How MAVN Marketing Cut HubSpot Workflow Audit Time From 15 Hours to 90 Minutes
MAVN Marketing, a HubSpot RevOps agency managing 18 portals, reduced workflow audit time from 15 hours to 90 minutes using Howly, transforming their pre-sales process and enabling visual client presentations that close deals faster.
Mike Woodward manages 18 HubSpot portals. Three people. No spare time.
Before Howly, auditing a prospect's portal before a sales call took between 6 and 10 hours, sometimes 15. That's time spent mapping workflow connections manually, trying to describe invisible dependencies to clients who built their own HubSpot, and producing proposals that may never close. For a small RevOps agency, that math does not work.
Today, the same audit takes 90 minutes.
This is how MAVN Marketing, a HubSpot-exclusive RevOps agency, restructured their entire pre-sales process around Howly's workflow visualization and health scoring, and why Mike calls it a no-brainer for any agency doing workflow work at scale.
https://youtu.be/T0TZQE_x6Ls?si=WWFgTsx8Jz5OvRHY
The Problem With Manual Workflow Audits
MAVN Marketing targets seed-through-Series-B companies that have outgrown their original HubSpot setup. By the time they arrive, the portal usually reflects years of accumulated automation logic, built by someone who no longer works there, never fully documented, and almost certainly named "New Workflow — Copy (2)."
The audit process before Howly looked like this: get access to the portal, navigate workflow by workflow, manually trace which workflows enrolled into which, document everything in a spreadsheet or Lucidchart, and then translate that into a coherent picture for the client.
The dependency mapping step is where the time goes. On a portal with 200 or 400 workflows, finding every connection manually is not a 2-hour job. It is a 10 to 20 hour job. And if the prospect doesn't sign, that time disappears.
"If we spent 6 to 10 hours trying to do these audits and then not get the client, that's a lot of time spent for a small team," Mike explained. "It just wasn't working."
What Changed With Howly
When MAVN Marketing adds a prospect's portal to Howly, the full workflow map loads in seconds. Every connection is drawn automatically: enrollment chains, property-based triggers, list-based dependencies. The spaghetti bowl that would have taken days to reconstruct is just there.
Mike now runs this live during the sales call.
"We come in with them, and we say: here are all of your workflows. You've got a ton across five different objects. And then I toggle all connections on. And then they see the spaghetti bowl, and that's the aha moment."
The impact is different from a verbal description of the same problem. When you tell a founder their HubSpot is a mess, they push back. It is their baby. They built it. But when you show them the connection map, when they can see that one workflow is tied to 15 others they didn't know existed, the conversation changes immediately.
"You just try to describe how ugly the baby is, it doesn't work. When you can show them how ugly the baby is, it's like: oh, you're right. It's not just your opinion."
The audit that used to take 15 hours now takes 90 minutes, including the proposal.
The Pre-Sales Workflow
MAVN Marketing's pre-sales audit process with Howly follows a consistent pattern:
Get portal access. The prospect invites MAVN into the portal.
Load the Howly canvas. The full workflow map loads in 10-25 seconds.
Toggle all connections on. Dependencies across all object types become visible: Contacts, Companies, Deals, Tickets, and any custom objects.
Identify the central workflows. Nodes with the most connections surface quickly. These are the high-blast-radius workflows, the ones where a change causes a cascade.
Pull one thread. Mike clicks into a high-connection workflow live with the client to show them the dependency chain. This is where quick wins become visible and where the scope of the problem becomes undeniable.
Transition to solutions. The visual makes the problem concrete. The conversation moves to what it would take to fix it, and what MAVN can do in the first six weeks.
The entire process runs in a single call.
Post-Sale: Health Check as the ROI Mechanism
Once a client signs, MAVN uses Howly's Health Checker as the primary tool for proving ongoing value.
The Health Check scores the portal on a 0-100 scale across a set of structural signals: broken workflows, stale workflows, orphaned workflows, duplicate actions, and more. MAVN benchmarks the score at engagement start, then checks back every 3 to 6 weeks.
"Give us 6 weeks, give us 6 months, we benchmark now, and then watch the health check increase. That adds validity and ROI from our perspective into the client."
This matters because RevOps work is often invisible to the client. Workflows that now run cleanly are workflows the client never thinks about. The Health Check score creates a visible record of improvement, one that translates into the kind of reporting that matters to leadership and investors.
A portal that enters at 315 stale workflows and exits at 110 is a portfolio before-and-after. The number tells the story.
Starting Points: How MAVN Prioritizes Cleanup Work
On a portal with 400 workflows, the question of where to start is not trivial. MAVN's approach:
Start with broken workflows. The Health Checker surfaces these immediately. Broken workflows, those with failed enrollments, missing properties, or broken branches, are the highest priority because they often sit at the top of enrollment chains. Fixing one broken workflow can resolve issues across the 25 or 30 workflows connected to it.
Move to duplicate actions. Once broken workflows are cleared, duplicate action patterns surface the next layer of inefficiency. Workflows that trigger the same property update or the same notification through different paths are consolidation candidates.
Watch for circular connections. Mike flagged these as a consistent problem: workflows that enroll into each other, creating cyclical loops that run contacts through the same logic repeatedly. These cause reporting errors, race conditions, and enrollment behavior that is nearly impossible to debug without a dependency map.
