HubSpot is an industry-leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform that is designed to help business-to-business (B2B) organizations grow. The all-in-one tool offers several different hubs, each built to support specific business needs, such as marketing, sales, customer service, and operations.
However, while this powerful software has everything you need in one place to streamline revenue operations and optimize workflows, things can quickly get complicated. Knowing how to get started with HubSpot can be overwhelming—especially for new users. That’s why we recommend investing in HubSpot onboarding services to help guide your first steps with the platform.
We’ve created a HubSpot onboarding checklist to give you an idea of what to expect as a new HubSpot user and to show you the process of setting things up. Use this checklist as a starting point to ensure you are taking full advantage of everything HubSpot has to offer.
HubSpot onboarding starts with general account set up and CRM organization. The first steps are (relatively) straightforward, but it’s critically important to do things right from the very beginning to set yourself up for success later.
Since HubSpot is dedicated to helping companies connect with their audience, manage customer relationships, and analyze performance, the platform relies on clean, accurate data and well-organized workflows. To maximize the capabilities of HubSpot’s powerful tools and features, make sure you are meticulous and detail-oriented from the get-go.
Spend time exploring the features and modules within HubSpot, such as the contact database, email marketing software, automation workflows, and analytics and reporting abilities. Keep in mind that each HubSpot package offers access to different tools, capabilities, and hubs, so review your plan and dive into everything HubSpot has to offer.
Create your HubSpot account and invite team members, as well as anyone else who will be using HubSpot, to set up their accounts too. Once users have been added to HubSpot, you can organize them into teams and assign each team permissions. Then, the right people can access what they need while you maintain control over what each individual user or team can do within the platform. Assign these roles and permissions based on their responsibilities.
HubSpot has a content management system (CMS) that allows you to manage your website on the platform. If you connect your company domain to HubSpot, you can then send emails, create landing pages, improve website performance, track analytics, and have more control over your online presence—all within your own branded domain.
This step is not required, but if you haven’t already, we recommend you consider connecting your company’s website to HubSpot.
HubSpot’s CRM gives you the ability to store, manage, and organize real-time customer information within the platform.
Migrate your existing contact list and customer data into HubSpot. Ensure the data is clean and accurate, and map relevant properties to HubSpot’s contact properties. Using these properties (or creating custom properties) makes it easy to segment your contact list for marketing or sales purposes.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is designed to help your B2B organization engage with your target audience, attract your ideal buyers, nurture prospects, and convert customers. It offers a range of workflows, tools, and features to support your inbound digital marketing efforts, from creating and executing marketing campaigns to capturing and tracking leads.
With the Marketing Hub, your marketing team has everything they need to optimize marketing operations, analyze campaign performance, and move leads down the sales funnel.
As a leading CRM platform, it’s no surprise that HubSpot integrates with most other technical applications used by B2B marketing, sales, and customer service teams. By customizing HubSpot with your existing tech stack, you can use the software integrations directly within the HubSpot system, automate workflows, and gain valuable insights through HubSpot’s reporting dashboards.
Connect your HubSpot account with the other tools and platforms used by your team members, including email marketing software and social media platforms. Additionally, set up integrations to ensure seamless data flow between systems and streamline operations.
In the Marketing Hub, you can build email templates and create email marketing campaigns, manage landing pages and forms to capture lead information, and develop and implement workflows to automate marketing processes and nurture leads. In other words, through HubSpot, you can create and design marketing campaigns to engage, inform, and nurture your audience.
As you set up your first marketing campaign, configure the settings to ensure the right people see your assets at the right time.
Content is king—and HubSpot is designed to help you optimize your content marketing efforts, from streamlining your content workflows, maintaining a consistent brand voice, staying organized with a competitive content calendar, personalizing assets for high-priority accounts, and measuring content performance.
In the Marketing Hub, you can create and manage blog posts, web pages, videos, interactive media, and other content assets. And no matter what type of content you start with, don’t forget to optimize content for search engines using HubSpot’s search engine optimization (SEO) tools.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub includes industry-leading lead capturing, tracking, and scoring tools that can be easily added to your website, landing pages, emails, or social media posts.
Create lead capture forms using HubSpot’s drag-and-drop form builder. When a prospect submits information using the form, HubSpot will capture the user data and store it for easy access. You can also place customizable call-to-action (CTA) buttons on relevant pages to encourage user interaction.
Be sure to configure lead tracking and scoring settings to prioritize high-quality leads. Additionally, set up lead nurturing campaigns based on lead scores and engagement.
The Marketing Hub gives you one central place to track marketing campaigns, analyze marketing data, and create reports to gain insights into your marketing performance. Then, your marketing team can see which channels are generating the most revenue, measure the success of different campaigns, and make data-driven decisions about what marketing efforts to invest in down the road.
Also, consider installing the HubSpot tracking code on your website to gather data and monitor traffic as well as creating tracking URLs to analyze the success of specific campaigns.
