Last month I opened a client's HubSpot and found 400 custom properties. I asked the sales team which ones they used.

They named 12.

Four hundred fields of data, meticulously created over 3 years. Twelve that anyone actually touched. The rest? Digital ghosts haunting every form, every record, every report in their portal.

This $5M manufacturing company had spent $40K in cumulative HubSpot license fees. They had 12 custom pipelines. CRM adoption was sitting at 4%. The VP of Sales had a name for it: "the HubSpot hellscape."

Their sales team had given up entirely. They tracked deals in a shared Google Sheet because HubSpot was — and I quote — "too complicated to bother with." They were three weeks away from cancelling their subscription and going back to spreadsheets full time.

Instead, we deleted 300 properties. And within 8 weeks, their revenue was up 34%.

Here's exactly how — and why deletion might be the most profitable thing you do to your CRM this year.

The Property Graveyard: Why Every HubSpot Portal Bloats Over Time

Here's a pattern I see in virtually every HubSpot instance we audit: somebody set it up with good intentions. They created properties for everything they might want to track. Then someone else added more. Then a marketing agency added their fields. Then a sales manager wanted "just one more dropdown."

Nobody ever deletes anything.

Over 12-24 months, your CRM becomes a property graveyard. Fields nobody fills in. Dropdowns nobody selects. Required fields people put garbage data into just to move past them.

The maths is brutal:

• More properties = more fields on forms = more time per record
• More time per record = lower adoption
• Lower adoption = worse data
• Worse data = useless reports
• Useless reports = "HubSpot doesn't work"

It's not HubSpot that doesn't work. It's the 388 properties nobody asked for that don't work.

Your CRM is a mirror. If it looks messy, that's your process staring back at you.

The Real Cost of CRM Clutter (It's Not What You Think)

Most people think CRM bloat is an annoyance. It's actually a revenue problem.

Here's what our manufacturing client's bloat was actually costing them:

1. Lost deals from non-adoption ($180K/year estimated)

When only 4% of your sales team uses the CRM, you have no pipeline visibility. Deals fall through cracks. Follow-ups don't happen. The VP of Sales was flying blind on a $5M business.

2. Wasted time on data entry ($65K/year in labour)

The reps who DID use HubSpot spent 15 minutes per deal on data entry. With 200+ deals per quarter, that's 50 hours per quarter — per rep — typing into fields nobody read.

3. Bad decisions from bad data ($???)

The CEO had dashboards. They looked professional. The numbers were wrong by 30%+ because half the data feeding them was stale, incomplete, or made up. How do you calculate the cost of strategic decisions made on fiction?

When I show founders these numbers, the conversation shifts fast. CRM cleanup stops being a "nice to have" and starts being an emergency.

The 70/30 Delete: How We Decide What Stays and What Dies

This is the framework we use for every CRM cleanup. I call it the 70/30 Delete™ because in our experience, roughly 70% of what's in any CRM is waste. The 30% that remains does more than the 100% ever did.

Here's the process:

Step 1: Export and Audit Every Custom Property

Pull a full list of every custom property in HubSpot. For each one, answer three questions:

1. Is data actually being entered into this field? (Check fill rate — if it's under 20%, it's a ghost)
2. Does anyone use this data in a report, workflow, or decision? (If no, it's decoration)
3. Does this field exist because someone MIGHT need it someday? (If yes, archive it now)

Step 2: Categorise Into Three Buckets

• KEEP (the 30%): Fields with high fill rates that directly connect to revenue reporting, pipeline management, or active automation
• ARCHIVE (the 50%): Fields with some data but no active use — don't delete, just hide them from views and forms
• DELETE (the 20%): Fields with zero data, duplicate fields, or fields created by old integrations that no longer exist

Step 3: Simplify What Remains

For the properties you keep:

• Can any be auto-populated by workflows instead of manual entry?
• Can dropdowns be consolidated? (If you have 47 lead sources, you probably need 8)
• Can required fields be reduced to the absolute minimum for deal creation?

Step 4: Rebuild Forms and Views

With 70% of the noise gone, rebuild your deal creation form (minimum viable fields only), contact and company views (show what matters, hide the rest), and board views (clean pipeline with clear stages).

