HubSpot Onboarding Checklist
Pramita Pramod
Pramita Pramod
HubSpot is a powerful marketing, sales, and customer service tool that can help businesses grow and succeed, but it can also appear to be complex and overwhelming for users who are new to using such a powerful platform. This is why HubSpot requires onboarding based on the product and tier to ensure you’re maximizing the platform’s capabilities.
While HubSpot does offer onboarding services ($3,000+) to help you get started, it is highly recommended by HubSpot to partner with a trusted digital agency to support instead. Not only can they help implement the platform and provide tailored recommendations for reaching your goals with HubSpot, but they can also offer discounts for these types of services.
That said, we understand that you may want to get an idea of what onboarding entails. To help you with that, we’ve put together a handy checklist of best practices for a successful onboarding experience. The checklist we’ve provided may vary based on your HubSpot tier, as each package offers different features and capabilities, but serves as a useful starting point for your onboarding process.
HubSpot offers a range of hubs, each with its own set of features and capabilities tailored to your specific business needs. As a result, each hub requires a unique onboarding checklist that is tailored to its specific offerings. The following hubs have been mapped out in our HubSpot onboarding checklist:
Onboarding Checklists & Best Practices
HubSpot Onboarding Checklist: Marketing Hub
The HubSpot Marketing Hub is a suite of features and tools designed to help your business attract, engage, and convert customers through inbound marketing. It features a variety of tools designed to assist you in creating and executing effective marketing campaigns, tracking and analyzing results, and optimizing their strategies. Below you will find a checklist to help you get started with Marketing Hub.
1. Integrate social media accounts
Adding social media accounts to HubSpot can help you streamline your social media management. Not only can you schedule posts directly through HubSpot, but you can also measure the effectiveness of your social media campaigns, and better engage with your audience. You can connect Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Source: HubSpot
2. Add email service providers
To integrate emails with HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, you need to connect your email account. HubSpot supports a variety of email service providers, including Gmail, Outlook, and Exchange. Adding an email service provider to HubSpot can help you improve the deliverability of your emails, personalize and segment your campaigns, automate your email workflows, and gain valuable insights through reporting and analytics.
3. Import and segment contacts
With HubSpot’s CRM, you can store real-time contact information and manage your pipeline across teams within one platform. Importing your contact information databases that you already have, such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other relevant data, into your marketing platform can save you time and effort by eliminating the need to manually enter each contact’s information. Importing can be done by uploading a CSV file or by syncing your existing CRM system to HubSpot.
It is also important that your targeted campaigns reach the right people with the right message. That is why it is crucial to segment your contacts by location, industry, interests, etc. You can do this using HubSpot’s default properties or creating custom properties to help add more information about your contact and company records.
4. Import your existing website (optional)
HubSpot also offers a CMS that allows you to build and manage your website content on the same platform. While it’s not required to have your website live on HubSpot, importing your website into HubSpot can help you streamline your marketing efforts, improve website performance, and gain greater control over your online presence.
5. Install the website tracking code
HubSpot’s unique tracking code for websites allows you to track visitors to your website and capture their activity data directly in HubSpot’s reporting tools. You’ll need to configure your tracking code and add it to your website to start tracking visitor data. If you have created a website on HubSpot, the tracking code will be implemented automatically. If you are using an external site like WordPress, you can install the plugin to add the tracking code easily to your website.
6. Manage email campaign settings
The right email campaign settings can help you personalize your messages, increase engagement, and drive conversions. Email campaign settings can impact the deliverability of your messages. By configuring your settings correctly, you can ensure that your messages are delivered to your audience’s inboxes. Proper email campaign settings can also ensure that your messages are compliant with relevant regulations, such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM.
7. Set up marketing assets
Setting up marketing assets in HubSpot is essential because it streamlines your marketing operations, and enables consistency and brand management. By setting up your marketing assets you can track data and insights, enable automation and personalization, and ensure collaboration and scalability for your team.
Set up your first lead capture form, which can be added to your website, landing pages, or shared via social media.
Create a landing page for your lead capture form, where you can direct visitors to learn more about your product or service.
Set up your first marketing automation workflow, which will help you nurture leads and move them further down the sales funnel.
The process of setting up marketing assets on HubSpot can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. A digital agency can help you save time and resources by taking care of the setup and optimization process on your behalf, and help you customize and personalize your marketing assets to align with your business goals.
