We've been running Salesforce Marketing Cloud and HubSpot portal audits at MarCloud for years, and the same issues come up regardless of which software a team is using, regardless of company size, and regardless of industry.
6 mins
Today, we’re walking through the six audit and project findings we see most often, so you can run your own checks and get a sense of where to look first when auditing your HubSpot or Salesforce accounts.
Some of these issues can be well hidden and only surface when you dig into your account, which is why we recommend running quarterly audits as best practice. If you’d prefer to have an expert do the digging for you (and the fixing!), feel free to send us a message.
Otherwise, read on for six lessons learned from Salesforce and HubSpot portal audits.
Before getting into the findings, let’s clear up what we mean by an ‘audit’, because the term gets used fairly loosely. A marketing automation audit is a structured review of how your Salesforce Marketing Cloud or HubSpot account has been set up and how it's being used day to day, covering data hygiene, lifecycle and lead management, automation, campaign tracking and reporting, integrations with other systems, and consent management. The purpose is to work out whether your account is configured to run reliably and show ROI reports you can rely on.
Whether it’s Salesforce or HubSpot, the issues we find in audits are rarely the result of somebody doing something drastically wrong. HubSpot portals are built quickly during onboarding, when the priority is getting campaigns live, and then new campaigns are layered on top of the original setup over months and years. People leave, new tools get connected, priorities shift, and the original setup and data go stale. This happens in HubSpot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud in much the same way, and it's usually only when leadership starts asking questions about pipeline contribution that issues are uncovered.
The percentages below come from our combined audit work across HubSpot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud accounts.
Three-quarters of the projects we take on end up involving a redesign of the marketing-to-sales handoff, which is probably the single most common issue we find.
A broken or disjointed handoff leaves leads sitting in a lifecycle stage they should have moved out of weeks ago, while sales teams complain that the leads they’re receiving aren't qualified, and marketers complain that sales reps don't follow up on the leads that are sent. There is almost always no shared written definition of what an MQL is or lead management process.
This lesson is the same whether we're looking at a HubSpot portal or a Salesforce Marketing Cloud account connected to Sales Cloud, because the handoff is a process problem first and a platform problem second.
And if you can't show a clean path from marketing-sourced lead through to closed revenue, there's not much you can point to when budget discussions come around. A few questions worth asking:
Do marketing and sales have a written, agreed-upon definition of what qualifies a lead as an MQL?
Are lifecycle stages moving forward automatically based on clear criteria, rather than relying on someone to update them manually?
Can you pull a report showing marketing-sourced pipeline and closed revenue in a couple of clicks?
If the answer to any of these is no, you likely fall into the 75% of accounts we see in need of that marketing-to-sales handoff redesign.
Almost every account we look at has sync errors of some kind, whether that's between HubSpot and a CRM, between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud, or between either platform and a data warehouse, ads tool, or enrichment service.
The reason these sync errors go undetected is that nothing breaks visibly; records just stop updating in the background, or fields overwrite each other, and nobody notices until somebody questions a figure in a report. By the time the issue is discovered, it's often been skewing segmentation and reporting for months.
In HubSpot, you can get a sense of sync health under Settings, Integrations, and Connected apps, and in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement, the equivalent information lives in Marketing Cloud Connect and the relevant data extension logs. A few things to check:
When did you last review the sync health of every integration connected to your portal?
Are the field mappings between systems documented somewhere that your team can access?
Do you know which system is the source of truth for each of your key contact properties?
No? It’s time to review your integrations and settings because you’ve probably got errors stacking up.
This is the issue that most directly undermines ROI reporting, which is why it matters so much for marketing managers trying to build a case for budget.
Usually, accounts have a mix of inconsistent UTM parameters, emails and landing pages that haven't been attached to a campaign, and paid media reporting sitting in a separate tool.
In HubSpot, assets aren't tagged to a campaign, and in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the issue shows up as sends and journeys that haven't been assigned to a campaign record in Sales Cloud, but the result is the same in both cases. When leadership asks what a particular campaign produced, marketing teams are struggling to answer.
Worth checking:
Is every campaign asset, including emails, forms, landing pages, CTAs, and ads, tagged to a campaign in your platform?
Do you have a documented UTM convention that everyone running campaigns actually follows?
Can you see cost, influenced pipeline, and closed revenue for a single campaign in one view, without having to stitch it together from three different tools?