HubSpot’s Sales Hub has everything your sales team needs to succeed. It offers tools, features, and processes to streamline the sales pipeline, set appointments with prospects, score leads, and optimize communications with customers.
You can use the Sales Hub as a sales enablement tool that supports your sales reps and makes it easier than ever to focus on what they do best: make sales and close deals.
When you connect your individual work email with your organization’s HubSpot Sales Hub, you can log emails, track opens/clicks, create email templates, and analyze the success of emails you send to prospects.
Additionally, sync your calendar (either a Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar) with HubSpot so that you can schedule meetings, set your availability, and add custom meeting types directly in HubSpot. Once you configure your calendar settings, prospects can easily book meetings with you using HubSpot meeting links.
HubSpot meeting links make it easier than ever for interested buyers to book meetings with you. Instead of back-and-forth calls or emails, where both parties are trying to find time in their busy schedules to meet, a prospect can use your unique meeting link to see the available times on your calendar, choose a time that works best for them, and book a meeting, all through the link.
These meeting links streamline the sales experience for both prospects and sales reps, leading to increased customer satisfaction and—potentially—more sales.
In the Sales Hub, a deals pipeline is a visual depiction of all the prospects and opportunities your sales representatives are currently pursuing. It offers a bird’s eye view of sales operations. You can use HubSpot’s default pipeline or customize the deals pipeline to fit the unique needs of your sales team, business, and industry.
Deals stages are the specific steps that leads follow through the sales funnel. Once you have set up the deals pipeline in Sales Hub, you can assign default deal stages or configure your own based on your team’s sales workflows and processes.
The deals pipeline and deal stages are essential to organizing and streamlining your sales process. Fortunately, in HubSpot, they are easy to tailor as needed.
With HubSpot’s lead scoring tool, you can determine the quality of leads and ensure your sales reps are spending the bulk of their time nurturing high-fit leads. Set up lead scoring in the Sales Hub to capture prospect data, assign scores to different actions performed by your target audience, and improve your lead scoring efforts.
You can configure HubSpot’s lead scoring settings to score some prospect actions negatively as well as score them based on both fit (how well they match your ideal customer profile) and engagement (how much they interact with relevant assets).
READ: 10 Best B2B Marketing Analytics Tools You Need to Know
HubSpot’s Service Hub is designed to help you improve customer service operations across your B2B company. It includes a wide range of tools, features, and workflows that make it easy for you to connect your customers with help they need and to curate an exceptional customer experience.
Within the Service Hub, you can find options for creating customer feedback surveys, chatbot flows, live chat features, a knowledge base, and more.
Customer feedback surveys help you measure customer satisfaction, get valuable feedback from your customers, gather business insights, and show customers that you care about their opinions.
Set up your first customer feedback survey to start collecting data from your customers. By analyzing the results, you can better curate a customer experience that promotes long-term brand loyalty and helps you retain existing customers.
Creating chatbot flows or live chat options in the Service Hub is a great way to streamline your customer support process. With HubSpot chatflows, you can build a series of automated conversation prompts and queries that guide customers to the answers or resources they are looking for. Live chat options connect customers directly with customer service reps so they can quickly get the help they need.
Customize the live chat experience and chatbot flows in HubSpot to match your brand and offer a better customer experience.
A knowledge base—an online library of information—is an essential part of a positive customer support experience. Building a knowledge base of helpful articles that answer common questions makes it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for without having to wait for a response from your customer support team.
With an extensive knowledge base, you can reduce customer support requests, improve customer satisfaction, and solve customer problems efficiently.
Support tickets make it easy to manage and organize your customer service communications. In the Service Hub, you can create ticket pipelines to keep track of interactions with customers over time, use ticket statuses to follow each customer ticket within a pipeline, and automate support ticket workflows based on custom triggers.
Creating custom ticket pipelines, workflows, and statuses in the Service Hub allows you to optimize and streamline the process of responding to your customers, helping your customers get the personalized help they need and ensuring your customer service reps can build positive relationships with your customers.
The HubSpot Operations Hub is intended to support your revenue operations (RevOps) efforts as well as any marketing operations (MarketingOps) or sales operations (SalesOps) teams working to streamline processes, meet your revenue targets, and achieve scalable growth.
With the Operations Hub, you can maintain high-quality customer data, automate business processes, connect applications, and create custom operations reports—all of which are essential to data-driven decision-making and revenue growth.
Clean, well-organized data is the foundation of a successful revenue operations framework. In order to make accurate data-driven decisions, your data needs to be both correct and consistent.
The Operations Hub is designed to help you maintain data hygiene. The data quality automation feature keeps your CRM data clean, consistent, and up to date, going as far as capitalizing letters and fixing formatting to ensure you receive accurate information. You can also design workflows to automatically clean up data, taking this tedious process out of the hands of your RevOps team.
Programmable automation is a feature of the Operations Hub that allows you to create custom automated actions for your business processes and workflows. You can add these automations directly to workflows, chatflows, and processes or execute custom code actions in HubSpot.