8. Invite users to set up their account
Inviting users to set up their accounts and assigning permissions is a crucial part of getting started with Marketing Hub. It allows you to give your team members access to the tools they need to be successful while maintaining control over what each user can do within the account.
HubSpot Onboarding Checklist: Sales Hub
HubSpot’s Sales Hub provides a range of features and tools to help sales teams manage their sales pipelines, automate sales processes, and improve customer interactions. These include features such as lead tracking, deal management, email tracking, and sales automation. The following checklist will guide you and ensure that you are set up for success.
1. Integrate your calendar
Integrating a calendar on Sales Hub is a useful step that enables your sales teams to schedule meetings, calls, and other events directly from the platform. This integration allows users to view their schedules, check for availability, and send invites to prospects and customers without leaving the Sales Hub. Your calendar provider could be Google Calendar or Office 365. Once the calendar is connected, you can configure your calendar settings in HubSpot. You can set your availability, define meeting durations, and add custom meeting types.
2. Establish meeting links
Meeting links can help save time by eliminating the back-and-forth emails that often come with scheduling a meeting, thereby improving the customer experience. With a HubSpot meeting link, the recipient can see the available times on your calendar and pick a time that works best for them. The meeting links can be included in emails as a link, and embedded or linked in landing pages. This convenience can lead to increased customer satisfaction and potentially even lead to more sales or opportunities.
Source: HubSpot
3. Install the HubSpot Sales extension for your web browser
The Sales extension for web browsers is designed to help sales professionals work more efficiently by providing access to key sales tools and information within their web browsers, making it easier to stay organized and on top of sales tasks. The extension provides a range of communication tools, including email templates and call tracking, which can help improve communication with prospects and customers.
4. Set up your deals pipeline and deal stages
Setting up a deals pipeline and deals stages on Sales Hub is an important step for any business that wants to manage its sales process effectively. A deals pipeline is a visual representation of the opportunities that your sales team is currently working on, while deals stages are the steps involved in moving a lead through the sales process.
A deals pipeline involves setting up stages that correspond to the different steps in your sales process. HubSpot’s Sales Hub comes with a default pipeline, but you can customize it to fit your specific needs.
Source: HubSpot
With your deals pipeline in place, it’s time to set up deals stages. These are the specific steps involved in moving a lead through the sales process.
Again, you can use HubSpot’s default deals stages or create your own based on your specific sales process. Some common deals stages include:
- Appointment scheduled
- Qualified to buy
- Presentation scheduled
- Decision maker bought-in
- Contract sent
- Closed/won
- Closed/lost
A digital agency can also help recommend ways to streamline sales efforts and implement automated processes related to the sales pipeline, such as tasks, notifications, and workflows.
5. Create your first sales email template
A sales email template is a pre-written email that can be personalized and sent to prospects or leads. Sales Hub comes with a variety of email templates that you can customize to fit your specific needs, or you can create your own from scratch. By creating a structured template, personalizing it for each recipient, testing it out, and saving it for future use, you can save time and increase productivity while still providing a personalized touch to your outreach.
Some tiers require you to configure permissions for your sales team members in order to access certain sales hub features. Depending on your tier, you may only have a few available, but you can always purchase more.
HubSpot Onboarding Checklist: Service Hub
HubSpot’s Service Hub is a customer service software that provides a range of tools to help your business manage and improve its customer service operations. The Service Hub includes features such as a ticketing system, a knowledge base, live chat, feedback surveys, and more. To get started with Service Hub, here’s what you’ll need to do:
1. Add a customer service representative
Customer service representatives can communicate with customers directly through the Service Hub, either by email or through the live chat feature. This enables your service team to provide faster and more personalized support, improving the overall customer experience. You can set the appropriate service permissions, such as the ability to manage tickets or access customer data, when adding users or editing their permissions. Representatives then can access customer data and history within the Service Hub, allowing them to provide more context and personalized support to each customer.
2. Create your first knowledge base article
Creating a knowledge base is an important aspect of providing great customer service. By creating helpful and informative articles, your business can provide better customer service, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce support requests by solving customer problems quickly and efficiently.
3. Create your first chatflow
Creating a chatflow in Service Hub is a great way to automate your customer support process and provide a better customer experience. With chatflows, you can create a series of automated messages and prompts to help guide customers through their support journey. You can save time by automating routine queries and providing customers with answers to common questions while making it easier for them to get the help they need.
