inconsistency.

The payoff

Clean industry data has an outsized impact on CRM usefulness. When your industry segmentation is reliable, marketing can target the right companies, sales can route leads accurately, reporting reflects reality, and ABM campaigns reach their intended accounts.

The initial cleanup is a project — but it's a project you do once. With the right prevention measures in place, maintaining clean industry data becomes a minor quarterly task instead of an ongoing burden.

---

Ready to standardize your industry values? SearchReplace lets you find and replace property values across all your company records, with full preview and rollback.