Hidden Gems of HubSpot Onboarding

Have you ever ordered off a secret menu? Maybe a butterbeer from Starbucks or dragon sauce from Chipotle? 

When it comes to technology, new features are fun, and with so many updates constantly released, it can feel like devices and software have a secret menu of their own. 

We’re here to tell you about some of our favorite hidden gems within the HubSpot onboarding process. Let’s dig in.

HubSpot Onboarding Essentials 

A successful HubSpot onboarding includes a few key essentials:

• Timeline for implementation
• Stakeholder buy-in
• Roadmap for implementation
• Executive Sponsor
• Power user/administrator

We would argue that your executive sponsor and administrator are the most important pieces of the onboarding puzzle. An executive sponsor drives the change management process of onboarding with HubSpot. Think of them as your HubSpot cheerleader. They help explain the “why” of HubSpot. Without one, you could potentially be stuck with a tool that only half your organization uses.

Your power user/admin is a dedicated HubSpot user — someone who will be in the weeds of the platform daily. They’ll be your go-to for questions related to HubSpot, and they’ll be the HubSpot evangelist across your teams and organization.

Overview of Main Features

When onboarding, we typically focus on a specific hub, whether it’s marketing, sales, or service. Our approach to onboarding those hubs differs as follows:

• Sales Hub: The most important part of onboarding Sales Hub is mapping out the sales process within HubSpot. We talk to businesses about their current sales process, identify the parts we want to keep and weed out inefficiencies. Our goal is to make sure HubSpot serves as the single source of truth for sales intelligence.

After that, we map it all into HubSpot, build a sales pipeline, and identify deal stages within that sales pipeline.

Finally, we focus on reporting to ensure you’re capturing the data you need when you need it and sharing that data across the organization

• Marketing Hub: We start the Marketing Hub onboarding process by making sure any contact data is clean before we import it to HubSpot. There’s no sense in bringing dirty data to a new house! Once your data is clean, we help you import it into HubSpot and segment it correctly, if needed. 

Next, we’ll set up your email-sending domain and talk about any brand considerations and the building out of email templates. We’ll highlight marketplace templates you can use, and then we’ll walk you through creating an email. 

• Service Hub: Onboarding Service Hub is similar to Sales Hub. We’ll discuss your current support process and identify the ticketing stages that do and don’t work. Together, we’ll talk about your ticket pipelines and ticketing stages in an effort to make the pipelines more efficient. We’ll also help you set up your conversations inbox to allow for support conversations with your customers. 

Related resource: Checklist: Prepare for a Website Migration to HubSpot 

The Hidden Gems in HubSpot Onboarding 

Now it’s time to discuss that secret menu. While none of these features are truly secret, they’re helpful to know about as you begin your onboarding process. 

Before we get into platform features, we want to reiterate the fact that your executive sponsor and power user will be your biggest gems. Remember, it’s humans that drive technology — not the other way around. Your sponsor can always help explain the “why” behind moving to HubSpot. If your users don’t understand the value HubSpot will bring, it will be harder to get their buy-in.

Your admin is the person employees turn to when they hit a roadblock. Knowing they have that person to turn to will help with buy-in. You never want anyone to feel “stuck” when they are using HubSpot. 

HubSpot Tools for Enhanced Engagement

Here are a few of our favorite tools for enhanced engagement with your audience. 

1. Consistently email key reports: No matter your hub, you can set up a PDF of an entire reporting dashboard to send to your teams regularly. If you have employees who aren’t in HubSpot on a daily basis, they can still stay hip to the data you’re collecting with these reports in their email. Helping everyone in a company understand that your key sales, marketing, and service data lives only in HubSpot will have an outsized impact on HubSpot adoption within an organization. 
2. Campaigns tool: We think this is one of the most underutilized tools on HubSpot. This tool allows you to aggregate all your marketing assets under one campaign so you can track its effectiveness overall. You’ll be able to see exactly how any piece of content or CTA performed with this tool.  
   
   This tool is especially helpful when going into executive meetings — it allows you to demonstrate your success around different campaigns. 
   
   

Overcoming HubSpot Issues 

If you don’t have a dedicated HubSpot power user/admin, it’s best to partner with an onboarding solutions provider like Lynton or hire someone permanently through a company like HubSearch. We Lynton folks know HubSpot like the back of our hand. Your HubSpot admin will know the ins and outs of the platform, too, but if they’re not around, a partner like Lynton or HubSpot support can help.

Together, we’ll look for the best solution to your issue, present it back to you, and move forward to address it.

Lynton Team Picks 

You have to know we have favorite features, too! Here are the tools we’ve added to our own secret menu. 

Colored object tags: These tags help you prioritize your deals and tickets. The colors will help you quickly identify higher-priority deals or tickets in your pipeline. 

Coaching playlists: These playlists are a great way to train your team. Add calls or clippings of calls to your portal to help train your crew. You can also use it to onboard new clients or employees, teach soft skills and/or selling tactics, create demo videos, and more.

Copy/paste actions from one workflow to another: You can now copy an action from one workflow and paste it into another workflow in your portal.

Deal stage required properties: Keep track of deals and deal stages by requiring your sales team to update properties in real time. This will help you secure more deals and keep your data clean.

HubSpot projects: If you don’t have an existing project manager, you can use HubSpot projects to assign tasks and subtasks to your teams. 

Teeing Up HubSpot for Success 

As you begin the onboarding process, establish a roadmap and be prepared to answer questions. Here are a few of our other best practices.

• Make sure your team understands why you’re switching to HubSpot.
• Integrate the proper data into HubSpot for useful reporting. For example, if you use Salesforce, confirm you’re bringing that sales data into HubSpot and whether you’ll be sending HubSpot data back to Salesforce.
• Be thoughtful about what you integrate, but also verify you're bringing into HubSpot all the data you need. Before you add an integration to HubSpot, review its capabilities to make sure it will still serve you and your HubSpot subscription level. If it doesn’t, reach out for a custom integration.
• Understand what existing tools you use and pay for can be replaced with HubSpot. For example, if you use DocuSign to send quotes, you could consider HubSpot’s quoting tool. If you’re using Stripe, you can eliminate it for HubSpot Payments. Replace Calendly with HubSpot’s meetings tool. 

Keep up with other HubSpot features and product releases here.

Why is HubSpot a Hidden Gem? 

The answer is simple: HubSpot gives you the ability to replace a number of other software platforms you’re currently paying for with one robust platform that includes marketing, sales and service functionality. How much could your organization save by replacing Salesforce, Zendesk, Docusign, Calendly, Stripe, Hootsuite and other software tools with HubSpot? 

When you simplify your tech stack, you’ll increase efficiency, streamline operations, and gather happy users in the process. That’s a pretty good “why,” wouldn’t you agree? 

Not ready to go it alone? Reach out to our onboarding team for help.