What a hubspot audit actually looks for
Most people hear "audit" and picture a sales call with a PDF attached. Somebody pokes around your portal for twenty minutes, tells you your data is messy, and produces a proposal.
That's not an audit. That's prospecting.
A real audit answers a specific question: is this portal costing you money, and where? Sometimes the answer takes an hour. Sometimes we need to get under the hood for a few days. Either way, you should walk away with a plain-English list of what's working, what's quietly bleeding, and what to fix first — whether or not you ever hire us to fix it.
Here's what we're actually looking at.
First: what do you even own?
Before we log in, we ask two questions. Which Hubs do you have, and on what tiers?
This sounds like paperwork. It isn't. It's the single most important input to the entire audit, because it determines what "good" looks like for your portal specifically.
A company on Marketing Enterprise, Sales Pro, Service Starter gets audited completely differently than one on Marketing Pro, Sales Enterprise, Service Enterprise. In the first, the marketing team has custom objects, advanced workflow logic, and multi-touch attribution available — and the service team has almost nothing. In the second, it's inverted. Recommending a solution that requires a tier the client doesn't own isn't advice. It's a sales pitch with extra steps.
And the number of possible configurations is genuinely absurd. Six Hubs — Marketing, Sales, Service, Content, Data (formerly Operations), and Revenue (formerly Commerce) — across four tiers each: Free, Starter, Professional, Enterprise.
That's 4,096 possible combinations.
In practice it's messier than clean arithmetic suggests. Revenue Hub doesn't follow the same tier model — most of it is free to use with consumption-based pricing on transactions. Content Hub's paid tiers start at Starter. So the real math isn't a tidy 4⁶.
But the messiness is the point. There is no standard HubSpot portal. And that's before add-ons: transactional email, SMS, dedicated IP, additional marketing contact tiers, extra core seats, sales and service seats, API limit increases, credits for AI features. Two companies can both say "we're on HubSpot Professional" and be running fundamentally different software.
If someone offers to audit your portal without asking what you own, they're auditing a portal they imagined.
Then we look under the hood
Once we know what we're working with, we go looking for the gap between what you're paying for and what you're using. It usually lives in three places.
Users, teams, and seats you're paying for twice
We start with the org chart, as HubSpot understands it. How many users, in what teams, structured how?
Then the uncomfortable part: who's actually logging in?
Not "who has an account." Who opens HubSpot on a Tuesday. We pull login activity and last-active dates, and it's common to find seats assigned to people who left, people who never onboarded, and people who quietly went back to running their pipeline out of a spreadsheet. Every one of those is a line item on your invoice.
This is one of the fastest ROI findings in any audit. A handful of dormant seats at Professional or Enterprise pricing adds up to real money over a year, and reclaiming them takes about ten minutes.
Team structure matters too. Teams drive record visibility, routing, and reporting. If your teams don't reflect how the business actually works — or if everyone got dumped into one team at implementation and nobody revisited it — your reports are aggregating things that shouldn't be aggregated, and reps are seeing records they shouldn't see.
Permissions, and the Super Admin problem
Then we check permission sets. Specifically, how many Super Admins you have.
The answer should be a small number. Two or three. Enough that you're not locked out if someone's on vacation, few enough that you know exactly who they are.
What we find, more often than not, is that roughly every other user is a Super Admin. This is not best practice, and it usually happens for an understandable reason: somebody hit a permissions wall mid-quarter, asked for access, and the fastest path was to promote them rather than build a proper permission set. Repeat that a dozen times over two years and your access model is gone.
The risk isn't that your team is malicious. It's that Super Admins can delete properties, edit workflows, change pipeline stages, modify billing, and export your entire database — often without realizing what depends on the thing they just changed. Most of the genuinely expensive portal disasters we've cleaned up started with someone well-intentioned who had more access than their job required.
Workflows: the count, and the craft
Workflows are where we spend the most time, because it's where the most damage hides.
First, the raw numbers. How many workflows exist, and how many are actually active versus inactive? A portal with 140 workflows and 30 active isn't automated — it's haunted. Those 110 inactive workflows are a graveyard nobody wants to touch because nobody remembers what they did or whether turning one off broke something. Meanwhile, some of the "inactive" ones are enrolling contacts you forgot about.
Then, the craft. Are workflows built to a standard, or did they accumulate?
We're looking for the boring stuff that separates a portal you can maintain from one you can't:
Naming. Is it [Sales] Deal Stage — Closed Won → Onboarding Handoff, or is it New Workflow (3)? You'd be amazed how often it's the second one.
Folder structure. Organized by team and function, or 200 workflows in a flat list?
Enrollment logic. Are triggers specific, or does everything enroll on "Contact is known" and get filtered later?
Re-enrollment. Set deliberately, or left on default and quietly emailing people four times?
Overlap. Do three different workflows all set Lifecycle Stage? (They shouldn't. They frequently do.)
Dead ends. Branches that go nowhere, delays measured in months, actions referencing properties that no longer exist.
Documentation. Any internal notes explaining why a workflow exists, or is that knowledge sitting with someone who left in 2023?
None of this is glamorous. All of it determines whether your team can change something next quarter without calling a consultant.
What you get at the end
A prioritized, plain-English list. What's working, what's costing you money, what to fix first, and roughly what each fix takes.
Not a 60-page deck. Not a scorecard with arbitrary letter grades. A list you could hand to an internal admin and have them start on Monday.
Plenty of clients do exactly that. We're fine with it — a good audit is worth paying for on its own, and we'd rather be the people who told you the truth than the people who manufactured a project.
KoiShark Consulting is a certified HubSpot Solutions Partner. We audit, rebuild, and train teams on HubSpot in English and Spanish, for startups and midsize companies across the US, Canada, and Latin America. If you want a second opinion on your pipeline, book a free 15-minute call or email contact@koishark.com.
