Some HubSpot problems don’t show up immediately.

They start as defaults you didn’t question, shortcuts taken under pressure, or decisions that felt harmless at the time. Then months later, you’re dealing with messy data, bloated pipelines, or reporting you don’t trust.

This Spotter Wrapped issue is focused on Traps — the most common ways teams unintentionally create friction and complexity in HubSpot. These are all things that are far easier to prevent than to clean up after the fact.

If any of these sound familiar, consider this your reminder to fix them before the new year makes them harder.

Don’t Make a New Pipeline

If I had a dollar for every unnecessary ticket or deal pipeline I had ever run into, I’d probably have enough for a new couch from Ikea.

When is a new pipeline necessary? When the process differs and you need different stages.

Different product? Use a dropdown property and custom index views.

Different geographic regions? Use a dropdown property and custom index views.

Wherever you are looking at the data, you can use these properties to report on the deals or tickets separately.

Now, if you have one product line that is self-service via your website, and an enterprise offering where your sales team engages an opportunity with proposals, contracts, and conversations, that is two different pipelines.

Avoid Messy Text Properties

A lot of messy data in HubSpot starts because of text fields that don’t follow the rules.

You may have an internal document for those rules, but HubSpot also allows you to build these into the property.

Make extra spaces, capital letters, and unique values required, or not.

You can even build custom logic for these write-in properties.

Don’t Let Duplicate Properties Slow You Down

Almost every HubSpot account has dealt with this issue. An admin or marketer made a new property, then months or even years later, a salesperson made a duplicate of it, because the property wasn’t showing in the default view.

And no, it’s not always the salesperson’s fault. This happens in all different ways. Here are a few things you can do to address it after the fact:

Property naming

If the property tracks the same information, but might be called something different by different people/departments, consider naming it something that will show up in everyone’s search.

Default Record Views

If it’s important to one or more departments, put it in their record views so they know it exists and don’t go and make another one

Copy the Values

This is how you make sure the old and new properties have the same info, before you delete one. Choose which one is staying, then set a workflow to copy the values from the other. If there is a conflict? You’re gonna need to work out which of the two values is more trustworthy. See what the workflow looks like below.

Distinguish company records for parent/child relationships

If you are marketing or selling to large corporate organizations, it’s usually best practice to split them by office, region, location, or department.

HubSpot’s default company identifier is the domain name. This will combine all of your big company records into one based on their domain name.

There are two fixes here.

1. You can set up a new unique identifier to split these companies up. You can even use workflows to associate the companies with the default “Parent/Child” association labels (unique identifier checkbox shown below).

2. Create new properties and use their combination (domain name + location, etc.) to delineate the offices and create new company records.

👋 Need a Spot?

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