Likke 90% of the accounts we see, these are massively important indicators that you’re unable to tie campaigns to revenue.
Eight in ten of the accounts we audit aren't capturing the full lead journey, by which we mean the ability to see every meaningful interaction a contact has had with your marketing from first touch through to a closed deal.
Most portals capture parts of the journey, usually the bits that are easy to track, but not the whole picture, which means the attribution reporting you're relying on is telling you half a story at best. This ties back to the handoff issue in the first point, because if sales reps are picking up leads without the full context of how they got there, they're making decisions on incomplete information, and marketing is being judged on reports missing part of the funnel.
HubSpot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud have different strengths when it comes to journey tracking, but the gap we see in audits is generally how the platform has been configured rather than what it's capable of. A few self-checks:
Can you see the first-touch and last-touch source for any contact in your database without needing to dig around?
Are offline or sales-led interactions being logged back to the contact record, or do they disappear once the lead is handed over?
Does your reporting account for multi-touch attribution, or is everything being credited to a single source?
A focus on your full lead journey will pay off in attribution reports later.
This one is more common than people expect, even in accounts with large databases and mature marketing teams. Without a HubSpot lead scoring or Pardot grading model in place, sales teams end up working through leads in the order they arrive rather than the order they're most likely to convert, and marketing loses the ability to prioritise nurture effort in any meaningful way.
Questions worth asking:
Does your portal have an active lead scoring or grading model that's running today?
When was it last reviewed against actual conversion data from closed deals?
Do sales reps trust the scores enough to use them to prioritise their day?
If the answer is no, you’ll want to work on your lead scoring and grading model.
Nine out of ten of the accounts we work with don't have a robust consent management process, and the reason this matters goes beyond GDPR compliance, although that's obviously the bit most people think of first.
Weak consent management affects deliverability and sender reputation, because you end up emailing people who never clearly opted in, which in turn affects the performance of the campaigns you're being asked to report on.
The typical issues are subscription types that don't reflect the communications being sent, legal basis not being captured at the point someone fills in a form, and old lists being emailed without a clear record of how and when the contacts originally opted in.
HubSpot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud handle consent quite differently, but the gaps we find are almost always about the process behind the setup rather than limitations in the tool. Worth checking:
Do you have a documented legal basis for every contact you're emailing?
Are your subscription types set up to reflect the different kinds of communication you send, or is everything lumped together?
If someone asked you to prove when and how a specific contact opted in, could you produce that record?
This issue isn’t one to ignore! It’s vital for compliance and campaign performance.
Our audits are far more comprehensive than just these six areas above, but if you’re looking at running your own account audit, block out half a day and work through these as a starting point, using the self-check questions in each section. At the end, you'll have a reasonable view of how well configured your account is.
A simple process is to score each area red, amber, or green based on how honestly you can answer the questions, prioritise the reds that most directly affect your ability to report on marketing ROI, and document what you find so you've got a baseline to measure any improvements against.
A lightweight audit like this isn't a substitute for a proper one, but it'll tell you fairly quickly whether you need to go deeper, and it usually throws up a handful of quick wins.
See what’s included in a specialist HubSpot portal audit.
Once a year is an absolute minimum for most accounts, but quarterly checks are best practice if you're running a high volume of campaigns or have recently connected new tools into your stack.
With a team of in-house specialists, MarCloud delivers HubSpot audits and Salesforce audits within two weeks.
Yes, and the six areas covered in this post are a reasonable place to start because this is where we see the most common mistakes, but external partners can help when the issues are more technical, or when you need an objective view of your setup.
Whether you're working in HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or both, keeping a well-oiled platform that you’re confident is correct gives you the room to focus on the creative side of the job without worrying about technical details or inaccurate reports.
Run an instant audit on your HubSpot or HubSpot plus Salesforce accounts and get a branded audit report covering data quality, automation health, pipeline performance, and ROI readiness, structured around the MarCloud ROI Framework.
Founder & CEO of MarCloud, Tom has been on both sides of the fence, client-side and agency, working with Salesforce platforms for the best part of a decade. He's a Salesforce Marketing Champion and certified consultant who loves to co-host webinars and pen original guides and articles. A regular contributor to online business and marketing publications, he's passionate about marketing automation and, along with the team, is rapidly making MarCloud the go-to place for Marketing Cloud and Salesforce expertise. He unapologetically uses the terms Pardot, Account Engagement and MCAE interchangeably.
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