Rid Your Portal of Dizzying Dashboards, Do Some Good, & Tell Time in New Ways

Dashboards can easily be the best or worst thing inside your HubSpot. This week, let's make sure they're the best. Plus check out our first app of the month, learn about a new way to connect with some nonprofits and explore the new calculated time properties!

What's Inside:

1. On Your Radar: Sprocketeer is Connecting HubSpot Admins with Nonprofits
2. Update Of The Week: Create 'Time Since' and 'Time Until' Properties
3. Admin's Assignment: Dashboard Audit (with template)

App of the Month: Hublead

This edition is brought to you in part by my favorite way to connect HubSpot with LinkedIn: Hublead! Hublead's HubSpot LinkedIn integration makes it super easy to add any LinkedIn profile as a contact, track LinkedIn activities, and report on it all right within HubSpot. Check back next week for our Hublead deep dive, or try it free today.

App of the Month is a paid sponsorship from app developers I trust. To inquire about getting your app featured or to learn more, click here.

On Your Radar

Sprocketeer is Connecting HubSpot Admins with Nonprofits

Cameron Collins and the rest of the folks at Sprocketeer are ringing in the new year with some charity by connecting HubSpot admins with nonprofits that need a little pro-bono HubSpot help.

This sounds like an excellent way for admins to give back, but also to get some wider experience. Maybe you're bored working in just a single instance, or maybe you're wanting to do a little good with your talents - either way this is worth checking out.

Here's the page with the details and the sign-up link if you're interested!

Update Of The Week

Create 'Time Since' and 'Time Until' Properties

Last week was another slow one for HubSpot updates due to the holiday, but we did have a couple move from private to public beta. The one that'll be most impactful to the most users is the ability to create two new types of calculated properties:

• One that displays time since another date property
• And one that displays time until another date property

That's right, this means no more having to build out or use a third party to create a 'today's date' property for hacky workarounds!

You create these properties the same way you create any other, then select calculation as the field type, then select either time since or time until, and finally select the date or datetime property you want to compare against. Remember that you'll still need to enroll in the public beta first.

The update release language from HubSpot talks a lot about using these properties for things like lists, workflows, and reports, but honestly these don't add much functionality over what you could already do with date filtering.

Where I do see these making a big difference are for giving your users easier to understand info at a glance, and for personalization tokens in marketing and sales emails.

To get a rundown of all HubSpot's December updates + some practical and creative use cases for them, join me this Wednesday, January 8th, for my monthly New & Now webinar!

Admin's Assignment

Dashboard Audit (with template)

Nothing is better than a HubSpot instance with helpful dashboards that give you the info you need to make better decisions. But nothing is worse than a HubSpot instance full of messy, outdated, and unhelpful dashboards that muddy things up so much you don't know where to find the good stuff!

Let's make sure your HubSpot instance falls into that first category this year with a little dashboard clean-up. Trust me, your team will appreciate a fresh start to 2025 with some nice and clean dashboards!

If you don't have too many dashboards and everything is in pretty good shape, you may be able to clean things up as you go. But if not, Step 1 below has a Google Sheet you can use to take notes and create a plan of action.

Step 1: Copy and prep the template.

• Click here to view the template.
• Click File > Make a Copy to save an editable version (you'll need a free Google account with Google Drive if you don't already have one).

Step 2: Get a lay of the land.

• Navigate to Reports > Dashboards.
• Click the blue 'Manage dashboards' link near the top right of any dashboard.

Here you'll see a list of all the dashboards in your account and you'll be able to see how many dashboards you have in the top left corner to start to get a sense of how much work you'll need to do. While there's no magical number for how many dashboards you should have, the bigger the number, the more likely there's some opportunity for clean-up.

Step 3: Identify dashboards no longer being used.

While you can't filter based on the last time a dashboard was viewed, you can sort by it. Click on the 'Last Viewed' column header twice to show the dashboards that haven't been viewed in the longest time at the top of the list.

Make note of the ones that haven't been viewed in the last year. There's a pretty good chance these can be safely deleted.

Step 4: Identify unnecessary dashboards by name.

Review the list of dashboard names and see if there are any you can immediately identify as no longer necessary because of their name. Look for names that include things like 'test' or 'temp' or anything else that suggests it's no longer needed based on the context you have about your organization.

Step 5: Identify duplicative dashboards by name.

Click on the 'Name' column header to sort your dashboards by name. Then look through the list and identify dashboards that have highly similar names (they'll often be right next to each other, but not always). Once dashboards with similar names are identified, take a look at the dashboards themselves to see whether they include the same reports or are trying to provide answers to the same questions. If so, you can likely consolidate them into a single dashboard.

Step 6: Review remaining dashboards one-by-one.

Now that you've identified the obvious clean-up opportunities, it's time to roll up your sleeves and do the real work. For the remaining dashboards, click into each one to review. As you're reviewing, ask yourself the following questions and take notes in the provided spreadsheet:

• Is this dashboard complete? Dashboards with one or two reports are often unnecessary and can be deleted.
• Is this dashboard accurate? Are the reports built correctly and based on the right data points?
• Is this dashboard necessary? Is it answering important questions or providing KPIs that you or other stakeholders care about? Is it the only dashboard doing so?
• Is this dashboard focused? Is it telling a singular story, such as the most important KPIs across the business, a full funnel overview, or a deep dive into a particular marketing channel? Or is it a random collection of reports that have nothing to do with one another?
• Is this dashboard helpful? Are the reports easy to understand with clear names? Do I have all the necessary context from additional text blocks or dashboard and report descriptions?

Step 7: Delete, update, or review with other team members.

Now that you have a good idea of what's going on with your dashboards, take action! Delete the ones you don't need, update the ones you do but that need a little work, and open up conversations with your team for dashboards you're unsure about.

Then, enjoy your fresh new dashboard experience and pencil in another review in the future, either next quarter, H2, or next year, depending on how often your team is creating or updating dashboards.

I publish this newsletter to help HubSpot admins navigate the firehose of HubSpot updates and tips to get exactly what they need to make an impact. If you find it helpful, please subscribe and help spread the word!

Happy HubSpotting,

The Orange Admin