The HubSpot Workflow Prompts to Ask Claude Through the Howly MCP

A prompt-by-prompt walkthrough of a real portal audit, from health score to cleanup plan

Quick Answer: Once the Howly MCP is connected to Claude, you can ask plain-language questions about a HubSpot portal, things like "what's my portal health score" or "give me a cleanup plan in priority order," and get answers pulled directly from Howly's Health Checker and workflow canvas. The connection is read-only. Claude can inspect and explain every workflow, but it cannot change anything in the portal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2lcIQpy3XQ

You have connected the Howly MCP to Claude. The setup worked. And now you are staring at a chat window wondering what to actually type.

This is the walkthrough. It follows a real audit of a client portal, prompt by prompt, from the first question to a finished cleanup plan.

Start With the Portal Health Score

The first prompt in any audit is the simplest one: what is the health score of all of my workflows?

Claude returns the score along with the full breakdown behind it: issue counts by category, issue counts by severity, and active workflows against total. That single number and its breakdown is usually enough to tell you whether you're looking at routine maintenance or a portal that needs a real cleanup project before anyone touches it again. Watch the video above for what that breakdown looks like on an actual client portal.

Ask What Is Actually Broken

The health score tells you how much is wrong. The next prompt tells you what to look at first: what are my biggest workflow issues right now?

This is the step that turns a score into a punch list. Claude ranks the findings instead of just listing them, which matters most on a portal you've never seen before and don't have time to explore workflow by workflow.

Find the Enrollment Loops

Circular dependencies are the most urgent issue category, because they keep running in the background even when nobody is looking. The prompt: which workflows are part of a circular dependency?

A loop is a set of workflows that enroll each other in a closed cycle, so a contact keeps getting re-enrolled with no way out. That inflates reporting, spams contacts, and eats into HubSpot's workflow enrollment limits for no reason. Claude traces the specific chain, workflow to workflow, so you can see exactly where to add a suppression list or a "not currently in workflow" condition to break it.

Surface the Broken Enrollments

Next: show me all of the broken enrollments.

A broken enrollment is a workflow trying to enroll contacts into a workflow that's turned off, so nothing happens. When several source workflows point at the same disabled target, reactivating that one target workflow is usually a faster fix than editing every workflow that feeds into it, and Claude will surface that pattern on its own. It's worth checking with whoever turned a workflow off before flipping it back on. Sometimes there's a reason.

Flag Stale Workflows

A workflow can be active, connected, and still be quietly wrong for the business it was built for two years ago. The prompt: which workflows have been stale for more than six months?

Howly flags anything active and untouched for six-plus months, based on the last-modified date. Age alone doesn't mean a workflow is bad, but it does mean someone needs to confirm it's still doing what it was built to do.

List Every Inactive Workflow

Inactive workflows aren't automatically a problem, until they're the reason something else is broken. Prompt: list all of my inactive workflows.

Because the conversation stays contextual, Claude can connect this list back to earlier answers on its own, flagging when a workflow sitting inactive here is also the disabled target behind a broken enrollment surfaced a few prompts earlier. The fix is either turning the target workflow back on or updating whatever still points at it.

Search by Name to See What's Actually Running

Naming search is useful for getting oriented in an unfamiliar portal fast. Prompt: find all workflows with lead or nurture in the name.

This is a fast way to spot duplication and drift: cloned workflows that were never cleaned up, or a campaign workflow named for a quarter that ended years ago and is somehow still live.

Trace a Full Workflow Chain

Some questions aren't about a list, they're about understanding one process end to end. Prompt: explain the onboarding flow to me step by step.

Claude walks the full chain, workflow by workflow, and can restate it in plain language for a non-technical stakeholder on request. Tracing a real business process this way is often where a broken enrollment found earlier stops being an abstract issue and turns into something concrete, like a stalled deal that nobody is getting notified about.

Get a Prioritized Cleanup Plan

The last prompt ties everything together: give me a cleanup plan in priority order.

Claude sequences the fixes instead of just restating the issue list: loops and broken enrollments first, since they're actively causing harm, then duplicates and orphans, then a workflow-by-workflow call on what's inactive and stale. That's a full action plan, in the order it should get worked, generated from a conversation instead of a spreadsheet.

Switching Between Client Portals

For agencies running audits across multiple accounts, the portal switch happens in Howly, not in Claude. Switch the active portal in Howly, start a new chat in Claude, and run through the same prompts again. The MCP connection follows whichever portal is currently selected, so the questions don't change, only the answers do.

Key Takeaways

• The Howly MCP connects Claude to a portal's workflow data read-only. Claude can explain and diagnose; it cannot edit or disable anything in HubSpot.

• A small set of prompts covers most of an audit: health score, biggest issues, enrollment loops, broken enrollments, stale workflows, inactive workflows, and a prioritized cleanup plan.

• Findings connect to each other across a conversation. A workflow flagged as inactive in one answer and a broken enrollment target in another are very often the same root cause.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Howly MCP? The Howly MCP is a Model Context Protocol connection that lets Claude query a HubSpot portal's workflow data directly through Howly. It's read-only: Claude can pull health scores, issue lists, and individual workflow details, but it has no ability to create, edit, or disable anything inside HubSpot.

Can Claude change my HubSpot workflows through the Howly MCP? No. The MCP connection only exposes data for Claude to read and explain. Every fix identified in an audit, like reactivating a workflow or adding a suppression condition, still has to be made manually inside HubSpot.

What is a HubSpot workflow enrollment loop? An enrollment loop happens when two or more workflows enroll each other in a closed cycle, so a contact can be re-enrolled indefinitely with no way out. It usually happens when workflows chain into each other through direct enrollment actions without a suppression list or a "not currently in workflow" condition to break the cycle. Loops inflate reporting numbers, generate repeated communications to the same contacts, and consume HubSpot's workflow enrollment limits.

How do I find orphaned or stale HubSpot workflows? An orphaned workflow is active but has no upstream or downstream connections to any other workflow. A stale workflow is active but hasn't been modified in six months or more, based on its last-modified date. Both are flagged automatically by Howly's Health Checker, and both can be asked about directly through the Howly MCP in a Claude conversation.

Can agencies use the Howly MCP across multiple client portals? Yes. Howly supports unlimited client portal connections under one agency account, and switching the active portal in Howly carries over to the MCP connection automatically. Starting a new Claude chat after the switch runs the same audit prompts against the newly selected portal.

Summary

A HubSpot workflow audit through the Howly MCP starts with one number, the portal health score, and works outward from there: biggest issues, enrollment loops, broken enrollments, stale and inactive workflows, and a full workflow trace where it's useful. The output is a prioritized cleanup plan built from a conversation, with every finding still requiring a manual fix inside HubSpot, since the connection stays read-only throughout.

To try this against your own portal, connect it to Howly with the seven-day free trial, no credit card required, and set up the MCP connection to start asking Claude directly.

For a broader look at what a full audit should cover before a handoff, see the HubSpot workflow audit guide for agencies. For the definitions behind orphaned, stale, and duplicate workflows, see how to map HubSpot workflow dependencies.

Howly is a read-only HubSpot workflow mapping and audit tool. It maps workflow connections, flags structural issues, and shows the impact of property changes before you make them. Used by RevOps teams and HubSpot agencies managing complex portals at scale.