74 HubSpot Terms Defined

08/02/2021 7 min read Written by Kelly Groover

New to HubSpot? A seasoned user? Whatever the case, with so many different systems and features available in the HubSpot ecosystem, you may get tripped up on a phrase occasionally.

We're here to help!

Our team has compiled a list of common HubSpot terms along with their definitions that you can turn to whenever you need. Here's what we've collected:

HubSpot Terms You Need to Know

Activity – An activity is anything a contact has done to interact with your company (i.e., email opens, email clicks, meetings, forms submissions, etc.).

App marketplace – A hub where you can download hundreds of integrations and other applications that maximize your HubSpot stack.

Asset marketplace – An area within HubSpot that gives access to thousands of themes, paid and free, so you can easily customize the look of your site, email, landing pages, and more.

Buyer's journey – The process a buyer or customer goes through to become aware, consider, and decide whether or not to purchase a product or service. As suggested, it's broken down into the awareness, consideration, and decision stages.

Calling – A feature within the HubSpot CRM that enables you to connect over the phone with your contacts.

Call-to-action (CTA) – A button or link that drives prospective customers to a web or landing page where they can convert on a form.

Campaign – A tool within HubSpot that lets you tag related marketing assets and content so you can track and measure the effectiveness of all your collective efforts.

Content management system (CMS) – A CMS is any system that lets you create and manage content on a website.

Contact One of the four standard objects in HubSpot's CRM, a contact is the information on a person your company engages with.

Contact record – All of the information you can store and maintain on contact, from personal demographics to activity.

Company – One of HubSpot's four standard objects, a company is simply the data of different businesses you work with; generally, associated with a contact.

Customer relationship management software (CRM) – A CRM is a system that houses all the necessary data to manage relationships with your customers.

Customer effort score (CES) – A survey that gauges how much effort a customer needed to use to find an answer or solution to something; generally used to measure customer loyalty.

Customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) – A survey deployed by your support or service team that measures your customer's satisfaction with your products, services, and experiences.

Drag and drop editor – The HubSpot email and page tool that lets you edit your emails and webpages by dragging and dropping different modules and content pieces.

Deal – Another of HubSpot's four standard objects, a deal represents an ongoing transaction a member of your sales team is pursuing with a contact or company.

Enrollment trigger – An enrollment trigger is something a user must do in order to be put into one of your company's workflows (ex: if someone is a member of your newsletter list, they'll receive your email).

Fallback email – An email that allows you to use certain HubSpot tools, such as ticket automation, even if you haven't connected a shared inbox yet.

Flywheel – The flywheel model refers to the idea of putting your customers front and center and creating momentum by aligning your entire organization around delivering a positive customer experience.

Forecast – A forecast is a tool used by sales executives to predict what a member, team, or company will sell weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually.

Funnel – A funnel represents your customers' journey from their first interaction to becoming a brand advocate; this helps track how effective your team is at moving people through your lead funnel.

  • Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) – This can refer to someone who's in the awareness stage of your buying journey and can also refer to the type of content you create for that stage.
  • Middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) – This is similar as above, but instead of awareness, this person is evaluating and considering and would need appropriate content.
  • Bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) – Again, similar to above, but refers to decision-level content or contacts.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – GDPR 2016/679 is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy in the European Union and the European Economic Area.

HubDb – HubSpot's relational database that allows developers to create database-driven content that can be embedded within websites and landing pages.

Integration – The connection of data between two systems, platforms, or applications, i.e., a CRM and HubSpot marketing automation.

Landing page and thank you page – A landing page is any page where you can offer a resource in exchange for contact information and a thank you page is a follow-up that generally provides the resource.

Lead scoring – The process of assigning positive and negative values to activities a contact has with your website or company that are then used to move people from lead to MQL and SQL.

Lifecycle stage – Lifecycle is another marketing term to describe a contact's journey from first engagement through purchase; HubSpot's include subscriber, lead, marketing qualified lead, sale qualified lead, opportunity.

