HubSpot is a comprehensive platform that provides tools for Marketing, Sales, Service, and Operations management. To use it efficiently and without any disturbances, there is a need for streamlined team onboarding. To help with this, we have implemented a standard operating procedure template that allows you to set up the accounts, configure the site, and customize the hub to align with the teams’ strategies.
Let’s explore this together.
HubSpot onboarding involves the simple implantation of the created HubSpot system according to the organization’s requirements. This encompasses user account creation and employees’ education. The onboarding process is a decisive way of enhancing the usage of systems’ efficiencies, which leads to effective business growth.
Some of the reasons why you will need HubSpot onboarding include if you want to scale up your business, automate your processes like customer service, lead generation, and nurturing, or track marketing and sales performances through reports and dashboards.
This checklist provides a comprehensive guide for setting up HubSpot, ensuring your business starts strong, and your business workflows remain efficient.
Before diving into HubSpot onboarding, ensure that the proper accounts are created, permissions are set, and all users are onboarded correctly. This involves:
Account Default and Localization Settings: Start onboarding by setting up account default settings like name, company name, etc. Also set up language, currency, and region settings properly that align with your business needs.
Team Configuration: This HubSpot onboarding step allows you to create teams and define permissions for these teams. You can also align members in different teams according to their departments.
User Management: To streamline your onboarding, invite all users to HubSpot. You can assign necessary access levels according to the role, for example, add & edit access or publish access.
User and Role Permissions: Depending on the organization structure, allow a precise level of access and roles to different team members. The reporting team may have access to goals and data quality.
Establishing company settings and security protocols, such as branding, address, and authentication measures, ensures your account is secure and legally compliant.
Branding and Address: Setting up branding is crucial for ensuring a consistent appearance across your emails, landing pages, and other customer-facing assets. This also includes adding your company’s physical address, which is often required for legal and marketing compliance, especially when sending marketing emails.
Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) Setup: Enabling 2FA adds an extra layer of security to your HubSpot account. It ensures that only authorized personnel can log into the system, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
Single Sign-On (SSO) Assessment: Single Sign-On (SSO) allows users to access multiple applications with one set of login credentials. If your company uses multiple platforms alongside HubSpot, enabling SSO can improve security and reduce the complexity of managing multiple passwords.
GDPR Settings Configuration: For companies operating in the European Union or handling EU customer data, configuring General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) settings is essential. This includes enabling cookie consent banners, ensuring opt-in marketing practices, and maintaining customer data privacy standards.
Customizing the CRM structure allows your business to tailor the platform to its unique needs, making data management and reporting more efficient.
Custom Object Creation: Custom objects allow you to create additional records beyond standard CRM objects like contacts, companies, or deals. These custom objects help your business track unique data specific to your operation and most of the time used when complex or out-of-the-box scenarios need to be managed.
Object Associations and Labels: Organizing objects within HubSpot’s CRM is essential for smooth data management. Associations and labels allow you to define relationships between different records (e.g., contacts linked to companies or deals). This helps streamline reporting and workflows by providing clarity on how data points are interconnected.
Custom Properties Configuration: Custom properties help you tailor HubSpot CRM to capture data unique to your business. Whether it's customer preferences, product specifications, or contract terms, custom properties ensure all necessary data is easily trackable and reportable.
Saved Sections: Saved sections allow you to create reusable blocks of details for easy deployment across records. This reduces the amount of time spent on repetitive tasks, allowing for a more streamlined workflow.
Sidebars and Middle Bar Customization: Customizing your sidebars and middle bar allows you to organize key data where your team can access it quickly. This setup enhances productivity by putting frequently used properties and tools within easy reach.
Integrating third-party tools with HubSpot helps ensure seamless communication between various platforms, enabling better workflow automation and data synchronization.
Native HubSpot Integrations: HubSpot offers several native integrations, such as linking to Google Calendar, Gmail, Salesforce, and other essential tools. Setting up these integrations according to your needs and ensure they work properly.
Custom Integrations via Zapier: For more complex or non-native integrations, Zapier allows you to connect HubSpot with over 1,000 other applications. Custom integrations are essential when your organization relies on various niche tools that HubSpot doesn’t directly support.
Connecting your domain ensures that your HubSpot-hosted web properties and email communications are branded consistently and function optimally.
Domain Connection for Website and Email: Connecting your domain to HubSpot is essential for establishing your website and email marketing functionalities. It also establishes trust and optimizes the performance of your online communications.
Primary Language Configuration for Domains: For diverse audiences, present the content in their preferred language. Delivering relevant content to users based on their location improves engagement and reduces bounce rates.
Sitemap Configuration: Configure the sitemap through HubSpot, ensuring that search engines like Google and Bing properly index all website pages. They can optimize search engine visibility and website indexing by efficiently configuring the sitemap in HubSpot.
Setting up tracking across your web properties allows you to monitor user behavior and engagement, providing essential data for optimizing marketing and sales efforts.
Implement Tracking Code on External Websites: To fully harness HubSpot’s analytics and reporting capabilities, you need to implement the tracking code on any external websites you own. This code allows HubSpot to collect visitor data and analyze user behavior.
Tracking Code Verification: Once the tracking code is implemented, verifying its functionality is crucial to ensure that all web traffic is accurately captured. This ensures that your marketing and sales reports are based on complete data.
Automatic Cross-Domain Linking Setup: If your company operates multiple domains, cross-domain linking helps track visitors across all your sites. This ensures that user activity across domains is captured accurately, providing a comprehensive view of customer behavior.