Whether you want to build a lead rotation workflow that fits the unique needs of your organization, create workflows that run relevant calculations based on certain triggers, or automate the third-party data enrichment process, you can accomplish these tasks—and more—with the Operations Hub’s programmable automation feature.
Other HubSpot Hubs have helpful integration capabilities that connect with your existing marketing, sales, or customer service tech stack, but the Operations Hub takes integration to a whole new level with data synchronization.
The data sync feature in the Operations Hub allows you to create a central database that updates in real-time, which is an essential part of a successful RevOps strategy. Not only does this feature support two-way synchronization so you can sync data on both systems, but it also has the ability to sync historical data that you collected before the integration—allowing you to fully and seamlessly integrate data and applications in HubSpot.
As your business grows, so will your data set—and as you collect more data, track more KPIs, and measure more metrics, it gets difficult to create reports that are actually meaningful and to find relevant data to inform decision-making.
In the Operations Hub, you can set up advanced data reporting and analytics by grouping data sets into collections. Your RevOps team can pre-select the most important properties for each internal audience, define new metrics for deeper insights, and create custom reports. Create curated reports easily, quickly, and consistently using these advanced features.
HubSpot’s CMS Hub is designed to simplify the website design process. It includes tools to help you create a website from scratch, migrate existing web pages to the HubSpot platform, personalize customer experiences, and manage a growing digital brand.
You can use the CMS Hub’s customization features, out-of-the-box security, and drag-and-drop tools to manage your website and digital content, all in one place. Whether you decide to use HubSpot’s CMS to build your website or integrate your current web pages into the Hub, you can use these features to optimize the user experience and improve your digital presence.
If you need to build a website for your organization, you can develop it right in the CMS Hub. Choose a theme or create a custom theme and then use the drag-and-drop editing tools to build the pages in HubSpot’s internal website builder. The CMS is easy to use and is backed by CRM tools to optimize the user experience for your customers.
If your company already has an established website, consider moving your website to HubSpot. Not only is the migration process simple with the CMS Hub, but the platform also ensures your web pages are mobile-friendly and accessible. Alternatively, you can choose to host specific web pages on the CMS Hub, such as landing pages for certain campaigns or digital assets like your blog.
Once your website is developed in or migrated to the CMS Hub, you’ll have access to a wide range of features and integrations that are designed to align with your business goals and support revenue growth.
In the CMS Hub, modules are reusable building blocks that you can use to add content to web pages, such as images, text, forms, CTAs, and more. The modules can be used across templates and pages to add certain functionalities to your website.
You also have the ability to create custom modules in the CMS Hub to take advantage of advanced features. These custom-coded modules have almost limitless capabilities—you can design them to do just about anything that’s possible with some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Build custom CMS modules to add unique pop-ups based on user behavior, create sliders featuring customer testimonials, design branded social sharing buttons, and more.
HubSpot has a wide range of built-in CMS capabilities and features that you can use to enhance the user experience of your website and establish a strong digital presence.
Create localized content that automatically updates the language of the text based on the visitor’s preferred language. HubSpot’s detailed search engine optimization (SEO) recommendations are ranked by order of importance, so it’s easy to make changes to improve the quantity and quality of your organic search traffic. Try out the adaptive testing feature, where you can test up to five variations of page content to determine what’s working (and what isn’t).
The CRM Hub supports these capabilities and more.
HubSpot offers a variety of reporting dashboards that you can use to analyze data from and track the results of your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts across channels—making it easier than ever to measure your company’s performance and growth.
You can create a variety of dashboards focusing on the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that are most relevant to you and customize reports to help your team make data-driven decisions, optimize resources, and support revenue-generating efforts.
HubSpot’s default reporting dashboard is useful and extensive as-is, but you can customize dashboards for each hub and create reports based on important metrics and KPIs. You can choose from a variety of pre-built widgets or create your own to prioritize the data and results that best align with the unique needs and goals of your B2B organization.
Instead of manually pulling reports when needed, you can configure your HubSpot dashboards to automatically run and share reports on a regular basis. With real-time performance data delivered to you on your preferred schedule, you will have all the data you need at your fingertips—exactly when you need it.
At OneIMS, we’re HubSpot experts. We’ve helped 500+ businesses across a variety of industries get the most out of HubSpot’s powerful platform, from HubSpot onboarding and optimizing the Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs to reaching revenue goals and achieving business growth.
If your organization needs assistance conducting HubSpot onboarding or managing HubSpot’s CRM, our experienced team of HubSpot specialists will take a deep dive into your company’s unique needs and business objectives, guide you through the HubSpot onboarding process, identify the features and tools that will support your goals, train your B2B staff on how to use HubSpot, and deliver measurable results with our HubSpot services. And if you’re also looking for a long-term partner to help manage your HubSpot activities, we have the solutions and strategies required to get the job done.
But you don’t have to take our word for it. View testimonials from our clients and read our blog to get an idea of our training, experience, and track record of success.
Are you ready to take advantage of everything HubSpot has to offer? Schedule a consultation with us today to get started.