While we’re an official HubSpot Partner, we believe there are many tools that can help you grow—HubSpot just happens to be one of the most widely adopted (and one of the most adaptable).
At its core, HubSpot is a CRM: Customer Relationship Management software. It tracks every interaction you have with leads and customers—from the first click on an ad to a closed-won deal. But most businesses don’t struggle with collecting data. They struggle with where that data lives and how to manage it.
This post breaks down what HubSpot does, how teams actually use it, and what it takes to make it work—without wasting time or budget.
At the center of HubSpot is its CRM—Customer Relationship Management software. It’s where all of your contact and company data lives, tracking every interaction someone has with your business or organization. That includes things like form submissions, emails, website activity, meetings, and support conversations.
This kind of shared record-keeping introduces a level of efficiency that’s hard to achieve when your tools are disconnected. Instead of jumping between systems or guessing at context, teams across marketing, sales, and service can work from the same set of data—making collaboration faster and handoffs smoother.
For many organizations, HubSpot is their first real CRM. If you’ve been managing contacts in spreadsheets or inboxes, making the switch can feel like a leap—but it’s often the moment things start to scale. HubSpot helps teams get organized, understand what’s working, and build repeatable systems. At Vaulted, we guide teams through that transition—whether they’re starting from scratch or cleaning up a system that’s outgrown its structure.
The CRM is the foundation for everything else in HubSpot. It’s typically where we start when implementing a new account or optimizing an existing one that’s grown disorganized over time.
The basic functionality of HubSpot as a CRM—storing and organizing contact data—has been paired with powerful tools that put that data to work. HubSpot gives teams a more complete picture of their entire pipeline, from new leads to long-term customers, and helps them engage more effectively based on real goals: growth, retention, conversion, or all of the above.
Most organizations come to HubSpot with contact data scattered across spreadsheets, inboxes, and disconnected tools. One of the first steps is importing that data into a single system. HubSpot makes it easy to standardize records, remove duplicates, and give your team one clean view of every contact and company.
Once that’s in place, every user can see a full timeline of activity for each contact—emails sent, forms submitted, pages viewed, meetings booked, and more. That visibility keeps teams aligned. Sales knows if marketing already followed up. Service can see if a support issue was just closed. And no one’s guessing about whether it’s the right time to reach out or what’s already happened.
Lists in HubSpot are how you group contacts based on shared traits or behaviors (any data point available in HubSpot) They’re used to organize people into segments—whether you're sending an email, building a report, or triggering automation.
For example, you might create a list of:
Lists give your team a flexible way to organize contacts and tailor how you engage with them—based on actions they’ve taken or information you already have. Once contacts are on a list, you can use that list to send targeted emails, kick off automated workflows, personalize website content, or build reporting dashboards that focus on just that segment.
HubSpot’s Shared Inbox lets your team manage customer communication across email, live chat, and form submissions—all in one place. Instead of messages being locked inside someone’s personal inbox, everything is visible to the right people, with full context.
You can assign conversations to specific team members, leave internal notes, and track response times—so nothing gets missed, and customers aren’t left waiting. For example, if a lead replies to a marketing email with a product question, your sales team can jump in with the full history of what that lead has seen and done.
Shared Inbox is especially useful for keeping communication consistent across teams. Everyone has visibility. Everyone knows what’s already been said. And no one’s asking a customer to repeat themselves.
HubSpot is a connected platform built for marketing, sales, service, and content management (in fact this website is running on HubSpot). Again, at its core, HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) system that is designed to manage, organize, and track any contact or company that touches your business.
HubSpot is organized into distinct products called Hubs, each built around a specific business function. Each Hub includes a different set of tools built around that core objective.
For example, one of the most common hubs we setup at Vaulted is Sales Hub. As the name would imply, Sales Hub is focused on lead and pipeline management—a unified space to manage deals, conversations, and customer activity.
At Vaulted, we focus on the four Hubs most relevant to go-to-market teams: Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and Content Hub.
Marketing Hub is a popular product that focuses on managing marketing operations. This means that HubSpot can help you manage your social media content and calendars, your ads on LinkedIn and Google Ads, and supports advanced marketing automation (for example, for long term nurture journeys).
Sales Hub helps sales teams manage their pipeline and follow up with leads efficiently. It replaces manual tasks (like sending check-in emails or logging notes) with automated tools that keep reps focused on deals. It also gives visibility into critical sales components for any sales team (like forecasting projected revenue).
