5 Biggest HubSpot Onboarding Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Sure, onboarding yourself to a new CRM platform like HubSpot can come with difficulties.

Onboarding your entire company, however, is a completely different challenge.

While completing the HubSpot onboarding process will undoubtedly reap benefits, you must first overcome the hurdles of learning a new platform.

Below, we list a few top HubSpot onboarding challenges we’ve witnessed and the best strategies to overcome them.

1. Understanding Your Hub’s Functionality

HubSpot boasts five different “hubs” used for various purposes to accomplish numerous goals. Before you begin onboarding, understand which hub you’re working with and what type of subscription you have, as your subscription type dictates the tools and capabilities available to you. HubSpot’s different hubs include:

• Marketing Hub: Per its namesake, Marketing Hub provides many tools to support your inbound marketing efforts. Some of these tools include email marketing, social media marketing (both organic and paid), landing pages, smart content, and more.
• Sales Hub: Sales Hub touts various features designed to create a seamless selling experience, with CPQ (configure, price, quote) functionality tools, reporting and analytics capabilities, and more.
• Service Hub: Designed to deliver unmatched customer experiences, Service Hub includes various helpful tools, such as a shared inbox, help desk automation, knowledge base functionality, customer feedback, custom surveys, reporting, ticketing, and more.
• CMS Hub: CMS Hub enables users to host their websites on HubSpot. One of this hub’s most popular tools is content staging, which allows developers to create and launch a website in a staged environment. (Note: This tool requires a CMS Hub Professional subscription.)
• Operations Hub: Operations Hub allows you to sync, clean, and curate customer data, thus keeping all of your data in a single, easy-to-access location.

To maximize your onboarding experience, get to know the hub you’ll be using—and encourage your team to do so. Understanding the features ahead of time will help you better plan to meet your business goals.

2. Using The Right HubSpot Tools

While each hub includes a plethora of tools, they can only be helpful if you know which ones are available to use—and how to use them.

Once you understand which hub you’ll be working in, determine what goals you want to accomplish with your HubSpot portal. We recommend asking yourself and your team the questions below.:

• For Marketing Hub: Do I want to secure more leads? If so, use the landing page builder.
• For Sales Hub: Do I want to manage my deals better? If so,  use the deal pipeline, which allows you to add deals, assign tasks, and track your prospects in a comprehensive, easy-to-use tool.
• For Service Hub: Do I want to build better customer relationships? If so, use the customer portal, where customers can seamlessly interact with your support team in a personalized environment.
• For CMS Hub: Do I want to build an easily customizable website? If so, use the drag-and-drop website builder.
• For Operations Hub: Do I want to sync data across different platforms? If so, use the data sync functionality.

While these are only a few of the numerous questions you can ask yourself, these provide a good starting point for figuring out what exactly you want to accomplish. From there, you can pinpoint which HubSpot tools will help you achieve your goals.

Pro tip: If you’re still unsure what tools to use, take advantage of HubSpot’s help center or contact HubSpot’s customer support via email, phone call, or online chat.

3. Creating an Onboarding Strategy

Now that you’ve familiarized yourself with your hub and know which tools you want to use, you’ll want to create an onboarding strategy that makes sense for your entire team. This step is critical to the successful onboarding and long-term adoption of HubSpot. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What’s our objective in using this platform, and how will our team members contribute to it?
• How can we introduce HubSpot to our team and train them on the technology? We recommend hosting a kick-off meeting followed by training meetings to cover specific aspects of each hub.
• To increase adoption, what resources can we provide our team with, both internal and external?

As you create your strategy, keep simplicity in mind. Your strategy should be thorough, but you don’t want to overwhelm your employees as they work to understand a new platform.

Pro tip: Use the HubSpot Academy to onboard your team. The academy offers helpful courses, lessons, ebooks, and templates across its many services, from marketing and sales to web design and development. 

4. Connecting Your Tech Stack

In many cases, companies choosing to use HubSpot already have various tech platforms to complete their day-to-day tasks.

Fortunately, that’s not an issue. HubSpot features an ecosystem of integrations to connect hundreds of apps to your account. Some popular apps include Gmail, Google Calendar, HubSpot for WordPress, Canva, SurveyMonkey, and Eventbrite—among hundreds of others. Simply click on the app name to view a setup guide and install it within your HubSpot portal.

Before you begin familiarizing yourself with the platform, make sure to take advantage of all integrations possible, which can help you save time, money, and data.

5. Incorporating Automation Tools

HubSpot’s automation tools are a must-have if your goal is to personalize communications with your target audiences and increase your team’s productivity. While these tools can seem initially complex, they’re ultimately designed to automate administrative tasks so your team can focus on building strong customer relationships. A few of these HubSpot tools include:

• Workflows: A function of Marketing Hub, workflows can be used in a myriad of ways to nurture users with email campaigns,  update a contact’s lifecycle or deal stage, create tasks for team members, and more.
• Sequences: A function of Sales Hub, sequences enable users to send targeted, timed email templates to nurture contacts. This tool can also be used to automatically create tasks for your team members.
• Deal management automation: A function of Sales Hub, deal management automation allows users to record calls, meetings, and emails. It can also record when prospects open emails, click on links, or download attachments.

As mentioned above, you’ll want to assess your goals and identify areas where you could become more efficient. From there, choose which automation tools will ultimately help your team save time and energy.

Pro tip: Check out HubSpot’s full lineup of marketing automation tools here and sales automation tools here.

As you face the challenges and questions associated with onboarding to HubSpot, understand that a thoughtful onboarding strategy may take time but will result in tenfold success. If you need help with this process, don’t be afraid to use outside resources to help simplify the process and take the stress off your plate.

Still Facing Challenges?

As HubSpot’s first partner agency, we can help onboard your team to the HubSpot CRM. Plus, with more than a decade of experience, we guarantee a seamless (and educational) process. Learn more by clicking the image below.