The whole process takes 2-3 days for a portal this size. The ROI starts on day one.

Inside the Cleanup: What We Kept, What We Killed, and Why

For our manufacturing client, here's how the 70/30 Delete played out:

Before: 400 custom properties
After: 97 custom properties

What we kept (97 properties): Core contact fields (name, email, phone, company, source), deal fields directly tied to revenue (amount, close date, stage, owner, product line), properties used in active workflows (lead score, lifecycle stage, last activity date), and properties feeding the CEO's 3 key reports.

What we archived (203 properties): "Nice to have" demographic data nobody queried, historical fields from a previous marketing agency's campaigns, duplicate fields (they had 3 different "Industry" properties), and fields from discontinued integrations.

What we deleted (100 properties): Properties with 0% fill rate, test fields ("Test_field_1", "Mick's test", "DELETE ME"), properties created by a Zapier integration they'd disconnected 18 months ago, and fields that duplicated HubSpot's built-in properties.

Pipelines: 12 → 2 (one for new business, one for existing client expansion)
Workflows: Deleted 14 broken workflows, built 5 new ones that actually ran
Dashboard: Scrapped everything, built 1 dashboard with 6 reports the CEO actually reviewed weekly

The Revolt — And Why It Lasted Exactly 3 Days

I won't pretend this was smooth. The day after the cleanup, I got a call from the ops manager.

"Where's the Industry Classification field?"
"Archived. It had a 3% fill rate."
"But we might need that for a report someday."
"When you need it, we'll bring it back in 5 minutes. Right now it's adding 2 clicks to every contact record for data nobody enters."

The sales team was nervous too. Change always triggers resistance. But here's what happened:

Day 1: Complaints about missing fields. "Where did everything go?"
Day 2: Grudging acknowledgment that deal creation was faster
Day 3: Silence. The good kind. People were just… using HubSpot.
Day 10: The first rep told the VP of Sales: "I actually don't mind updating deals anymore."

That's when I knew the cleanup had worked. CRM adoption isn't a training problem. It's a friction problem. Remove the friction, and people adopt naturally.

Simplicity scales. Complexity dies.

The Results: Adoption, Forecast Accuracy, and the Revenue Surprise

Here's what happened over 8 weeks:

• Custom properties: 400 → 97 (-76%)
• Pipelines: 12 → 2 (-83%)
• CRM input time per deal: 15 min → 2 min (-87%)
• CRM adoption: 4% → 91% (+2,175%)
• Forecast accuracy: 40% → 87% (+118%)
• Google Sheets for deals: Retired ✅

And the revenue? Revenue didn't go up because we did something clever in HubSpot. Revenue went up because the sales team could finally see their pipeline. With 91% adoption, the VP of Sales had real-time visibility for the first time in 3 years.

Three specific changes drove the 34% revenue increase:

1. Faster follow-up: With deal stage automation and task reminders, average follow-up time dropped from 4 days to same-day
2. Better forecasting: The CEO stopped making inventory decisions on gut feel and started using actual pipeline data
3. Recovered deals: They found 23 deals in the old CRM that had been "forgotten" — 8 of them closed within 6 weeks

The CRM didn't make the revenue. The CRM made the revenue visible — and the team did the rest.

Your 15-Minute Property Audit (Do This Today)

You don't need to hire us to start. Here's a quick audit you can run right now:

Step 1 (5 minutes): Go to Settings → Properties in HubSpot. Filter by "Custom properties." Note the total count.

Step 2 (5 minutes): Sort by "% of records with a value." Flag every property under 20% fill rate.

Step 3 (5 minutes): For your flagged properties, ask: "Does this field appear in any active workflow, report, or dashboard?" If no — it's a candidate for archive.

Your benchmark:

• Under 50 custom properties? You're lean. Nice work.
• 50–150? Normal. Probably 30% waste.
• 150–300? Bloated. Time for a cleanup.
• 300+? You're in hellscape territory. Call us.

Data before dashboards. Simplicity scales. Complexity dies.

If your HubSpot feels like a hellscape, it's not the tool — it's the 300 properties nobody asked for. Start deleting. You'll be surprised what grows back.

Want us to run this audit for you? We do a free 15-minute CRM health check — no pitch, just an honest look at your portal.