I recently spoke about a HubSpot portal which had been in existence for several years.
It had all those features: dozens of workflows, hundreds of properties, custom reports, multiple pipelines, integrations, and when you looked at it on paper it seemed like a fully developed CRM.
But every change felt hard. Nobody wanted to touch the workflows because they were not sure what else might break. New properties kept getting created because nobody could tell if an existing one already did the same thing. Reports showed different numbers depending on who built them.
The portal was still operational. It just seemed… heavy.
That made me think: how can you actually tell when it’s time to stop making repairs and begin rebuilding certain parts of your CRM?
What I’m referring to is not destroying all the data and beginning again since most companies cannot simply get rid of years’ worth of customer data and automation. However, at times it is simpler to rebuild a process than it is to work out the years of minor modifications.
We often continue to make alterations to the same workflow since it seems quicker to do so than to redesign it; we introduce one more branch, one more condition, and one more exception, and in the end the workflow becomes so complicated that no one wants to touch it anymore.
The same applies to properties, pipelines, and reports; all the decisions were sensible when they were made. It is only when you put all those decisions together that the mess results.
At present, each time I look at a HubSpot portal I ask myself this question: would I construct it in the same manner if I were to build it today?
At times the answer is yes and at other times it is no, which is generally a reason to take a step back before making one more minor change.
I am now of the opinion that keeping a HubSpot portal going is not merely a matter of adding new features, since it’s also necessary to realise when an old process has become outdated. In some cases the best way to improve things is not to carry out another update but rather to have the courage to redesign something that is no longer suitable for the business.