The HubSpot Year-End Tune-Up: Clean Data, Clear Goals, Bigger Q1 Wins

Christmas to New Year is the rare quiet window where you can stop firefighting and get your house in order. If you use HubSpot, a short, focused tune-up now sets you up for faster campaigns, cleaner reporting, and bigger Q1 wins.

This guide gives you a step-by-step plan to tidy your CRM, align teams, and lock in the baseline metrics that matter. You will also find a simple 30-day pilot checklist with two measurable outcomes your team can hit before the end of January.

Hey Rebels scopes HubSpot Consultancy and Onboarding around practical outcomes, not bloated retainers. You get clean data, clear goals, and working automations that actually move the numbers.

Step 1: Tidy your properties and lifecycle stages

If your properties are messy, your reports will lie to you. Start here.

• Remove or archive unused contact and company properties
• Add clear descriptions to the properties you keep
• Standardise picklist values, especially Lead Source, Job Title, and Industry. Fix casing and duplicates
• Align Lifecycle Stage to one shared definition across Marketing, Sales, and Success
  • Subscriber: opted-in contact
  • MQL: meets scoring threshold
  • SQL: sales-qualified with a documented need
  • Opportunity: tied to an open deal
• Map Lifecycle Stage to Deal Stage movement so contacts do not stall
• Use workflows to enforce rules and prevent skipped stages

Outcome: cleaner segmentation, better scoring, and fewer “unknown” values wrecking dashboards.

Step 2: Find and fix duplicate contacts and companies

Dupes kill deliverability and waste sales time.

• Use HubSpot’s duplicate management tool weekly for the next month
• Choose a single source for enrichment and set tie-break rules
  • Last activity wins for phone
  • Verified email wins for email
  • CRM notes are never overwritten
• Create a simple merge playbook covering who merges, master fields, and what gets archived

Outcome: higher email deliverability, cleaner timelines, and fewer awkward double calls.

Step 3: Align deal stages and exit criteria

Deal stages should reflect your real sales motion.

• Keep the pipeline lean. Six to eight stages is enough for most B2B teams
• Define clear entry and exit criteria for every stage
• If criteria are not met, the deal does not move
• Add automated tasks, alerts, and data capture at each stage
  • Create a task to send a summary
  • Log the next step
  • Capture Budget and Authority

Outcome: predictable forecasting and a shared view of where revenue will land.

Step 4: Set your baseline metrics

You cannot improve what you do not measure. Capture these before Q1 kicks off.

• Lead volume by channel and campaign
• MQL to SQL conversion rate
• Win rate and average deal value
• Sales cycle length from first touch to closed won
• Time to first response for inbound leads
• Reply rate to the first sales follow-up

Put everything on one dashboard. Agree Q1 targets and set a weekly review cadence.

Step 5: Quick wins with Breeze and automation

Small changes compound.

• Use Breeze Assistant to create first drafts of landing copy, nurture emails, and social snippets. Human-edit for tone and accuracy
• Add a two-step follow-up sequence for inbound demo requests
  • Fast first reply from the owner
  • Personalised nudge referencing last page viewed or form notes
• Turn on internal Slack alerts for new SQLs, deals slipping past due dates, and uncontacted MQLs older than 24 hours

Outcome: faster campaign shipping, higher reply rates, and fewer leads slipping through the cracks.

Your 30-day pilot checklist

Pick one marketing outcome and one sales outcome. Keep scope tight and measurable.

Week 0: Setup (90 minutes)

• Create a prompt library with brand voice, benefits, and compliance notes
• Build a shared dashboard with baseline metrics
• Confirm deal stages and exit criteria

Week 1

Marketing outcome
Reduce time-to-first-draft using Breeze. Choose one pillar topic. Draft one blog, remix it into one email and three social posts. Ship one asset by Friday.

Sales outcome
Improve first follow-up reply rate. Build a two-email sequence with personalisation tokens. Test two subject lines.

Week 2

• Review metrics against baseline
• Aim for a 30 to 50 percent reduction in drafting time
• Target a 5 to 10 percent uplift in reply rate and keep the winner

Week 3

• Automate data hygiene
• Set Lead Source consistently via workflow
• Alert owners when key properties are missing
• Add a task to every new SQL to log Decision Criteria and Next Step

Week 4

• Roll winners into playbooks
• Save final templates and prompts
• Lock reporting
• Present outcomes and decide whether to expand to two more use cases

Two measurable outcomes to prove value in 30 days

• Improve first follow-up reply rate by 5 to 15 percent
• Reduce time-to-first-draft by 30 to 50 percent using Breeze

Where Hey Rebels fits

We are a London-based partner that scopes HubSpot Consultancy and Onboarding around outcomes. No bloated retainers, no mystery hours. You get:

• A tidy CRM that mirrors your real funnel
• Automations and Breeze-powered workflows that save time
• Dashboards that track lead volume, conversion, and ROI
• A week-by-week playbook your team can own

Ready for bigger Q1 wins?

Book a minute discovery and kick off in January. We will review your current HubSpot, define two pilot outcomes, and agree a fast path to measurable improvements in weeks, not months.