Service Hub focuses on customer support and success. It brings tickets, chats, and help articles into one place so your team can respond quickly and consistently and more consistently. You can route requests, monitor resolution times, and even run customer satisfaction surveys to monitor sentiment.
Content Hub (formerly CMS Hub) lets you manage your entire website—landing pages, site pages, and blog—from one platform. It includes tools to improve performance, like A/B testing and smart content, so you can tailor what visitors see based on their behavior and interests.
There are two other hubs, Operations and Commerce, that tend to be used on accounts that already have at least one "core" hub, and they often represent an advanced versions of HubSpot:
Operations Hub focuses on maintaining data quality within HubSpot—an essential foundation for any CRM. It helps track, flag, and correct inconsistent or outdated records, ensuring your team is working with clean, reliable data. It also allows you to sync data from non-HubSpot systems, making it easier to manage a connected tech stack without introducing duplicates or errors.
Commerce Hub is, effectively, a payment processor within HubSpot where you can collect payments, send quotes and invoices, and manage your product library. This hub can be especially helpful if you’re selling services, products, or retainers and want everything tied to one contact record.
Buying HubSpot is one thing. Getting started with it—strategically—is something else entirely. From choosing the right tools to onboarding your team and building the foundation, here’s what that process actually looks like (and where Vaulted fits in).
One of the biggest misconceptions about getting started with HubSpot is thinking you need to pick a product first. In reality, the best approach is to start with your business goals—and then choose the tools that support them.
You might be trying to improve how leads move through your sales process, get better visibility into customer data, launch your first marketing campaign with automation, or consolidate tools into a single, scalable system. Each of those outcomes points to a different starting point in HubSpot—and the decisions you make early on shape how well the platform supports your team.
At Vaulted, we help teams start with the outcome and build backward. That means recommending the right combination of Hubs, the right subscription tier, and a rollout plan that fits your priorities and your team’s capacity.
Once you’ve clarified your goals, the next step is choosing the right products—and making sure you’re buying them in the most cost-effective way.
There are basically two ways to purchase HubSpot:
Self-serve Checkout: Most HubSpot products can be simply purchased online through their normal online checkout process.
Partner-assisted pricing: A more involved process, but one that often leads to better pricing, custom bundles, and added onboarding support.
As a Certified HubSpot Partner, Vaulted helps guide both the selection and purchase process. That includes helping you choose the right products and subscription tiers based on your roadmap—not just what’s in the catalog. We also help negotiate directly with HubSpot to secure discounts or terms you likely wouldn’t get through self-serve checkout.
After you’ve purchased HubSpot, the first step is onboarding your team—and making sure they know how to use the platform in the context of your business.
At Vaulted, we combine foundational training with practical, role-based support to accelerate adoption and reduce friction across your team. Our onboarding process includes:
Assigned HubSpot Academy training tailored to each user. HubSpot Academy is the platform’s built-in learning system, offering structured courses that cover both core concepts and tool-specific functionality. We assign the right tracks based on each team member’s role.
Personalized instruction to reinforce how the system is set up for your team. Sometimes this means 1:1 sessions with key stakeholders; other times it’s team-wide walkthroughs or department-level training.
Our goal is simple: get your team up to speed quickly, confidently, and with a system they actually know how to use.
Once onboarding is underway, the next step is implementation—translating your goals into a working HubSpot system that fits how your team operates.
Every implementation is a little different. The timeline, complexity, and configuration all depend on which Hubs you’re rolling out and what your internal processes look like. That’s why most teams benefit from working with a HubSpot Partner or consultant who can tailor the system around your goals, not just the software’s default settings.
That said, most implementations include a few consistent building blocks:
CRM structure: We define contact properties, lifecycle stages, and segmentation logic so your data is clean, reportable, and usable across teams.
Workflow automation: From lead routing to email follow-ups, automation reduces manual work and helps your team stay responsive at scale.
User roles and access: Defining who sees what—and who’s responsible for what—keeps the system organized as your team grows.
Reporting and dashboards: Real-time visibility into sales, marketing, and service activity gives leadership the clarity to make smarter decisions.
Again, most implementations take around three months. Some are faster. Some take longer. But the goal is always the same: to build a system that supports how your business works—and sets you up to scale.
If you’re still exploring HubSpot—or want to go deeper on specific parts of the platform—these posts break it down further:
Whether you’re just getting started or looking to clean up an existing HubSpot instance, Vaulted can help you turn the platform into something that drives results—not just activity.