HubSpot Partner Not Delivering? How To Diagnose What's Really Wrong

You're a year or so into a HubSpot subscription that costs about as much as a junior salary, and the pipeline looks much the same as it did before you signed. The monthly report from your partner arrives full of green arrows and words like "engagement", your sales team still mutters that the leads are rubbish, and somewhere at the back of your mind a fairly uncomfortable question is starting to form about whether any of this was ever going to work.

Before we go any further, we should get our bias out in the open, because we're a HubSpot partner ourselves, which means we have an obvious commercial interest in you concluding that your current one isn't up to the job. So read everything below with that in mind. In fairness, a decent chunk of this post is about situations where switching partners will fix precisely nothing, and in our experience, those situations are far more common than the agency world likes to admit.

What we want to do here is help you work out where the problem actually sits, because "HubSpot isn't working" is usually three or four separate problems wearing the same coat, and only one of them has anything to do with the agency you're paying.

What "it's not working" usually means

When someone calls us about a HubSpot portal that's underperforming, the opening description is nearly always the same handful of words, and those words cover an enormous range of very different problems. Getting specific about which one you've actually got is the whole game, because the fix for each is completely different and some of them can't be bought from an agency at all.

In our experience, the complaint breaks down into one of these:

• There simply aren't enough leads coming in, and traffic to the site has barely moved in a year
• There are plenty of leads, but sales say they're worthless, which usually means marketing and sales have never agreed what a good lead looks like
• The leads are fine, but nobody in the sales team is actually using the CRM, so deals live in someone's head or in a spreadsheet nobody else can see
• The data is such a mess that the reporting can't be trusted, and once you can't trust a report you stop opening it
• You're paying for a tier of HubSpot with features you've never switched on, which is a procurement problem rather than a marketing one

Notice that only the first of those is unambiguously an agency's responsibility, and even then only if generating traffic and leads was what you hired them to do. We've walked into portals where the agency was doing perfectly decent work on the top of the funnel while the entire sales process underneath it quietly leaked, and no amount of extra blog posts was ever going to fix that.

Start with a basic question: what did you actually buy?

A surprising number of the rescue conversations we have start with the client not being entirely sure what's in their HubSpot contract, which sounds unlikely until you remember that the person who signed it has often since moved on, and the renewal has rolled over twice since then without anyone reading it properly.

So go and find the contract. Work out which hubs you're paying for, which tier each one sits at, how many seats you've bought, and crucially when the thing renews, because your renewal date will shape every decision you make from here. If you want a refresher on what all the different bits do and what they cost, our plain English guide to what HubSpot actually is covers the ground, and our breakdown of what CMS Hub really costs gets into the numbers that don't appear on the pricing page.

Then compare that against your agency's scope of work. This is the bit that catches people out. We've seen companies furious at their partner for not improving SEO when the retainer they signed covered only email and workflow support, and we've seen the reverse, where an agency has quietly been doing three times the work it was contracted for because nobody wanted an awkward conversation. Neither situation is anybody's fault exactly, but you can't judge whether you're getting value until you know what you asked for. Our post on how digital marketing retainers are meant to work is worth a read if the scope feels vague to you.

The three places the problem can sit

Once you know what you bought and what you asked for, you can start narrowing down where things have gone wrong. There are broadly three candidates, and it's entirely possible to have all three at once, which is a miserable position to be in but at least a knowable one.

It's your own setup, your data, or your sales team

This is the one nobody wants to hear, and it's the most common. HubSpot reflects the process you put into it, so if your sales process is undefined, your portal will be a mess no matter who administers it. The tell-tale signs are worth knowing: lifecycle stages that don't match how your business actually sells, deal stages that were copied from the HubSpot default template and never changed, contacts sitting in a lifecycle stage they entered eighteen months ago because nothing ever moves them along, and a sales team that closes business perfectly happily without touching the CRM at all.

If your reps aren't in the system, no agency on earth can rescue your reporting, because it's only ever as good as what the reps put in. We've been in rooms where the marketing manager is being held responsible for pipeline figures that bear no relation to reality, purely because half the sales team logs deals a fortnight after they've closed. That's a management problem, and it needs solving internally before you spend another penny externally.

It's the partner

Sometimes it really is the agency, and there are patterns we see often enough to name. The most obvious one is a partner who reports on activity rather than outcomes, so you get a monthly summary of emails sent, blog posts published, and social impressions, without a single number that connects to revenue. Activity reporting is what agencies do when they can no longer point to results, and it's a reliable signal that something is wrong.

