Let’s say you’re building a new website.

Or want to have a centralized location to manage your marketing efforts and keep customer information.

HubSpot is a great solution. As a platform, HubSpot offers different pieces of software that can be purchased individually or together to manage basically every aspect of your business.

It’s extremely useful software, but it does have a learning curve if you want to get the most out of it.

You’ll need not only to get your team set up on the software, but you’ll also need to get them using it every day for their work. That’s where onboarding comes in.

As an inbound marketing and web development agency, we can handle setting up your website, blog, and marketing campaigns on HubSpot, but we also take the time to onboard our clients onto the platform so you can understand how to use it and hit the ground running with smashing your business goals.

Let’s get started by taking a closer look at what HubSpot onboarding is, what it entails, and the different types of onboarding services available.

What is HubSpot Onboarding

HubSpot onboarding is when an agency (such as Roketto) provides technical and strategic guidance on how to setup HubSpot effectively, whether you’re using it to grow traffic on your website or keep customer information organized and easily accessible.

In other words, HubSpot onboarding is meant to help you and your team:

• Be able to use all aspects of the software necessary to achieve business goals
• Get started using HubSpot as quickly and efficiently as possible
• Get the most out of your investment in HubSpot software
• Gain a strong foundational knowledge of the software

What is the Best Way to Onboard with HubSpot

When it comes to HubSpot onboarding, you really have two options available. You can onboard yourself and your team with the various resources available on HubSpot’s website, or you can hire a HubSpot professional onboarding service to make the process more streamlined and applicable to your business.

Self-Serve Onboarding

If you check out the HubSpot Academy, there are a plethora of tutorial-type courses available that are designed to walk you through the basics of using every aspect of their platform, from the marketing hub to the CRM.

It’ll take time, but by going through these courses and treating it like you’re going to school to learn HubSpot, you can gain a decent foundational knowledge of the platform and how it works. Thankfully, these courses are all available for you and your team to access for free with your HubSpot subscription.

Learning can be done all at once, or whenever it’s needed, so you can start yourself and your team with a few courses and approach the training as more of an ongoing process.

But when you scroll through the available courses, you’ll quickly find that:

• Course lengths range from around 30 minutes to several hours, meaning that you’ll need to do careful planning to ensure that team members can dedicate themselves to uninterrupted training
• There are thousands of courses available, and some may or may not apply to what you’re using HubSpot for. This means you’ll need to comb through the available courses and choose the ones that are relevant to each team member
• There are different levels of courses — beginner, intermediate, and advanced — and it may be unclear as to which is the appropriate level for each individual team member until they start taking the course, which means they might waste a bit of time with discovery rather than learning

If you’re willing to put in the time and effort, self-service onboarding is definitely doable. However, if you want the most streamlined, efficient, and relevant training possible, then you’ll want to strongly consider HubSpot professional onboarding.

HubSpot Professional Onboarding

Rather than spend tons of extra time sifting through the courses on HubSpot Academy to learn the basics and then apply that knowledge to your specific business goals, you can streamline that process with HubSpot professional onboarding.

By choosing this onboarding process, a HubSpot professional will work with you to create a customized onboarding plan that’s tailored to your business and your specific goals. In other words, it cuts out the fluff and helps you get into using the platform for actionable insights and deliverables immediately.

It’s like when you want to learn a new programming language — as many experienced programmers will tell you, it’s much easier and more motivating to learn when you’ve got a goal in mind, like building a game or a productivity app, rather than trying to learn with no clear direction.

In this case, your business goals are both your start and end point, so it encourages you to learn and sets the expectation for what you’ll receive by the end of the training.

Other benefits of using HubSpot professional onboarding include:

• Saves Time and Money

In business, time equals money. Anytime you can add efficiency to a process to make execution faster and retain the same results or better, it’s always worth it, even if it requires a bit of an investment. HubSpot marketing onboarding, for example, might start at $3,000 (pricing as of August 2022), but you’re getting a full overview of your marketing data within the platform, how you can manage it, and a content strategy and campaign setup to boot (complete with automation where necessary). That way, you’re hitting two birds with one stone: you’re actively learning the platform while at the same time using your own business’s data to assist in that learning — so when you’re done, you’ll be set up for success.

Every business will have different goals and objectives that equal success for them. For one company, that could generate more leads, but for another, successfully completing a goal could mean optimizing their customer support processes to have customers move through the support queue faster. HubSpot’s customized approach means that your onboarding will focus on your specific definition of successful goals and help you reach them.

So once again, you’re learning the platform and using your own company’s data during that process. You’ll likely be able to identify opportunities for improvement and be inspired to try new ideas.

Once you’re done with the initial onboarding process, that doesn’t mean that you’re on your own. With the higher tiers of the HubSpot onboarding plan, you’ll get included technical consulting, which means that they’ll help you with things like integrations, API review or troubleshooting, and much more.