The canvas makes all of these visible before a single change is made.
The Lucidchart Export: Current State to Future Architecture
Some clients want their workflow documentation inside Lucidchart, a format their teams are already using. Before Howly, that meant manually building the entire map from scratch. Ten to twenty hours.
With Howly, MAVN exports the current-state connection map, drops it into Lucid as the baseline, and then builds the target architecture on top of it.
"This is our current state. What we want it to look like is this new Lucidchart version."
It transforms what was a delivery burden into a deliverable advantage: a visual artifact clients can actually use to understand the gap between where they are and where they need to go.
Workflow Planner: Previewing Changes Before Making Them
MAVN recently started using Howly's Workflow Planner, a feature that shows the downstream impact of a property change before any workflow is built or modified.
The use case Mike described: a client wants to set lifecycle stage to Marketing Qualified Lead. Before touching anything, the Workflow Planner maps every workflow that responds to that property, every enrollment trigger, every if/then branch, every downstream action that fires when a contact becomes an MQL.
"Now we can see connections before we actually make the workflow. That's been a really helpful tool just in the last week or two."
For clients scaling into complex lifecycle management, this is the difference between a confident change and a change that breaks seven things you didn't know were listening.
The Numbers
15 hours to 90 minutes: Pre-sales audit time reduction
18 portals managed simultaneously by a 3-person team
200-400 workflows in typical client portals
10-20 hours to map the same connections manually in Lucidchart
3 to 6 weeks: Health Check benchmark intervals for client reporting
Who This Applies To
MAVN Marketing's use case is not unusual. Most RevOps agencies running pre-sales audits are doing the same thing: getting portal access, spending hours tracing workflow logic, and producing proposals that try to justify a project scope the client cannot visualize.
The audit time is the hidden cost. It compounds across every prospect. On an agency running 15 or 20 pre-sales audits per quarter, the difference between 15 hours and 2 hours per audit is not a process improvement. It is a capacity unlock.
"For any agency trying to become more efficient in any way around workflows, Howly is a no-brainer."
Connect your first portal to Howly and see the full dependency map before your next client call. The 7-day free trial requires no credit card.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does a HubSpot workflow audit take for a portal with 200-400 workflows?
Manually, tracing workflow connections across a portal with 200 to 400 workflows takes 10 to 20 hours, longer if the portal lacks documentation or naming conventions. That estimate covers only the dependency mapping step, not the full audit writeup or proposal. With Howly, the same dependency map loads automatically in 10-25 seconds. A pre-sales audit that previously took 15 hours now takes 90 minutes for MAVN Marketing, including the proposal.
How do HubSpot agencies use workflow visualization in the sales process?
The most effective approach is to run the visualization live during the sales call, not as a prepared slide, but as a live exploration of the prospect's portal. When a prospect sees their own workflow connections mapped in real time, it validates the complexity of the problem without requiring the agency to describe it. Clients who built their own HubSpot often resist verbal descriptions of what's wrong. A visual map of 400 workflows with enrollment chains crossing every object type removes that resistance immediately.
What is the blast radius of a broken HubSpot workflow?
Blast radius describes the scope of downstream impact when a workflow fails or is changed. A workflow that sits at the top of an enrollment chain, directly enrolling contacts into 10 or 15 downstream workflows, has a large blast radius. If that workflow breaks, every workflow downstream of it stops receiving the contacts it was supposed to send. Without a dependency map, the blast radius is invisible. Howly's Impact Analyzer shows the full downstream chain for any workflow or property before a change is made.
How do RevOps agencies prove ROI to HubSpot clients?
The most durable proof of RevOps value is a documented before-and-after state. Howly's Health Checker provides a 0-100 portal health score based on structural signals: broken workflows, stale workflows, orphaned workflows, duplicate actions, and similar indicators. Agencies that benchmark this score at engagement start and track it across 3 to 6 week intervals create a visible record of improvement, one that translates directly into client reporting and renewal conversations.
What is a circular workflow connection in HubSpot?
A circular connection occurs when two or more workflows enroll into each other, creating a loop. Workflow A enrolls a contact into Workflow B; Workflow B re-enrolls that contact into Workflow A. Depending on enrollment settings, this can run a contact through the same logic repeatedly, cause unexpected property overwrites, and produce reporting anomalies that are nearly impossible to debug from within HubSpot's native workflow list view. Howly's canvas makes circular connections visible as a distinct connection pattern, identifiable in seconds on a portal where they would otherwise take hours to find manually.
Can Howly export HubSpot workflow maps to Lucidchart?
Yes. Howly can export the workflow connection map for use in Lucidchart or similar charting tools. The export provides the current-state dependency structure, which agencies use as the baseline for building future-state architecture diagrams. This replaces the process of manually constructing Lucidchart diagrams from scratch, a task that previously took 10 to 20 hours on large portals and is now handled in a fraction of that time.
Summary
MAVN Marketing reduced pre-sales HubSpot workflow audit time from 15 hours to 90 minutes by replacing manual dependency tracing with Howly's workflow visualization canvas. The change transformed their sales process: enabling live visual presentations that close prospects faster, benchmarking with the Health Checker to prove ongoing ROI, and exporting workflow maps for use in client architecture planning. For a 3-person RevOps agency managing 18 portals simultaneously, audit time is not an abstract metric. It is capacity. And Howly returned most of it.
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.
