HubSpot Onboarding: How To Select The Best Option For You

Imagine elevating your career and propelling your company's success to a whole new level with just one decision - the choice to invest in HubSpot. This dynamic change in your tech stack promises to revolutionize your sales and marketing operations. But remember, the real magic unfolds when you step into the world of onboarding - an essential, not merely a suggestion. Read on to unlock the secrets of effective HubSpot onboarding and begin your journey to remarkable transformation.

Benefits of Selecting The Right Onboarding Solution For HubSpot

With proper onboarding HubSpot as a platform can provide you with positive outcomes, including:

• Marketing Insights: With diligent data hygiene and governance, HubSpot can give your marketing team greater insight into the impact of their efforts with powerful analytics and reporting capabilities.
• Personalization: With HubSpot, you can deliver highly personalized, targeted messaging by using a combination of list segmentation, persona-aligned campaigns, and workflow logic designed to right size the audience experience.
• Consistent Voice: Not only can HubSpot help you maintain branding standards, but it can also help you deliver full-cycle communications in a branded voice.
  
• Sales Growth: Using HubSpot's advanced CRM to actively manage leads, streamline your sales process, and accelerate business growth.
• Improved Conversion Rates: Optimized sales funnel with HubSpot's analytics and A/B testing tools to increase conversions and boost revenue.
• Enhance Customer Relationships: Strengthen customer connections using HubSpot's CRM features to understand your customers better, encouraging repeat sales.
• Boost Sales Productivity: Free up your sales team to focus on closing deals by automating manual tasks with HubSpot, fostering growth in your customer base.
• Refine Sales Forecasting: Make strategic, data-informed decisions by using HubSpot's analytics capabilities to enhance the accuracy of your sales forecasting.

OK, sounds great, right? Not so fast. HubSpot can help you achieve all these things. However, HubSpot fresh out of the box is like a new bike in a box on Christmas morning. You still have to assemble before you can enjoy it.

HubSpot Onboarding. What are the Options?

Onboarding and implementing your new HubSpot account are a must. There are a few different onboarding options from which to choose:

1. Directly from HubSpot
2. DIY
3. Work with a HubSpot Partner

Onboarding from HubSpot

HubSpot not only sells their platform, but they also offer onboarding services. After all, they are the ones who created it. So, why not hire them to help you get started with your new HubSpot account? As much as we love HubSpot, we have to be honest. HubSpot’s own onboarding is very rarely the best option.

What you can expect if you hire HubSpot to help with onboarding:

• One HubSpot implementation specialist
• Limited to 90 days
• General guidance platform functionality
• Access to their knowledge base and instructional videos
• Minimal technical support
• You complete all the tasks yourself

Unfortunately, their direct onboarding services often fall short of customer expectations. Yes, they do a great job at what they do. But it’s what they do that is the problem. Their services provide customers help in a general, generic sense. Ironically, you bought HubSpot so that you can provide a unique, customized, personalized experience for members of your audience. But that’s not what you get when you hire them to help you get up and running.

DIY HubSpot Onboarding

Yes, if you so choose, you can log in to your new HubSpot account and get started. There’s nothing stopping you. But if you like most people in marketing today you have about two dozen other things going on.

Many DIYers find that it’s nearly impossible to maintain all their existing activities while attempting to set up their new HubSpot account. You will likely need two full weeks of uninterrupted time to successfully learn about and then configure your HubSpot account.

You may be excited to dive right in and start using your new tool. But you may have second thoughts after you consider the following:

• Technical literacy limitations: As tech-savvy and interested you are in keeping with the trends, HubSpot takes quite a bit of knowledge to get established, configured, and integrated with other platforms in your tech stack.
• Using what you’ve bought: HubSpot comes with a mix of hubs as well as licensing levels. There are literally thousands of possible combinations of features and functions that you may or may not have access to.
• Steep Learning Curve: Due to HubSpot’s complexity and flexibility, there is an awful lot to learn before, during, and after onboarding. And the more hubs, users, contacts you have in the CRM the more difficult the learning curve.

HubSpot Partner Onboarding Services

Another onboarding option for you is to find and engage with a trusted HubSpot Partner company.

A HubSpot partner can offer you the best blend of guidance, technical knowhow, personalized training, expert knowledge of best practices you can use, and an ability to help you grow and evolve your HubSpot maturity over time.

HubSpot onboarding with a HubSpot Partner brings you several advantages, such as:

• Tailored Approach: HubSpot Partners can lean on their past onboarding experiences to develop a custom plan based on your industry, your team, and your specific needs.
• Flexibility: A HubSpot Partner agency has more flexibility to setup, configure, build, and train your team at a pace that works best for you.
• Support from a Team: HubSpot Partner agencies employ teams of people with a wide range of skills. Rather than having only one person, you may get up to 6 people all working together on your account.
• Applicable Knowledge: Not only can a partner help you with the technical set up and typical onboarding services, but great partners also bring real-world expertise. Platform agnostic strategy development, planning, and execution skills provide a highly valuable supplement to the technology. They can help you configure the platform according to your unique sales and marketing strategies.
• Best Practice Guidance: A HubSpot Partner can blend their technical capabilities, business acumen, and accumulated experiences. Having helped others optimize HubSpot, they can recommend the most effective methods for achieving and sustaining great results.
• Service Oriented Perspective: HubSpot Partner agencies are service oriented by nature. They place the ultimate needs of their clients at the top of their priority list. They are known for going above and beyond expectations. You don’t get that from the other onboarding options.

Other Important Skills: A HubSpot Partner is very likely to have several other services you may need to get the most out of your HubSpot account. It’s a near certainty that you’ll need to integrate your account with other platforms. You may also have ancillary needs, such as paid search advertising, landing page development, integration needs with your other business applications, and customer insights / reporting needs to name a few.

HubSpot Onboarding Selection Framework

We put together a criteria evaluation framework for you to determine which onboarding best fits your needs. Follow the framework below to make a decision:

1. Self-Evaluation:
   
   1. Identify your team's technical abilities and comfort level with the HubSpot platform.
   2. Determine how much time you can dedicate to onboarding without affecting other tasks.
   3. Understand what features and functionalities of HubSpot are relevant to your business and team.
   4. Identify what your investment amount will be for onboarding
2. Onboarding criteria:
   
   1. Current needs - will the option you selected get you all of your current needs?
   2. Future needs - does the option selected have the ability to grow with you and plan for your future use?
   3. Timeline - will you get your onboarding done correctly, on time?
   4. Costs - will you be able to stay on budget with onboarding selected?
3. Decision Making:
   
   • Evaluate the pros and cons of each approach based on your team's capacity, your specific needs, and the level of personalization you require.
   • Find the onboarding solution that aligns with your current maturity of processes, platform, and people that will be interacting with HubSpot.

Why Choosing a HubSpot Partner for Onboarding is The Right Choice

Choosing a HubSpot Partner for onboarding services is the best option for businesses who want to get it right, do it quickly, and set themselves up for long-term success.

HubSpot is one the world’s leading MarTech platforms. It offers so many features that it can be difficult to get things right from the onset.

Without a HubSpot Partner and their team of experts guiding you, you may be unable to get HubSpot set up the way you need it. Since HubSpot directly impacts your sales, marketing, service, and operations efforts it’s important to understand the onboarding options available.