The second pattern is the partner who only ever does what's in the ticket queue. They're responsive, they're pleasant, they turn things round quickly, and in three years they have never once brought you an idea you didn't ask for. That's a supplier, and if you're paying partner money you're paying for someone who should be telling you things you don't want to hear. Our piece on why client and agency relationships fail goes into this in more detail, because it cuts both ways and clients contribute to the drift as often as agencies do.

The third pattern, and the one that irritates us most, is the partner who set the portal up two years ago and hasn't been back into the settings since. You can usually spot it in the wreckage they leave behind: workflows erroring out every week that nobody notices, forms feeding into a list that nothing is subscribed to, and a graveyard of half-built dashboards that nobody has opened since the day they were made. HubSpot rewards maintenance and it punishes neglect, so a portal that hasn't been tidied in eighteen months will be carrying an awful lot of dead weight.

It's HubSpot, or at least the bit of HubSpot you're paying for

We say this as people who almost always recommend HubSpot's CRM, so it isn't a comfortable admission, but occasionally the software genuinely is the wrong fit. If you sell one enormous contract a year through a relationship your MD has had since 1998, then a marketing automation platform built around a steady flow of inbound enquiries is not going to transform your business, and anyone who told you otherwise was selling. Equally, if you bought Marketing Hub Professional for the workflows and you're running four workflows, you've overbought; the fix is to downgrade at renewal rather than hire someone new to justify the licence.

The portal audit you can run yourself in an afternoon

You don't need an agency to tell you whether your portal is in reasonable shape, and doing this yourself before you make any decisions puts you in a much stronger position, whether you end up staying or going. Set aside a couple of hours and work through these in order.

1. Check your lifecycle stages against how you actually sell. Open the contacts list, group by lifecycle stage, and ask whether those labels describe anything real in your business. If you can't explain the difference between a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead in a sentence, and more importantly if sales can't, then the whole funnel above it is measuring nothing.
2. Run the original source report, which tells you where your contacts genuinely came from and is often a bit of a shock. If 80% of them have an original "offline sources", then somebody has been importing lists, and your organic and paid numbers are fiction.
3. Count your workflows, then count the ones that ran this month, because the gap between those two numbers is a decent proxy for how much attention the portal has been getting. Have a look at the error tab while you're in there, since failing workflows are a very common source of leads quietly going nowhere.
4. Look at your deal pipeline and check the dates on everything. How many deals haven't been touched in sixty days? If it's most of them, your pipeline value is imaginary, and no reporting built on top of it means anything.
5. Submit one of your own forms using a personal email address, then follow the whole journey through: what page do you land on, what email do you get, how long does it take, who in your business gets notified, and does anybody actually ring you? We do this on every rescue project, and the results are frequently embarrassing.
6. Open the last three monthly reports side by side and see whether they're measuring the same things. Has anything been quietly dropped after a bad month, and does any number in them connect to a figure your finance director would recognise?

Write down what you find, because that document becomes the agenda for the conversation you're about to have, and going into that conversation with specifics instead of a general feeling of dissatisfaction changes it entirely.

What a competent partner should have done by now

It's worth setting out what reasonable looks like, because "poor results" is only meaningful relative to some expectation, and plenty of people we speak to have never had that expectation properly set for them.

Within the first three months, a decent partner should have got your lifecycle stages and deal stages to match your actual sales process, sorted out the data hygiene to the point where your reports can be trusted, and agreed with you and your sales director what counts as a qualified lead. Within six months you should be seeing movement in whichever metric you agreed to care about, even if it's leading indicators rather than closed revenue, because B2B sales cycles in engineering and industrial markets are long and nobody should be promising you deals by month four. Our post on marketing for complex B2B sales cycles explains why the timelines look the way they do.

By twelve months, you should be able to answer a fairly blunt question: what did this cost, and what did it bring in? If you can't answer that, and neither can your partner, then something has gone wrong in the measurement even if the underlying work has been fine.

If it really is the partner, how to move without losing everything

Assuming you've worked through all of the above and concluded that the agency genuinely is the weak link, the good news is that changing HubSpot partners is nowhere near as painful as changing, say, a website developer, and a lot of the fear people have about it is unfounded.

The single most important thing to understand is that you own your portal. Your HubSpot subscription is between you and HubSpot, and the agency simply has a seat in it, so they cannot hold your data hostage, they cannot take your workflows with them, and removing their access is a two-minute job in the settings. We mention this because we've had conversations with people who genuinely believed they were trapped, and that belief had kept them somewhere unhappy for an extra year.

