HubSpot Guide: Understanding Professional HubSpot Onboarding Solutions

One of the biggest challenges of purchasing a new software is getting started and implementing it for success. Onboarding a totally new solution presents all sorts of challenges.

When it comes to purchasing a HubSpot plan, HubSpot requires each business to go through onboarding with HubSpot or one of its certified HubSpot Solutions Partners.

The reason behind this requirement is that onboarding a business into such a robust platform can be challenging. 

Without experienced help, the HubSpot onboarding can be time consuming and overwhelming. A professional onboarding process brings clarity and convenience to what would otherwise be a daunting launch process. 

And let’s be honest here, HubSpot is an expensive platform because of its all-in-one solution. It’s difficult to get the implementation and onboarding right without previous experience. 

HubSpot is striving to get its new customers and businesses up to speed quickly to maximize upon their investment and use the full capabilities of its tools.

We wrote this blog to dive into the ins and outs of HubSpot onboarding for businesses looking for a professional service. We mention this upfront because we’re not going to shy away from professional onboarding being the best quality solution.

Keep in mind, professional onboarding may not be the best choice for your business. You need to consider costs and how important the platform is to your business before choosing a professional service. 

There are numerous onboarding solutions available to you. Check out our blog that compares HubSpot vs professional service onboarding, if you’re on the fence. 

No matter which one you choose, your onboarding experience should be designed to help you reach your most important goals as quickly as possible.

The best onboarding process is all-encompassing, providing goal setting, planning, implementation, and onboarding and training to ensure a strong start.

Quick HubSpot Overview

HubSpot is a powerful platform built for marketing, sales, service and operations teams to manage all of their campaigns, accounts, pipelines, support tickets, and reporting in one place.

Here’s some of the awesome functionality used to make this happen:

Workflows – automating campaigns and tasks for your teams

Emails – marketing, sales, and service email options with automation

Forms and Chat/Chatbot – Conversion and engagement opportunities for your customers

Pipeline – manage different stages for your pre and post-sale customer journeys (i.e. sales cycle to close and customer support

Automation – sales sequences and tasks, marketing workflows and campaigns, ABM, and beyond

Integration – bringing your full tech stack and its data in alignment with your CRM

Reports – customized, deep insights into your customers and marketing, sales, service, and operations teams

The goal is to create an end-to-end understanding of your customers by managing and monitoring all of your interactions with them in one place - HubSpot. 

Through all of this data, your company is able to monitor its performance through each phase of the customer journey and learn where there are bottlenecks or friction points affecting customers and processes.

Speed up your sales cycle, create a more predictable pipeline, deliver higher performing campaigns, and the list goes on. 

That’s the goal - at least. Is it possible? For sure. Is it easy to do? Depends. 

It takes experienced technicians to build a powerful HubSpot platform.

When signing up for such a feature-rich platform, make sure you take full advantage of it from the beginning and get your money’s worth. 

After all, if you’re going to pay for it, why not enjoy its full benefits? That’s where having an onboarding team is especially helpful.

DIY Onboarding Challenges

All new things can seem a bit overwhelming. Some of the challenges that people face when jumping into HubSpot onboarding:

Unfamiliarity of a New Platform

As previously mentioned, HubSpot is an enormous platform with loads of benefits. If you are new to HubSpot (and even if you’re not), it can be easy to overlook some of the best practices and more complex but valuable features that it offers.

Setting Up Insightful Dashboards

Tracking and analytics are two of the most important aspects of running a successful business. Inaccurate data and weak dashboards are a big missed opportunity that HubSpot is designed to solve. Many companies struggle to fully maximize their reporting.

Familiarizing Yourself with Automation

HubSpot’s automation is one of its most valuable components. The efficiency and consistency it creates for teams is invaluable. The trick is to execute it properly. Poor automation processes can ruin customer experience and dig holes for the business. 

Issues Migrating Data

Migrating to any platform can be challenging, let alone one as in-depth and comprehensive as HubSpot. It’s easy to make errors or take shortcuts when cleansing and organizing the data.

Aligning Teams and Resources

Executing on an in-house implementation and onboarding is tough on everybody, but aligning the resources and opening up capacity to make it happen is especially challenging. 

How a Professional HubSpot Onboarding Wins

There’s a major reason why the vast majority of businesses use professional onboarding services. Implementing a new system, onboarding teams, and managing it successfully is no easy feat. These technologies cost a pretty penny, and it’s important to get the investment right.

Here are some of the benefits of a professional onboarding experience:

A Personalized Platform

Ideally, a HubSpot onboarding team will get you started on the right foot by diving deep into your business model to identify and define your objectives. From there, a strategic onboarding plan is put in place specific to your goals, customers, and process.

We Love Convenience

I mean who doesn’t love convenience? A skilled onboarding team and tested process helps avoid the difficult tasks of strategizing, executing, and configuring a new platform.

Maximize HubSpot from the Start

Experienced technicians know all the ins and outs of HubSpot and how to apply them to different business models. They ensure you don’t miss any features and take full advantage of all the tools and services HubSpot offers.

Generate Accurate Reporting

The most important piece is to ensure all of your hubs are generating accurate data to inform your analytics and reporting. Your onboarding team will be skilled at migrating data, cleansing it, organizing it, and optimizing it for reporting.

Hit the Ground Running

HubSpot does an excellent job of providing a robust training platform called HubSpot Academy. Anything you want to learn is available and it's accessible by anyone who has an account. However, your platform should be personalized to your business and will likely have unique workflows and use cases. Instead of teams figuring it out on their own, a professional onboarding team offers hands-on, personalized training.

Build Relationships with Experts You Trust

It’s a bit cheeky to say, but It’s helpful to have a team on tap that you trust and knows your business and your HubSpot. As your business evolves, your HubSpot platform will need to grow with it.

