Once you’ve decided to make HubSpot the sales and marketing solution for your business, you will need to complete the onboarding process onto the HubSpot platform. This process encompasses the technical set-up of your account and services, the workflows to automate your inbound marketing efforts, the custom templates and tracking parameters, and importing your existing customer data.
Each onboarding process differs between businesses, as each business has unique objectives, things they want to measure and track, and business models. The onboarding process is the time to create a solid foundation on which to build your inbound marketing strategy and scale your business to success.
Why is HubSpot Onboarding required?
There is simply no way you could sign up for HubSpot and it will automatically design custom workflows, templates, and upload your entire business data network automatically. (But that would be cool!) As with all accounts, software, and services, some sort of set-up is required, and that is what the onboarding process is.
You have two options on how your business decides to get started on the HubSpot platform, as you’ll read below. Just as your business is unique and custom, how you decide to onboard with HubSpot is entirely up to you.
A successful onboarding will create systems that make your existing work more efficient so you can focus on running your business, and let the automated custom workflows do the work for you. An unsuccessful onboarding could be time-consuming, or leave you chasing integration errors as you learn the nuances of the HubSpot platform. It also could limit the potential of your business’s growth, as you risk not utilizing all of the tools and custom solutions available to you while you learn about all the capabilities of HubSpot solutions.
We should also mention that this is highly specific on which HubSpot products you plan to invest in.
For example, if you're considering something like HubSpot's Marketing Hub, then it helps to work with a HubSpot Web Design Agency (like Vaulted) with experience in both web design and HubSpot. However, some HubSpot products are more centric to automation and workflows and, thus, the customized onboarding can be slightly different from each product.
When onboarding with HubSpot, you can choose to do the work yourself directly, or choose a HubSpot Partner or Agency to do the onboarding process for you.
Onboarding Without a HubSpot Partner
If you choose to onboard with HubSpot directly, you will be assigned a HubSpot Implementation Specialist to help guide you through the process for the first 90 days of your subscription. This agent will be there to answer questions as you follow the steps of the onboarding process through the platform, and will also assist you in creating your first campaign with HubSpot software.
The HubSpot platform and its potential can be a bit overwhelming at first, and even with their direction and guides, the technical integrations (including a tech stack audit) and logistical set-up can get confusing, so having someone to ask questions along the way is very helpful.
The HubSpot Implementation Specialist is a supporting role, however. So you will be responsible for the full technical set-up and transferring, workflow and template design, and software integration, as well as training your team on how to use the HubSpot workspace.
Using a HubSpot Partner or Agency for the Onboarding Process
When using a HubSpot Partner for the onboarding process, you will be bringing an expert onto your team to create a custom HubSpot solution for your business. They’ll know the ins and outs of the technical set-up which will save you time and energy, and give you confidence in the foundation of your inbound strategy. They’ll also work with you to create a custom HubSpot integration, rather than the cookie-cutter or off-the-shelf solutions you’re likely to get with HubSpot’s guided support.
With an expert on your team, your HubSpot partner will make the onboarding process efficient and custom to your business’s unique objectives. All this will be done without taking your time away from operating your business to integrate the HubSpot platform.
What is the onboarding process like with a HubSpot Partner Agency?
What to Expect: Steps of the onboarding process
The first step of the onboarding process is understanding how HubSpot can help your business, and which of its tools will benefit you most. This is done by chatting with you and your team to gain a thorough view of your business now, and where you’d like it to be. Choosing someone from the HubSpot Solutions Partner Program will then apply their expertise and knowledge of the platform to design an inbound strategy to meet your goals.
First is technical and strategic guidance to integrate with existing tools and platforms, set-up your tracking and measuring parameters per your unique objectives, and making sure the backend of the platform is solid without any bugs or errors that might plague you later. This step, alone, will save you hours of reading tutorials on setting up your HubSpot account on your own.
After gaining an understanding of your business’s objectives and building a fully-integrated foundation, your HubSpot Solutions Partner will then get to work developing the custom workflows that will automate your business and marketing efforts. This is where having a HubSpot partner for the onboarding process will provide true value to your HubSpot solutions - using their familiarity to find the most efficient and customized solutions for your business.
Finally, it is time to transfer your existing data into the platform and see the magic of HubSpot’s automated workflows. The amount of time for this stage will depend on the amount of data you have, as well as the current platform or format that the data currently exists.
How long does onboarding take?
The length of onboarding will depend on the size of your business, the size of your team, and the amount of data that already exists in your current CRM that needs to be transferred. But, generally speaking, the benchmark for most accounts is 90 days.
The amount of HubSpot solutions your business is looking to incorporate will also influence how long the onboarding process will take, as well as how granular and customized the workflows need to be in order to reach and measure your unique goals.
However much time it will take for the transfer, design, and set-up of the HubSpot on your own - it will typically take significantly less time (and headache) to work with a HubSpot Solutions Partner for the process.
What value does a HubSpot Partner bring to the onboarding process?
As a HubSpot Solutions partner, we are here to save you time and energy on the tedious task of onboarding your business to the HubSpot platform. With our knowledge and expertise gained through years of HubSpot experience, we can give you a custom automated inbound strategy that’s ready to work for you immediately. You’ll still be trained on how to manage and use these workflows, but there’s no need to spend your time learning the one-time process of onboarding.
When you use a qualified and experienced partner for your onboarding, you can continue to run your business, and we’ll hand over a ready-to-operate solution for your inbound strategy or sales process that is completely customized for you.
One of the core tools for this at Vaulted is our onboarding plan. The onboarding plan is a customized plan for both onboarding and implementation that we complete as part of every project. Not only does this plan create clear expectations about completing your onboarding within 90 days of engagement, but it allows you to speak to your objectives and goals.
Choosing the Right Onboarding Process for You (Agency/Partner vs. HubSpot direct)
The difference between onboarding directly with HubSpot yourself and having a HubSpot Partner or Agency do the onboarding process for you is a bit like filing your taxes. As a competent business owner, you are completely capable of following the directions to file your taxes correctly, as tedious as it may be.
Even so, unless you are in the business of filing taxes, there is a higher risk of making a mistake, missing a write-off, or being up-to-date on every new tax law and write-off that applies to your business.
When you hire an expert to do your taxes, you can just hand off the work, and let them apply their knowledge and expertise to file everything accurately and find every benefit to your business. This keeps your business operating at full speed so you don’t take time and energy from your business to file taxes once a year.
HubSpot onboarding is similar in this way. Doing the onboarding process yourself might be the best option for you and your team if you’re interested in becoming a HubSpot expert to know the ins and outs of the platform and utilize it in a custom way for your business’s success. It’s a steep learning curve at first, but with the support agent assigned to you, you can be using HubSpot and implementing your inbound strategy with success on your own.
However, hiring a HubSpot Partner (and expert) to provide you with customized onboarding process for you, means that you can just hand over the data and your business objectives (like growing your traffic), and let the expert utilize their knowledge and expertise to create a custom inbound marketing solution for your business. They’ll dig deep into the HubSpot platform, and let you focus on the management of your business in the meantime. The result is guaranteed to be faster, more efficient, and more effective because you have an expert on your team.
You and your business are unique and you know what is best for you. If you are interested in what the unique onboarding process for your business with a HubSpot partner would look like, we’d love to chat.