So you’ve had your first sip of the orange Kool-Aid and purchased one (or more) of the Hubs on HubSpot’s platform. Welcome to the inbound family! You have a lot of power at your fingertips, but it can be overwhelming and even inefficient if you don’t know how to use your HubSpot software.
Like onboarding as a new employee, you’ll need time and practice to get comfortable with the ins and outs of your HubSpot portal. Luckily, HubSpot makes their software as user-friendly as possible and has a ton of resources to help you along your inbound journey.
One of the first decisions you make after purchasing your HubSpot software is how you want to be onboarded. For this decision, you have two options: onboard with HubSpot or onboard with a HubSpot Partner Agency. HubSpot requires onboarding to ensure that you have the setup and knowledge to use your HubSpot software effectively.
Making the Onboarding Choice: Luckily, this is a choice with no wrong answer. Both HubSpot’s onboarding team and HubSpot Solutions Partners are experts who can provide a streamlined, informative software onboarding for your company. There’s a couple key benefits of working with a HubSpot Solutions Partner from the start — a Solutions Partner can support your company’s objectives in HubSpot past the initial onboarding for the duration of a project, campaign, or long-term partnership and oftentimes a Solutions Partner charges less for onboarding than HubSpot. HubSpot’s onboarding can get you started if you’re ready to dive in independently after the initial setup is complete.
So what does onboarding with HubSpot look like? Let’s take a look at a broad overview.
Information Housekeeping
Once you get into your HubSpot software, you’ll need to begin the general housekeeping tasks necessary to transition to a new software portal. This includes moving contacts, installing tracking codes, implementing global branding options, recreating forms, setting up GDPR, and ensuring that everyone who needs access has it. The exact information you’ll need to move depends on the Hubs you’re using and what software (if any) you were using before. Here are some of the onboarding tasks to tackle in each Hub to give you an example of the process:
Marketing Hub:
- Connect social media accounts
- Integrate Google Analytics
- Collect data from current website forms in HubSpot
Sales Hub:
- Setup your deal pipelines
- Import your products
- Establish and import playbooks
Service Hub:
- Setup ticket pipeline
- Setup knowledge base
- Integrate any email or on-page surveys into HubSpot
CMS Hub:
Establishing your website on the HubSpot CMS takes more onboarding support than the other Hubs. Websites built on the HubSpot CMS are created as themes. You’ll need to work with a HubSpot developer to create or adapt an existing theme for your company’s website.
Operations Hub:
HubSpot's brand new Hub is focused on keeping your databases clean and up-to-date at all times through data syncs, data quality automation, and programmable bots.
Establishing Your Workflow
After your company’s contacts, information, and users have been added to your HubSpot portal, you’re ready to dive in and get to work. Lean on your Solutions Partner agency, HubSpot onboarding contact, or HubSpot resources to learn the ins and outs of your Hubs. You’ll need to familiarize yourself with the workflows in HubSpot that allow you to do all your day-to-day tasks.
Most software services are similarly designed to allow you to create the email newsletters, website pages, or deals that you use that software for. HubSpot is designed to be user-friendly, but a new software can take time and practice for you and your team to get the hang of. Integrate time for training, practice, or exploring into your onboarding plan. Time dedicated to learning your Hubs in the short term will empower your team in the long run.
Team Collaboration
One of the powerful components of the HubSpot platform is the ease of collaboration between teams and Hubs. Your sales, marketing, and service teams can work together on campaigns, projects, and reports from the same software ecosystem. While this power can boost your inter-team efficiency, it can also cause some hiccups if not used responsibly.
With HubSpot you can control who has access to your portal and what level of access they have. But when you have many team members working in the same place, there’s the potential for miscommunication, mistakes, and inefficiency. Communicate across teams about your workflows for updating contacts, implementing new campaigns, and making website updates. Communicating between teams from the start mitigates later problems that can arise with multiple teams working in one portal. If your team isn’t working cohesively with others, implementing a new software is an ideal time to change that. Onboarding is an opportunity to take stock of current workflows, KPIs, and business goals to refine your process.
Harnessing the Power of HubSpot
There’s a reason that HubSpot is such a popular software platform, and it’s not (only) because of their catchy orange color scheme. The power of HubSpot is in their all-encompassing software. With HubSpot, you can build on the organization of your CRM with marketing, sales, and website strategy that enables you to collaborate efficiently, implement new ideas with ease, and track the effectiveness of your efforts across teams.
Don’t get me wrong, the power in each individual Hub is pretty impressive, but companies who see the most success with their software platform are using multiple Hubs across different teams and collaborating on marketing, sales, and service needs and business goals. One of the reasons HubSpot is so popular is because of how well their Hubs work together. Instead of every team within your organization using their own software and collaborating inefficiently as a result, HubSpot localizes your whole organization into one powerful portal.
Once your HubSpot portal is up and running, you’ll have the power of HubSpot under your control. Download our HubSpot One Pagers for more information on the different hubs.
