I’m a new manager/admin and I wanted to ask if there are any general guidelines for managing users and content. I inherited an overwhelming amount of information in our account. No old users have ever been removed or their worklows/reports or notifications cleaned up. As far as I can tell, the files have never been organized or replaced, so there are several versions of catalogs and other files like product images that are outdated. Any landing page or form ever created is still in our account some are unpublished but a lot were still live.
In my opinion, if its not current then it needs to be archived or deleted. I would think old user accounts would be a safety concern and should be removed. All the marketing files are backed up on our local server so there shouldn’t be multiple versions on Hubspot that might get put out on the web incorrectly. That being said, I also wasn’t sure if there was a reason to keep some of this stuff or if this was just poor management of the account. I didn’t want to go on a clean up rampage and then accidentally delete something important. Has anyone else had to go through a major account clean up or reorganization?
I’ll also add a few experts to our conversation to get their input. @MRipley is looking for best practices on managing old users and outdated content such as workflows, reports, and landing pages.
This certainly sounds like poor management of the account. It’s easy to let that happen if there aren’t procedures or a dedicated person responsible for managing users, contacts, lists, content, etc.
I would definitely delete old users - you may need to reassign contacts if they owned them, but all of the files and workflows will remain in place
Use the Workflow analytics/history to determine if workflows are still being used or if they should be deleted or updated
This will be timely, but worthwhile
Outdated files in the file repository is definitely a concern as people may be given the wrong information on an outdated document
This is also a challenge for users to understand which file is up-to-date and accurate
I would create an archive/to-delete folder and start moving those assets there as soon as you identify the most up-to-date/current one in the system
I would highly recommend putting in place an SOP for all of these assets that live within HubSpot and identifying who will be responsible for managing this on an ongoing basis. Ultimately if someone isn’t owning it, it won’t get done consistently. You can break various clean-ups into what needs to happen weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. There should also be something in-place so that the responsible party can report that it was complete and any other data that is important.
This isn’t HubSpot specific…this is all CRMs or even other platforms you may be using. It’s not always a fun task, but it is important!
As far as general guidelines go, these depend a lot on your requirements. That being said, here’s what I think about the areas you mentioned.
Old users. These should definitely be deactivated. (I wouldn’t delete them, deactivating does the same job and you’ll have more transparency.) If you can enable single sign-on, that would automatically lock out all old users. Make sure to re-assign all records owned by these old users before deactivating them. I would also check if any communication is sent from their names (by exporting all automated emails, if applicable, and checking the from names / from email addresses).
Files. It’s not unusual that this part of the tool is a mess. Cleaning this up is going to be a big time sink so I’d move this to the end of your to-do-list it since it doesn’t affect day to day, see also linked blog post above. When you clean these up, keep in mind that they might be referenced on landing pages and in emails.
Workflows. Generally a good idea to audit these as older workflows are not following the latest requirements. This is going to be a one-by-one task. Again, exporting all workflows in a spreadsheet and tracking progress there is your best way forward.
Forms. Never delete forms, as this will also delete form submissions from the associated contacts. My recommendation is to either update them to meet current standards or rename them (add “Archived” to the title) and moving them into an archive folder.
Let me know if this answers your questions. Happy to go into more detail!