I've run a lot of audits. Analytics, CRM, process, funnels, SEO, and HubSpot of course.
Lots of service providers recommend starting with a long technical audit of a HubSpot Portal. I generally don't.
Not because audits are useless. These days audits are automated and cheap to produce so they can be piled high with findings upon findings. They make a big THUD when dropped on your desk. Plus for the service provider they're high-margin. "Look at everything we found." Forty-two Workflows that need review. Properties with no data. A naming convention that gave up in 2019. Every HubSpot portal has these problems.
Those are easy to fix even if they're a huge mess. I don't care how many abandoned Workflows you have. Neither does anyone trying to actually grow a franchise system. The list seems like insight. It rarely is.
When I do an audit here in the FranDev Lab we look at lots of things in a HubSpot portal, but we don't report the technical nitty gritty. We'll get to that eventually. What we do report is the two things that really matter. And because we really get Fran Dev, we have the specialization to understand it for Franchisors using HubSpot:
- Does the system serve the business?
- Does the data reflect reality?
That's how you know what's important, where to focus, and how bad things actually are.
And we can use those findings to look at where the system is actually serving the Franchise
The two questions
When I do a HubSpot audit for a Franchise, there are over 100 checkpoints from how Teams and Permissions are configured to Email Health to Workflow setups, and Aging Deal infrastructure. But everything rolls up into one of those two critical questions.
Does the system serve the business?
This asks whether the Portal is configured to support your FranDev efforts. Does it help your teams do the work? Are the major Fran Dev activites covered? Does everyone have the data they need? Do the views remove friction?
Some of what I look at:
- Do Leads get nurtured from the moment they're created through Sales handoff, or does follow-up wait on someone remembering?
- Are Deal Pipelines built around how you actually sell candidates, or around the vendor default?
- Can leadership pull pipeline health and a signings forecast as a live view, or does someone rebuild it the night before the meeting?
- Is the Franchise Application feeding qualification and scoring, or sitting in an inbox?
- Is the team using the Hubs and tiers you're paying for, or a fraction of them?
Does the data reflect reality?
This asks whether the CRM is a truthful picture of what's actually happening in your pipeline. When the data drifts from reality, every report built on it lies, every automation fires on a bad trigger, and leadership makes confident decisions on numbers that were never true.
A few of the things I look at:
- Can you even tell who's a real candidate, or are Contacts duplicated and lifecycle stages set by guesswork?
- Is Close Date something the team manages, or a date HubSpot picked months ago that everyone ignores?
- When a Deal dies, does it get closed — or does it sit in the pipeline looking alive, padding the forecast?
- Are Units and Revenue actually set on the Deal, so a forecast means something?
- When the forecast says one number and the team's gut says another, which one turns out to be right?
If a pipeline can't pass these, the reports coming out of it are fiction with good formatting.
Then you know your portal actually sits
We put the findings onto our grid to show you the cold hard truth about your HubSpot portal.
- Source of Truth: you have good data, and it serves the business. Hooray!
- Source of Stress: data is flowing in…somewhere. Reps are struggling with the system but making due. Lots of work is manual and more steps than it needs to be. Every question about the data is hard to answer. The data is there but hard to use.
- Zone of Delusion: you've got a well-setup system but no one is using it. People keep their leads in spreadsheets. Dashboards are full of zeroes.
- Zone of Neglect: you've got bad data and the system doesn't serve the franchise. Nobody trusts it, nobody uses it, people rarely log in.
What does your franchise need?
That's why I do audits this way at FranDev Lab. What you really need to know is whether your HubSpot portal is serving your Franchise and if the data reflects reality. That provides a clear answer to where you need to focus to run a better franchise development process. And that's what generic or technical HubSpot audits can't answer.