Restricted Tracking and Cookies Configuration: Implementing restrictions on tracking and cookies can help you comply with privacy laws like GDPR or CCPA. This involves configuring HubSpot’s cookie settings to prevent unauthorized data collection and ensure compliance with user consent requirements.
Bot Activity Filtering: Bot filtering helps eliminate irrelevant traffic from your reports, ensuring you’re only analyzing data from real users. This is essential for maintaining accurate analytics and decision-making.
Exclude Own IP from Reporting: Excluding your company’s IP addresses from HubSpot’s analytics ensures that internal visits don’t skew your data. This is a critical step to ensure accurate external traffic reporting.
Analytics Views Setup: Setting up analytics views allows you to segment and filter data based on specific criteria. This helps your team create focused reports that drive actionable insights.
Cookie Request Setup: To comply with privacy laws and maintain user trust, setting up a cookie request ensures that visitors are informed about data collection practices on your website. It also allows users to opt in or out, which helps with GDPR compliance.
Google Search Console Integration: Google Search Console provides valuable data on how your website performs in organic search results. Integrating it with HubSpot helps you optimize SEO efforts by providing insights into keywords, impressions, and click-through rates.
Each HubSpot hub, Marketing, Sales, Service, and Operations requires specific configurations. Below are the key onboarding steps for each hub, ensuring they align with your business's goals.
The implementation of Marketing Hub enables you to build and automate marketing campaigns, track performance, and generate leads through strategic content delivery and audience engagement.
Form Strategy Implementation: Implementing a form strategy involves setting up lead capture forms on your website, landing pages, and emails. Forms are essential for collecting information from prospects and converting website visitors into leads.
Landing Page & CTAs: Creating landing pages with clear calls-to-action (CTAs) is vital for generating leads and guiding visitors through the buyer's journey.
Email Configuration: Proper email configuration ensures that your marketing emails are sent from authenticated domains, improving deliverability and preventing them from being flagged as spam. It’s essential for running successful email campaigns.
Social Settings: Connecting your social media accounts to HubSpot enables you to schedule posts, track performance, and engage with your audience directly from the platform. This streamlines your social media management.
Marketing Automation: Setting up marketing automation workflows helps streamline repetitive tasks, such as email nurturing campaigns or lead qualification processes. Automations ensure that your team can focus on high-value activities while keeping leads engaged.
Configuring the Sales Hub ensures that your sales pipeline is well-organized, providing the necessary tools to manage deals, nurture leads, and close sales efficiently.
Configure Deal Management: The appropriate configuration of the deal management processes guarantees that the sales pipeline is efficient and every stage is distinctly smooth. This makes it possible for the team to update and project sales with precision.
Meeting and Call Configuration: The meeting and call configurations allow the sales reps to directly schedule the meetings from HubSpot and appropriately record calls with ease. Resources are saved and so are interactions that are central to the meetings.
Sales Snippets, Sequences, and Templates: Email snippets, email drips, and other templates facilitate your unit in outsourcing emails that repeat, for instance, email reminders. These tools increase efficiency and change the message for each source of sale.
Product and Quote Configuration: Allowing the configuration of goods and quotes helps the sales department create required quotations and proposals within HubSpot. This process helps in improving a workflow and maintaining a stable price.
Goals and Forecasting: The creation of targets and forecasting tools assist in activity-based selling management by helping the sales manager ascertain how close the team is to the profit margins and utilizing facts. It aids the understanding of how the sales team is performing holistically.
Email and Task Integration: Nurturing email with task tools within HubSpot enables your unit to perform email and to-do list management, all without leaving the Hubs. This makes steps easy to execute, and important follow-up tasks are not lost.
The Service Hub allows your support team to manage customer tickets, provide real-time support, and gather feedback to continually improve customer satisfaction.
Ticket Management: Configuring ticket management enables your support team to handle customer issues and track their progress through resolution efficiently. This ensures accountability and faster response times.
Feedback Surveys: Setting up feedback surveys helps gather customer insights and measure satisfaction. These surveys provide valuable data for improving service quality and ensuring customer retention.
Knowledge Base Configuration: Creating a knowledge base provides customers with self-service options, reducing the burden on your support team. This also enhances the customer experience by offering quick solutions to common problems.
Chat: Enabling live chat allows your team to engage with customers in real time, providing instant support. This setup is critical for improving customer satisfaction and resolving issues faster.
Service Automation: Automating service tasks such as ticket assignments and follow-up emails helps reduce response times and improve overall efficiency. Automations ensure that nothing falls through the cracks, providing better service outcomes
The Operations Hub focuses on data synchronization, automation, and process optimization, enabling businesses to streamline workflows and maintain clean, high-quality data across platforms.
Programmable Automation: With containing Automation, rich automation features can be applied using setups to build workflows that go beyond basic, self-marketing tools, suitable for in-house sequential multistep processes.
Data Synchronization: Data synchronization ensures that your information flows seamlessly between HubSpot and other tools or platforms your business uses. By syncing data, you ensure that all systems involved in your operations (CRM, marketing tools, ERP, etc.) are updated with the latest information at all times.
Data Quality: Keeping the data quality is staying within the boundaries of the contents that are to be saved in HubSpot as being factual, clean, and relevant. Duplicates or incomplete information or lack of any entry for a report might result in aspect metric problems and lack of proper judgment in handling processes statutes.
Datasets: Datasets in HubSpot are custom-defined data segments that allow you to analyze and report on specific metrics or information tailored to your business’s needs. You can create datasets that aggregate data from different sources and apply filters or logic to produce actionable insights.
Proper onboarding is key in utilizing HubSpot to its full capacity. By following this checklist, you will make sure that your account is correctly configured, your team is properly equipped, and your processes can support growth across all Hubs to pursue success in the long run.