DIY vs. Hiring a HubSpot Consultant: How to Decide

Should you tackle your HubSpot portal cleanup internally, or bring in a HubSpot consultant? It's a question I get asked constantly — usually by someone who's already tried the DIY route and hit a wall.

There's no universal answer. It depends on your team, your timeline, and how deep the problems go. But after 22 years of working inside CRMs — and cleaning up portals that other people tried to fix themselves — I can help you think through it honestly.

When DIY Makes Sense

Let me be upfront: I'm a consultant, so you might expect me to say "always hire someone." I won't. There are situations where handling it in-house is the right call.

• You have genuine internal HubSpot expertise. Not someone who "knows the basics" — someone who can navigate Settings, understand property dependencies, and build workflows without breaking existing automations. If you have that person, they can do real damage (the good kind).
• You have dedicated time. This is the one that kills most DIY efforts. CRM optimization is not a side project you squeeze between quarterly reports. It needs focused hours every week, for weeks. If your "HubSpot person" is also doing sales, marketing, and customer support — it's not going to happen.
• Your issues are relatively contained. If it's a specific problem — duplicate contacts, one messy pipeline, a handful of broken workflows — that's a focused project with a clear finish line. DIY works well here.
• Your team will actually maintain it. A one-time cleanup without ongoing data governance is wasted effort. You'll be back where you started in six months. If you don't have the appetite to build maintenance habits, cleaning up now just delays the inevitable.

If all four are true, go for it. Use the RSM Audit App to get your baseline score, identify the biggest problem areas, and work through them systematically. CRM optimization is absolutely learnable — it just takes discipline.

When You Should Bring In Help

Here's where the honest part gets uncomfortable. These are the situations where I've seen teams waste months trying to figure it out themselves:

• You don't have internal expertise. Learning HubSpot while trying to fix HubSpot is like rebuilding an engine while driving the car. You can do it, but it's going to take five times longer and you'll make mistakes that create new problems. A consultant who's done this dozens of times can spot issues in minutes that would take you weeks to even identify.
• You've tried and stalled. If you've been "meaning to clean up the CRM" for months — or worse, you started and got overwhelmed — that's a signal. The longer bad data sits, the worse it gets. Every week you wait, your team creates more records, more duplicates, more inconsistencies. The cleanup gets bigger, not smaller.
• The stakes are high. You're preparing for a CRM migration, a funding round, an acquisition, or a major campaign launch. You need the data right, and you need it fast. This isn't the time to learn on the job.
• You need objectivity. Sometimes the person who built the portal — who created those 47 unused custom properties, who set up workflows that contradict each other — isn't the best person to audit it. They have blind spots. They'll defend decisions instead of questioning them. Fresh eyes see things differently.
• You want processes, not just a cleanup. Cleaning data is one thing. Building sustainable data governance — naming conventions, validation rules, ownership models, regular audit cadences — that's a different skill set entirely.

The Hidden Cost of Waiting

Here's what most people don't calculate: the cost of doing nothing.

Every month you operate with a messy HubSpot portal, you're paying for it in ways that don't show up on an invoice:

• Wasted subscription fees. If you're overpaying for HubSpot because you can't tell which features you actually need versus which ones are compensating for bad setup — that's real money.
• Lost deals. Leads that fall through the cracks because workflows aren't routing them properly. Follow-ups that don't happen because task automation is broken. Prospects who get the wrong email at the wrong time because sequences and workflows are stepping on each other.
• Team frustration. Your sales team doesn't trust the data, so they keep their own spreadsheets. Your marketing team can't segment properly, so campaigns underperform. Everyone's working harder than they need to because the system that's supposed to help them is getting in the way.
• Bad decisions. Leadership is making strategic choices based on reports pulled from dirty data. Pipeline forecasts are wrong. Attribution is broken. You're flying blind and calling it data-driven.

Add all that up across a quarter, and the cost of a consultant looks like a bargain.

What to Look for in a HubSpot Consultant

If you decide to bring in outside help, here's what separates the good ones from the rest:

• Specific HubSpot expertise. Not a generic "digital transformation" agency that happens to list HubSpot. Someone who works inside the platform daily and understands its quirks, limitations, and hidden features.
• Experience with portals like yours. Size, industry, and complexity matter. A consultant who's optimized enterprise portals with 500,000 contacts might not be the right fit for a 5,000-contact startup — and vice versa.
• Process focus, not just cleanup. Anyone can delete duplicate contacts. The value is in building systems that prevent duplicates from happening again. Look for someone who talks about governance, not just fixes.
• Knowledge transfer. A good consultant makes themselves unnecessary. You should understand what they did, why they did it, and how to maintain it after they leave. If they create a black box, you'll be dependent on them forever — and that's not partnership, that's a trap.
• Honest scoping. Watch out for consultants who jump to a massive engagement before understanding your actual needs. Sometimes a micro package — a focused, fixed-price sprint — is all you need. The right consultant will tell you that.

The Real Question

It's not "should I hire a consultant?" It's: what is your current situation actually costing you?

If your messy portal is costing you deals, frustrating your team, and burning subscription dollars — the question isn't whether to fix it. It's how quickly.

Start with a free baseline. The RSM Audit App analyzes your HubSpot portal and shows you exactly what needs attention — data quality, workflow health, property usage, the lot. Takes 5 minutes, costs nothing, and gives you the clarity to make this decision with actual data instead of guesswork.

And if you want to talk through your specific situation, book a free discovery call. I'll give you an honest assessment — whether that means working with us, handling it yourself, or something in between.

Related reading:

• What Data Hygiene Actually Means for HubSpot Admins
• When to Use Workflows vs. Sequences in HubSpot
• Marketing Contacts: What Counts and What's Costing You
• Are You Overpaying for HubSpot?