An Audit That Found Workflows With No Action
A subscription retailer of sustainably sourced household paper goods carried roughly 1,000 HubSpot contacts with zero buyer personas built and a homepage that took 17.4 seconds to load against a 3-second target. A HubSpot and Klaviyo audit graded the portal 60 out of 100 and the website 65 out of 100.
Executive Summary
Context
A subscription retailer of sustainably sourced household paper goods runs direct-to-consumer storefronts across Australia, the UK and the US alongside a region-gated B2B wholesale channel. Its HubSpot portal held roughly 1,000 contacts with no personas built.
What We Built
We audited the client's HubSpot portal and website end to end, grading each element from personas through reporting, then reviewed its live Klaviyo automation to find where the two systems' logic no longer matched the business running through them.
Tech Stack
- HubSpot CRM and Sales pipelines
- HubSpot free-tier Marketing Hub
- HubSpot Sequences
- Klaviyo automation flows
Not a fit if you can't free a stakeholder to work through the audit's sub-scores on a set cadence. A contact stretched thin on their own operations slows every downstream decision, as it did here. It also delivers less on a free marketing-hub tier alone, because progressive-profiling forms and smart content need a licence upgrade.
The Challenge
The client ran HubSpot's free tier, which doesn't include the persona, smart-content or progressive-profiling tooling that a Professional upgrade unlocks. Roughly 1,000 contacts moved through the portal with zero personas built to route them. The homepage took 17.4 seconds to load against a 3-second target, which was the audit's leading technical fault.
The portal had 35 workflows, 27 of them active, yet 134 deals had sat inactive for 90 or more days across seven pipelines. Several workflows enrolled deals on stages like Prospecting and Engaged and Qualified to Buy, and then took no further action once a deal was in. The client needed to know which of these faults to fix first, and which ones its licence tier could fix at all.
Our Approach
We worked through the portal stage by stage: personas, buyer journey, forms, automation, tasks, email, calling, pipelines and reporting. Each area was graded towards the 60-out-of-100 total. On automation, the fix we scoped for the no-action workflows was a re-engagement task inserted into stages that were already enrolling deals.
Klaviyo held a separate, more mature library: a wholesale lead-onboarding sequence that rerouted ineligible regions to their own holding message, a region-specific auto-reply that branched by AU, UK or US, and an invoice-dunning sequence that escalated from a 15-day reminder to a 45-day hold warning. We considered rebuilding that library inside HubSpot, but the free tier couldn't yet run smart content or progressive forms. So we replicated the client's email designs as HubSpot templates with per-module edit permissions instead.
The trade-off is that full flow parity waits for the licence upgrade. We held the flow rebuild for that upgrade, and flagged the Professional tier as its prerequisite.
Impact
A graded audit turns a vague hunch into a scoped list
The portal and website were scored element by element, from personas through reporting, so each sub-score named exactly what needed attention rather than a single composite grade. That gave the client a prioritised list to work from instead of a general sense that HubSpot was underused.
Workflows that enrolled deals and did nothing get a next step
The audit found workflows configured with enrolment criteria but no action once a deal entered a stage like Prospecting or Engaged and Qualified to Buy. The fix scoped a re-engagement task into those workflows, so a stalled deal now surfaces to a rep instead of sitting silently.
Existing email designs move into HubSpot without a licence upgrade
The client's Klaviyo EDM library was replicated as HubSpot templates with per-module edit permissions for header, CTA, testimonial, image and footer, so marketing could produce on-brand email inside HubSpot immediately, without waiting on a Professional-tier upgrade to do it.
A mapped sales process replaces an ad hoc one
Workshops between the delivery team and the client's stakeholders produced an initial mapping of the sales process and a general outreach sequence, giving reps a documented flow to work from as the copy moved into HubSpot Sequences.
Each portal element, personas, buyer journey, forms, automation, tasks, email, calling, pipelines and reporting, was scored on its own rubric and rolled up to a 60-out-of-100 total; the website carried its own 65-out-of-100 score with load time as the leading fault.
Workflows were checked against their enrolment criteria, a deal reaching a stage like Prospecting or Engaged and Qualified to Buy, to confirm that an action existed past the gate. Several didn't have one, so we scoped a rep re-engagement task.
The client's live Klaviyo automation, wholesale lead onboarding, region-specific enquiry auto-response, invoice dunning and post-purchase welcome, was reviewed against its own trigger, key and gate before any HubSpot equivalent was scoped.
EDM designs were rebuilt as HubSpot templates with edit permissions scoped per module, header, CTA, testimonial, image and footer, so the build ran entirely inside the client's existing free-tier licence rather than assuming an upgrade.
A deal that reaches a HubSpot pipeline stage enrols in a workflow, and where no further step existed, the audit's fix adds a sales-rep re-engagement task. In Klaviyo, a wholesale lead enquiry is routed by the requester's region (AU, UK or US) to a region-specific auto-reply, and an ineligible region gets a holding message instead. Overdue wholesale invoices follow their own path, with a reminder at 15 days and a hold warning at 45 days. The two systems run on separate triggers, and no sync crosses between them.
FAQ
The client's HubSpot workflows and Klaviyo flows had drifted apart with nobody tracking where. Scoring each portal element and reviewing the Klaviyo library first meant the build replicated what already worked and fixed what specifically did not, rather than rebuilding from a guess.
The client ran HubSpot's free tier, so progressive-profiling forms, smart content and social publishing weren't yet licensed. We scoped what the tier could run now, and we flagged the Professional upgrade as the prerequisite for the rest.
