Most of the time, when people talk about improving their HubSpot portal, they usually focus on their workflows.
“Can we automate this?” “Should we add another notification?” “Can we build a new branch?”
I enjoy building workflows, but now, I’ve started to focus more on contact properties.
And the reason is simple: over all these years working on HubSpot, I have realized that most workflow issues begin with the data the workflow uses.
Think about it: if a property isn’t updated regularly, the workflow can only make decisions based on incomplete information. If two teams use the same property in different ways, reports become unreliable. If nobody knows what a property is supposed to track, people stop filling it in correctly.
The workflow isn’t broken; it just relies on bad data.
That is one of the major reasons why I spend more time discussing properties than workflows. When someone requests a new automation, one of my first questions is:
“Do we already have the right data to support this?”
More often than not, we discover the property hasn’t been updated in months, or different teams have conflicting ideas about its use. Fixing that often matters more than changing the workflow itself.
I’ve also seen properties multiply over time. Marketing creates one. Sales adds another one. Operations throws in a few more. Each one makes sense at the time. A year later, there might be three properties tracking nearly the same thing, and no one knows which one to use. That confusion spreads into reports, automation, and dashboards.
For me, it all boils down to this: a well-run HubSpot portal relies on well-managed data. Workflows are important, but they’re only as effective as the information that feeds them. I’ve found that regularly reviewing properties helps identify issues before they affect automation.
And so, it might not be the most exciting part of the job, but it might just be one of the most valuable ones.