HubSpot is a straightforward and intuitive marketing platform, and is designed to be used pretty much ‘out of the box’. If you’re setting up the basic HubSpot CRM, you can be up and running in as little as five days or even a day with the support of an agency partner, or the various online resources available to new users.
However, the time it takes to fully integrate HubSpot with your business processes and reap the benefits of the platform can vary, and this depends on several factors. Full onboarding and training – depending on your requirements and the size of your team – could take anything from a month to four months, because to fully reap the benefits of HubSpot, you’ll need to understand the core features well enough not to disrupt your current business operations.
Some businesses who buy HubSpot independently (i.e. without an agency) find the need to dedicate up to 20 hours per week to HubSpot onboarding and optimisation in the early stages, certainly for the first few weeks. In this article, we’ll look at a few tips to help you get fully set up and comfortable with HubSpot in order to start streamlining your business processes.
Enrol On The Hubspot Academy
HubSpot Academy provides users of all experience levels with a wealth of training and information resources to help them get the most out of the platform. You’ll find courses, project guides, and even certifications on topics ranging from inbound marketing to sales enablement. Investing some time in HubSpot Academy is well worth the effort and can help you get up to full productivity far quicker than without these resources.
The courses can all be completed at your own speed and include video lessons, memory retention quizzes, and practical exercises to help you apply and understand what you’ve learned in the context of your own business. The Academy also provides downloadable user guides and documentation for all of the HubSpot tools and features, which is an excellent resource to utilise when you’re just getting started with the platform, and when you want to learn about new features or best practices further down the line.
Get Familiar With Contacts
HubSpot contacts are the bedrock of your CRM and marketing efforts, and are essential to the way the platform works, so accurately setting up your contact database from the get-go is the first crucial step to using HubSpot efficiently.
Each ‘contact’ represents an individual you’re trying to reach out and interact with, whether they are a current customer, a lapsed customer, or a prospect. Learning how to effectively manage your contacts through HubSpot is crucial – you can add contacts manually, through a form, or by importing a CSV file of your current customer database.
Each individual contact record stores various details about the person, including their name, email, company, and phone number. You can also customise each contact record by adding custom properties, encompassing anything from their preferred form of communication to their last purchase. Understanding how to segment these contacts into usable lists for targeted marketing efforts is also essential.
Set Up Workflows
HubSpot is first and foremost an automation platform, which is where the real benefit comes in streamlining your business processes. The platform uses workflows to automate various aspects of sales, marketing, and customer service. Each workflow is essentially a sequence of software-automated actions you can trigger to occur based on a contacts’ behaviour or stored information.
For instance, you could set up a workflow to send an automated follow-up email whenever a prospect fills out a contact form on your website, or to update a contact record lifestyle stage when they reach a certain lead score. (A lead score is a numerical value assigned to a contact by the platform based on their perceived value to your business, and is calculated using various engagement metrics, demographic information, and behavioural data from interactions with your emails and website.)
To set up a workflow, you’ll first need to select a ‘starting condition’ – such as a form submission – set the action you want to occur – e.g. send an email – and specify any other conditions and criteria. Using workflows effectively can save you a lot of time, prevent leads from going cold, and help you create a more personalised sales and customer service experience for your customers.
Work With An Experienced Hubspot Partner Agency
Often the best way of leveraging the most value from HubSpot in the fastest time is by working alongside an agency that already knows the destination and is set up with all the tools you need to get there. An experienced agency will know exactly how to tailor HubSpot to the needs of your business and your marketing goals, without you having to wade through terabytes of online resources to find the answers you’re looking for. One of the strengths of HubSpot is the huge wealth of learning materials they provide new users, but this can also sometimes be a weakness because it can be confusing for new users to know where to start. A HubSpot partner agency will direct you to the practical training and resources you need to understand the platform quickly, and can also give you direct support in setup and onboarding, as well as access to new tools and features.
Next Steps
To find out more about our HubSpot marketing services and how we can help you streamline your business processes using the platform, please contact JDR today by clicking the link here.
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