Automating Data Hygiene With HubSpot Operations Hub [+Examples]

Dirty data makes all your marketing efforts cloudy. It allows for skewed numbers and estimations. So why do we keep dealing with dirty data? Because there's no efficient way to clean it and then keep it clean (or is there?). HubSpot Operations Hub was designed to do just that by automating data cleaning. If you think the data in your CRM is clean, think again! Let's unpack just how bad dirty data is and talk about a solution that will leave your data squeaky clean.

The Impact of Dirty Data on Your Business

You may be saying, what's the point? Why do we even need clean data and a data quality automation project? Here are some of the ways dirty data impacts your business:

• leads to poor personalization and lower engagement in marketing communications
• wastes salespeople's time by having to manually review, research, and update their CRM
• manually cleaning data is a time-consuming and tedious process
• lead scoring is less effective because of skewed information in the CRM
• damages your reputation with incorrect information on your lead nurturing and prospect campaigns

[Example] Businesses use personalization tokens in emails to encourage engagement. However, with dirty data, the business could appear unprofessional or disorganized. Bad or unformatted fields damage their reputation and trust with prospects. The more personalized a business's communications and outreach are, the more critical data quality becomes.

How to Solve the Challenges of Dirty Data

Because of the need to overcome these challenges, many businesses have turned to 3rd party tools to manage data quality automation. However, tools like Zapier and Automate.io could be cost-prohibitive on a long-term basis. And these types of data formatting and cleansing steps that move or access the data outside of your CRM ultimately create data and business vulnerabilities instead of keeping data cleansing activities within the application that already securely maintains your CRM data.

There is a single solution that maintains the security of your CRM data while offering data quality automation to reduce manual data cleansing work and keep your budget stable. HubSpot was built to provide businesses with a free CRM and has been adding features within the platform to market, sell, service, and now clean that data all inside its comprehensive automation platform.

What is HubSpot's Operations Hub?

Operations Hub is the newest Hub on the HubSpot platform. But it now has full capabilities and various pricing and feature levels that include Free, Starter, Professional, and Enterprise tools. Operations Hub unlocks HubSpot as a crafted CRM platform by making it simple to connect, clean, automate, and curate your customer information from across apps and to build sustainable business processes around it in HubSpot. We'll dive deeper below into the capabilities and mention the level needed for those options. See the full list of features in the Operations Hub section of our HubSpot Page.

Don't yet have all marketing and sales info in one secure platform? Learn about your options.

Data Quality Automations and Programmable Automations

Basic Data Quality Automations

Most experienced HubSpot users can set up data quality automation without developer support.

While data sync allows you to move data between other tools in your client's tech stack, data quality automation is all about making sure the data in their CRM is in the right format and that the quality of their data is maintained, so they can avoid negative downstream impact to their marketing, sales, and service efforts. Many databases start out clean, but because people input their data in variable formats, databases can quickly become messy and require cleaning to maintain the quality of the information within them.

Some common examples Data Sync can fix include:

• Fully capitalized names
• Names without any capital letters
• Incorrect date properties
• End users submitting the wrong information into a chatbot
• Service/sales reps incorrectly entering CRM information

Complex Programmable Automation

Programmable automation in HubSpot's Operations Hub is complex to set up and likely requires developer support (psst...we can help!). This functionality is a game changer because custom code actions will allow you to replace software solutions and perform complex automation. They also work with workflows and bots in HubSpot, opening many possible use cases.

[Example] You can now write and execute JavaScript right in a workflow. And you can run a function, make API calls (inside and outside of HubSpot), and use that data in the rest of your automation. Take the power of HubSpot and expand it as far as your imagination and your developer can go.

Examples of What HubSpot Operations Hub Data Automation Can Do

With such a powerful tool that offers advanced flexibility, the sky may be the limit, but this can lead to overthinking these use cases.

Here are some HubSpot customer examples using this feature:

• When standard workflow functionality doesn't do what you need it to do
• Assign complex territory or new lead assignments
• Pull in data from third-party tools to enrich information for HubSpot records
• Renewals
• Define lead routing and rotation
• Ticket assignment
• Data enrichment
• Cross-object associations
• Commission calculations
• Deal/project IDs and numbering

Building And Managing Programmable Automations

While HubSpot has created a library of programmable automation, this doesn't mean that any marketer can just implement these workflows without any development skills. And honestly, many items will need to be customized per your specific environment and use case.

With that in mind, only you, alongside your trusted HubSpot partner (Hey — we're a Diamond HubSpot Solutions Partner), can realistically determine which Operation Hub automation is useful for your CRM, services or products, customers, or buyer personas. Your current challenges and business goals are a great place to help identify potential automation opportunities. These types of automation could include complex service date reminders, lead rotation, as well as advanced data manipulation calculations.

[Example] You could create a custom automation that allows HubSpot to calculate the necessary service date for a vehicle or piece of machinery based on your company's recommended service frequency for the item. The workflow would then populate a date for the next needed service or could trigger a reminder email to ensure service dates are met.

Thinking about getting Operations Hub, or maybe you are new to HubSpot? We can help you make the most of HubSpot's powerful tech stack. Find out more about getting a HubSpot audit. Click on Buzzy, and he will show you the way to more information!