What you do need to watch is the commercial side. Check whether your HubSpot subscription was purchased through the agency as a reseller; if it was, the renewal is tied to the retainer, and you'll want to time your exit around it. Check the notice period in the retainer contract; in this industry, it is usually between one and three months. And before you give notice, get a written handover list agreed covering admin access, any custom code or integrations they built, template files, and documentation of anything bespoke, because the goodwill for that conversation evaporates the moment you tell them you're leaving.

When you talk to replacement agencies, ask them to audit your existing portal before they quote. Any partner worth hiring will want to see inside it first, and the quality of what they spot in that audit tells you more about them than any case study will. If someone quotes you a monthly figure without asking to look, walk away.

When we'd tell you to stay exactly where you are

We said at the top that we'd cover the cases where switching won't help, so here they are. We'd genuinely rather you read this bit than hire us for the wrong reasons.

Stay put if your sales team isn't using the CRM, because you'll spend six months and a setup fee arriving at exactly the same place with a different logo on the reports. Fix the internal adoption problem first, and if that means someone senior making CRM use non-negotiable, then that's the actual project.

Stay put if you've changed the brief three times in the past year, because agencies can't build momentum on shifting ground and the pattern will follow you to the next one. Stay put if the relationship has gone quiet mostly because your side stopped attending the monthly calls, which happens more than anyone admits and is usually salvageable with one honest conversation. And stay put if you're eight months into a twelve month first year, because HubSpot work compounds and the results tend to arrive later than anybody would like. Our post on why inbound marketing might not be for you is deliberately unflattering about the timescales involved.

The one situation where we'd say move quickly is when you've lost trust in the numbers. Everything else is fixable with a difficult conversation, but if you suspect the reporting has been massaged then the relationship is finished whatever the underlying performance looks like, and you should get out at the next contractual opportunity.

If you're having HubSpot issues nd need some help, please fill in this form, and we'll arrange a suitable time for a chat. Alternatively, simply book a time now.

Frequently asked questions

Can my HubSpot partner stop me accessing my own portal?

No, they can't. Your HubSpot subscription is a contract between your company and HubSpot, and your agency simply holds a user seat within your portal, which means all of your contacts, workflows, templates and reporting stay exactly where they are when the relationship ends. The one thing to check is whether you bought the subscription through the agency as a reseller, in which case the billing runs through them and you'll want to speak to HubSpot directly about transferring it before you give notice.

How long should I give a new HubSpot partner before expecting results?

For B2B companies in engineering, industrial and professional services markets we'd say three months to get the foundations right and the data trustworthy, six months to see movement in leading indicators like qualified enquiries, and twelve months before you can fairly judge the return, largely because sales cycles in these sectors routinely run six to eighteen months on their own. Anyone promising closed revenue inside a quarter is either working in a very different market or telling you what you want to hear.

Is it worth switching partner if the problem is really our sales team?

Almost certainly not, and this is the most common misdiagnosis we come across. If your reps aren't logging deals, aren't updating stages, or are working out of a spreadsheet alongside the CRM, then a new agency will inherit exactly the same broken foundation and you'll have paid a setup fee to arrive back where you started. Sort out internal adoption first, ideally with a bit of visible pressure from someone senior, and then reassess the agency question from a position where the data actually means something.

What should I ask a prospective HubSpot partner before hiring them?

Ask them to audit your existing portal before they quote you anything, and pay attention to whether they push back on any of your assumptions during that audit, because the ones who agree with everything you say are the ones who'll be sending you activity reports in eighteen months. Ask specifically what they'd measure and what they'd expect that number to be doing at three, six and twelve months, and ask who'll actually be doing the work rather than who's in the room for the pitch.

Where to go from here

Run the portal audit before you do anything else, because whichever way you end up going you'll want that list of specifics in your hand. If it turns out the problem is internal, you've saved yourself a switching fee and a lot of upheaval. If it turns out the partner really has gone stale, you've got the evidence to have a proper conversation with them, and if that gets you nowhere, the evidence to brief a replacement properly.

If you'd like a second pair of eyes on what you find, we're happy to spend fifteen minutes on the phone looking at it with you. There's no hard sell at the end of it, and if we think you should stay where you are then that's what we'll tell you, which is a fairly poor business model but one we've stuck with for twenty years.