Your chatflow can also be configured to send new messages directly to service team members, or you can have it automated 24/7 when no team members are available.
Source: HubSpot Blog
4. Set up your first customer feedback survey
Creating a customer feedback survey can help your business gather valuable insights and feedback from your customers. It can also be a great way to engage with customers and show them that their opinions are valued. You’ll need to set up service seats to set HubSpot users as available agents to receive chat requests.
Source: HubSpot
HubSpot Onboarding Checklist: Reporting Dashboards
The HubSpot reporting dashboard is a comprehensive tool that allows users to track and analyze their marketing and sales efforts across a variety of channels, including email, social media, and website traffic. You can customize and create a variety of dashboards, like a sales dashboard, marketing dashboard or website traffic dashboard, etc, to show the metrics and data that are most relevant to your business, allowing you to focus on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most.
1. Set up business objectives
By setting clear and measurable business objectives, you can easily track your progress toward achieving them. This allows you to identify areas where you may need to adjust your strategy or tactics to stay on track. By setting business objectives, you can ensure that everyone on your team is aligned around the same goals and working towards the same outcomes. This helps to keep everyone focused on what matters most and avoid distractions
2. Customize your dashboard to fit your reporting needs
While the default reporting dashboard in HubSpot is already quite useful, it is important to customize them to better suit the specific needs and goals of your business. By customizing your dashboards, you can focus on the metrics that are most important to your business. For example, if you are primarily concerned with lead generation, you can set up your dashboard to track metrics like website traffic, conversion rates, and lead generation rates. You can choose from a variety of pre-built widgets, or create your own custom widgets to track the metrics that matter most to your business.
Source: HubSpot
3. Create your first report
Creating the first report on the reporting dashboard on HubSpot is important because it allows you to become familiarized with HubSpot’s reports, and at the same time, you can measure the success of your efforts and make data-driven decisions to improve your performance.
4. Set up your first automated report
Creating automated reports on the reporting dashboard in HubSpot can save you time and ensure that you always have the latest data at your fingertips. Rather than manually pulling data and creating reports on a regular basis, you can automate the process and receive updated reports on a schedule that works for you. It allows you to stay on top of your marketing performance in real-time, rather than waiting for reports to be manually updated.
A digital agency can support you in creating automated reports on HubSpot by utilizing the platform’s robust reporting capabilities and customizations. They can work with you to define the report requirements, such as the metrics to be tracked, the frequency of reporting, and the target audience for the reports, making it easier for you to automate reports.
5. Explore HubSpot’s advanced reporting features
Exploring HubSpot’s advanced reporting features is important because it allows you to gain deeper insights into your marketing performance and make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategy. Advanced reporting features can also help you segment your data and analyze performance across different channels, campaigns, or segments. This can help you identify patterns and trends that can inform your marketing strategy.
Additional HubSpot Onboarding Checklist for All Hubs
1. Train your team
HubSpot can be a complex platform, and without proper training, team members may be hesitant to use it. By investing in training, you can encourage the adoption of the platform and ensure that everyone on your team is using it effectively and efficiently. Alternatively, you can work with a digital agency to train your teams on HubSpot.
2. Utilize applications available on HubSpot
There are thousands of HubSpot’s applications designed to help automate tasks and save time. By using these applications, you can eliminate manual processes and focus on other important initiatives. For example, the Facebook Ads application can help you get cross-network reporting. Similarly, the Zoom application can help you with HubSpot meetings.
3. Decide on a naming system
By using consistent naming conventions for things like images, videos, landing pages, properties, etc. you can ensure that your assets are organized and easy to find across teams. Ex: Company name_asset type_asset title_year created.
Partner with Pyxl
A digital agency like Pyxl can provide expert HubSpot onboarding services to work with your business and understand your unique needs and objectives when getting started with HubSpot. By assessing your business’s existing marketing and sales processes, we can help identify which HubSpot features and tools will be most beneficial for your business today and what features to consider as you grow.
As a HubSpot Platinum Solutions Partner, our team of experts can provide valuable assistance in helping your business onboard to HubSpot. By providing needs assessment, implementation, training, customization, ongoing support, and other HubSpot services, Pyxl can help to ensure that your business is able to get the most out of the platform and achieve your business goals seamlessly.
Updated: Feb 23, 2024
Kati Terzinski
Erin Murray