  • Subscriber – Contacts who have opted in to hear more from your team via a newsletter, blog, or similar.
  • Lead – Any contact that's shown some "sales" readiness, like signing up for a premium content piece.
  • Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – Any lead that has actively engaged with the team's marketing efforts and should be flagged or handed off to sales.
  • Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – Someone who has indicated that they are ready for a direct sale follow up like submitting a form on a pricing page.
  • Opportunity – Any contact associated with a deal that is not yet won.

List – The lists tool in HubSpot allows you to create a list of contacts or companies based on property values and other characteristics, including activities.

  • Active – Lists that update members automatically based on preset criteria.
  • Static – Fixed lists with records that meet a certain criterion when the list is saved.

Marketing automation system – A platform like HubSpot that automates certain marketing tasks like emails, social media, ads, and more.

Meeting link – A link that anyone in your HubSpot portal can copy and share with contacts so they can book time with you.

Object – A piece of data in your CRM, like a contact; also referred to as a record as in "contact record."

  • Custom objects – A way to define something outside of the four standard objects.

Partitioning – A way of allowing access to assets so only the right teams and users can view and edit them.

  • Teams – A group of determined HubSpot users.
  • User roles – Different permissions to give to different users in your portal, like admins, marketers, blog authors.

Personalization – Tokens that can be used to add personal demographic information, like first name, to an email or other piece of content.

Pipeline – A pipeline is where deal stages or ticket statuses are set; they're used to predict revenue, analyze blockers, and manage tickets.

Properties – Properties allow you to store all the different types of information you collect about your records or objects in HubSpot; for example, descriptions and labels to help you identify more about a company.

Reporting – A method of providing insights into how your sales, marketing, and service efforts are doing, based on what matters to your organization.

  • Dashboard – A centralized location that shows either your sales, marketing, or service metrics in one place.
  • Single object – A report that lets you analyze an object, such as contacts, with object properties.
  • Custom object – A report that lets you analyze a custom object with properties.
  • Funnel – A report that measures the conversion rates between certain stages in a customer's lifecycle or deal's pipeline.
  • Contract attribution – Reports that measure which assets, interaction, or source impacted lead generation.
  • Deal create attribution – The same as above but shows what impacts deal generation.
  • Revenue attribution – Same as above but shows what had the greatest impact on revenue; multi-touch revenue reports show the exact interactions in specific order that led to customers.
  • Closed-loop – A report that shows each customer's interaction on your website from the first time they visited through becoming a customer (includes sales, marketing, and service engagements).

Saved view – Saved views are a way to view a segment of your standard objects based on property values.

Sequence – A tool within Sales Hub that automates messages to your prospects in a defined order.

Session – A session groups together the interactions individuals have with your site, including page views, form submissions, and more.

Smart content – Content that changes on your website, email, or CTA based on defined user criteria, such as language.

Snippet – Snippets are short, reusable text blocks that can be used on any of the standard object records, in email templates, chat conversations, or when logging notes and activities.

Targeting rules – A way of tailoring the pop-ups or chat flows your visitors see when they visit your site.

Task – Something you can mark that needs to be done in HubSpot.

Theme – A theme is any set of templates, modules, global content, and style settings you can use to create your website.

  • Template – Pre-made reusable page or email wrappers that users can select before populating content.
  • Code templates – A set of templates for your website that are custom coded by a developer.
  • Modules – a set of unique theme modules or reusable components added to pages that you can add and customize to any page template within a theme.
  • Global content – Any content repeated on multiple pages, like a header.
  • Theme settings – The default settings for the templates in your theme, like fonts, colors, and spacing.

Ticket – One of HubSpot's four standard objects, a ticket is a customer inquiry or request for help from your customers.

Workflow – Workflow refers to an automated process where tasks, information, and emails are triggered based on set rules; users can either be added automatically through triggers or manually by importation.

Get Help

Are you a HubSpot master yet? If not, don’t worry. Even after 12 years as a HubSpot partner, we find ourselves looking up a term occasionally. Hopefully, this glossary will help you. If there is any specific term you’d like to know more about, don’t hesitate to reach out!

By: Kelly Groover

Kelly serves as the Specialist of People and Talent for Lynton. She lives in Savannah, GA with her husband, daughter, and two dogs. When she's not managing conversion rates and lead generation for the company, she's typically playing soccer or watching football.

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