Hub-Specific Onboarding Goals

Professional onboarding services are available for each of the hubs HubSpot offers. When you’re working with a professional onboarding team, make sure your goals for each of the hubs is in line with their capabilities and specialties. Here are some examples of goals you may need for each hub.

Marketing Hub

Import and organize your data – Set the platform up to have access to vital data from  migration and integration with external tools.  

Generate more traffic – Use SEO and content strategy to increase website visitors

Increase conversions – Convert more traffic into leads from your campaigns, social media, and website

Sales hand-offs – Send qualified leads over to the right salesperson at the right time

Measure analytics – Set up reports to see how your efforts are performing

Automate your marketing – Perform automation on campaigns and tedious tasks

Sales Hub Onboarding Goals

Import and organize your data – View and capture vital data to power strong reporting and metrics

Automate your processes – Setup automation in your pipeline, customer communication, and quoting process

Design, Price, and Quote – Report on revenue and send quotes to prospects

Performance reporting – Setup reporting strategies that enable you to track your KPIs

Speed up your sales cycles – Through sequences, snippets, quotes, and reporting

Manage larger teams – Guidance to work with larger scaled groups

Service Hub Onboarding Goals

Set up your help desk – Set up ticket intake channels, properties, and important info

Help your customers help themselves – Create self-service channels, live chat, and/or knowledge bases

Measure and see results – Setup dashboards to improve customer retention and beyond 

Improve Customer Experience (CX) – Hear the voice of your customers through surveys and other outreach activities

Operations Hub Onboarding Goals

Data sync – Make sure your tech stack and apps are aligned with HubSpot through bidirectional data syncs

Data quality automation – Use automation to clean your data, format it, and correct errors

Custom properties – Build custom properties to store data from forms, data sources, and external tools

Custom field mappings – Map your data from other platforms into your HubSpot

CMS Hub Onboarding Goals

Migrate your website – Support for the transition and utilization of website tools

Build your site – Build and manage your entire website through HubSpot

Capitalize on leads – Lead and execute your SEO plan and content strategy

Measure activity – Standard and customized reporting to track your website, SEO, and marketing strategies

Manage multiple domains – Manage multiple brands and domains through your HubSpot CMS

How long does onboarding take

As we all know, the answer is always – it depends. However, based upon your HubSpot plan, goals, resources, and teams, onboarding will range somewhere between 1-3 months.

When we work with partners who need basic onboarding for one or two hubs, it typically takes us a month, not including support and training. Businesses looking for a premium onboarding experience across all of the hubs will likely need the full 3 months.

Keep in mind that whichever onboarding experience you choose, you should allot about a 3-month period for your teams to become fully integrated and for you to start seeing results.

Factors Involved in Onboarding Pricing

Pricing for onboarding can vary quite a bit depending upon a number of factors:

• Which hubs you need implemented
• Whether you want a basic, high-level onboarding or a premium, white-glove service
• The number and complexity involved with migrations and integrations
• How much support and training your teams need
• Your personal goals and needs from the platform

To provide you with a little bit of a range - even though it’s broad - you should expect to spend somewhere between $5,000 to $20,000 for a professional solution.

How to Find the Right Professional Onboarding Solution

The answer here depends upon the journey you took to purchase. You likely went through a HubSpot salesperson or a certified solutions partner. Here’s how to find an implementation solution depending upon your path:

Through HubSpot

Those who purchase directly through a HubSpot rep should ask for recommendations from the rep on who he/she trusts. Reps want you to love HubSpot and are motivated to connect you with a partner he/she knows will do a great job onboarding you. They want you to hit the ground running.

We recommend also visiting the HubSpot Solutions Directory to search through their certified solution partners to find a professional partner that works best for you. 

Through Solutions Partner

In case you didn’t know, solutions partners are licensed to sell you HubSpot. We are also compensated for doing so.

Should you choose to purchase through a HubSpot Solutions Partner you will likely choose to retain that partner for onboarding. 

However, if you decide to choose a separate onboarding partner or want to search around, we recommend visiting the HubSpot Solutions Directory to find an option that aligns with your business. 

Feel free to always do your own research via Google or contact someone who's gone through the onboarding process to learn about their experience.

The Benefits of Onboarding with Revvy

Revvy is a HubSpot solutions partner that specializes in delivering HubSpot and RevOps solutions to B2B SaaS companies.

We pride ourselves in delivering a personalized onboarding experience for each partner. We don’t provide cookie-cutter onboarding or rigid packages.

As a small business, we understand the importance of a customized solution that aligns with your business today.

Our Revvy Process

When working with a potential new partner, our first step is to learn about your business, your goals, and your operations to understand what you need out of your HubSpot platform.

As we work with your leadership and teams, we will also begin auditing the different components that affect your HubSpot - your tech stack, data, process and workflows, and customer experience.

We use this information to put together a customized implementation, onboarding, and training plan. Some companies need a basic set up to get started and others need an extensive implementation. No matter your needs, we make sure your HubSpot is optimized to its fullest.

Our implementation process is built on transparency and collaboration. As we go through the execution phase, we hold regular meetings to discuss recent updates and upcoming objectives. We also communicate and track our progress through a project management tool accessible to everyone.

Once objectives of the implementation are complete, we run a tailored training regimen for each of your teams. The goal is to ensure teams understand how the HubSpot platform is configured and how to complete all of the tasks and objectives.

Learn more about our onboarding services through our website or feel free to reach out to the team to ask any questions.

We’d love to help

HubSpot onboarding can be intricate and arduous, but it also helps you align your goals and build a platform that aligns with your business model and specific use cases. 

The good news is there are excellent professional onboarding services to you. 

Please let us know if you have additional questions about onboarding or you’d like to discuss something we didn’t cover.