Also, if you and your team are ready for the big leagues and need a more advanced setup with any of the Hubs, there’s documentation to help guide you along. Oh, and if you need hands-on help, there’s a whole list of HubSpot Solutions Partners available for you to choose from.

Errors can cause setbacks that you don’t want. While you and your team will definitely need time and room to learn the platform, the obvious goal is to avoid errors. What a HubSpot onboarding professional can do is provide you with a clean foundational setup so you can be 100% sure that you’ll have a working, error-free solution right out of the gate, rather than risk compounding errors and incorrect data as information moves through the system.

The main focus of HubSpot onboarding foundations is to set up the platform so you can start meeting your business goals as soon as possible using the platform. This means you can be sure that using HubSpot alongside their onboarding services will result in measurable business growth that you can continue to capitalize on over time.

Professional Onboarding HubSpot Services

*pricing as of August 2022

HubSpot Onboarding Direct Services

You may already be aware that HubSpot, being the behemoth in the business operations space that it is, offers businesses that provide support for other businesses — like agencies and IT companies — the ability to become HubSpot partners. The HubSpot Partner program targets businesses that want to expand their offerings to include HubSpot and become HubSpot experts. Just like you can make yourself look better when applying to a tech job by highlighting all the platforms you can use, a HubSpot expert makes themselves more attractive to businesses wanting help with the HubSpot platform by becoming a HubSpot Partner.

HubSpot Partner Onboarding

By becoming a HubSpot partner, two professionals — a Channel Consultant and a Channel Account Manager will work with you to get HubSpot set up to help you achieve your business goals, using your go-to-market (GTM) strategy as a basis for helping you utilize the platform to sell services and solutions to your customers.

For example, if you’re an inbound marketing agency, HubSpot’s onboarding professionals will help you determine how to package and sell different inbound marketing services within the platform, including retainers for ongoing maintenance and other services your clients will need over time.

HubSpot for Startups

Startups often don’t have much extra budget for things like becoming a HubSpot partner. In the early stages of a Startup business, they’re much like a student with a business idea, trying to break into the world and make a name for themselves in their target market.

That also means that if they do invest in something, like technology, they need to reap the benefits from it as soon as possible — remember that budgets are tight!

Thankfully, HubSpot’s Startup program offers 30-90% off their professional or enterprise software packages for the first year, depending on your startup’s eligibility, which has to do with the amount of funding your startup has raised and whether you’re partnered with a global VC, accelerator, incubator, or entrepreneurial organization.

If you meet the eligibility requirements, then you’re able to apply for the discounted pricing.

HubSpot for Startups Onboarding

With the HubSpot for startups onboarding program, startups can be set up for success for about $300*, which includes 60 minutes with a Customer Onboarding Specialist and access to the HubSpot for Startups community.

During the onboarding call, your onboarding rep will help you create an onboarding plan to get HubSpot up and running and point you to the relevant certification courses and documentation on the HubSpot Academy that you and your team should take to learn the platform.

After that, you’ll have access to the HubSpot Customer Success team for any additional questions or support you may need.

Once you’ve completed the onboarding process, you can enlist HubSpot consulting services for marketing, sales, and more to help you build your business strategies.

HubSpot Onboarding Process

Now that you have some insight into how the HubSpot onboarding process works for businesses, you’re probably wondering how these businesses turn around and use HubSpot to onboard their customers.

The typical process for each “Hub” is as follows:

HubSpot Marketing Onboarding

Part 1: Getting Started

Part 2: Optimization and Maintenance

Part 3: Utilization and Maintenance

HubSpot Sales Onboarding

Part 1: Strategy and Planning

Part 2: Optimization and Reporting

Part 3: Utilization and Maintenance

HubSpot CRM Onboarding

Part 1: Setup and Planning

Part 2: Data Optimization and Maintenance

Part 3: Maintenance

HubSpot CMS Onboarding

Part 1: Strategy and Planning

Part 2: Deliverables and Quality Assurance

Part 3: Launch and Post Launch Maintenance and Additional Q&A

Part 4: Post Launch Improvements (Ongoing)

HubSpot Service Hub Onboarding

Part 1: Platform Setup

Part 2: Optimization and Reporting

Part 3: Maintenance

Conclusion: Where to Find Guided Client Onboarding HubSpot

Guided client onboarding for HubSpot can be found in a number of ways. First, HubSpot themselves has a list of onboarding services provided by them as well as a variety of HubSpot Partners (such as Roketto) that specialize in different areas, from Marketing to Service.

In addition, the HubSpot Academy offers in-depth training courses that you can utilize either alone or in addition to onboarding through a HubSpot Partner. Going through the courses that explain the fundamentals of the “Hub” you purchased is extremely beneficial to ensure that you have a greater understanding of how the platform works.

If you’re looking to get started with or optimize your experience with inbound marketing with HubSpot, give Roketto a call today. We’ll be happy to chat with you!