HubSpot Onboarding Made Easy: A Checklist for a Successful Implementation

Getting started on HubSpot? A successful marketing automation implementation takes time, thorough organization, and commitment to the process by your entire sales and marketing team. You’re investing in this new tool, so you want to make sure onboarding goes off without a hitch.

Our team has worked with dozens of clients to implement HubSpot and other marketing tools, so we know the hiccups companies typically run into and the little details that make an implementation truly effective. We’ve compiled that knowledge into a HubSpot onboarding checklist to help you map out an implementation plan for your company. Let’s take a look.

HubSpot Implementation First Steps: Planning and Process

Recognize up front that implementation is a big task. Our agency typically allots 30 to 50 hours over two months to get a company up and running on a new marketing automation tool, depending on complexity.

Does your internal team have the capacity to take on the task? This is the first question you should ask. Project complexity, time restraints and unfamiliarity with the process can slow down your onboarding timeline. An agency familiar with HubSpot can be more efficient with implementation and onboarding, building off past experience. If your internal team doesn’t have the bandwidth to absorb at least 50 or so hours over the first two months, we’d recommend hiring a HubSpot partner, like Beacon Digital, to guide you through the process.

Your HubSpot Onboarding Checklist

To help you get the most out of your investment in HubSpot, our onboarding checklist takes you on a systematic walk-through of every part of the platform. We’ve adapted our checklist to make it friendly for people brave enough to take on implementation internally. Along with a fully customizable content library, it covers the six key steps to implementation:

1. Set-Up Users and Import or Migrate Your Prospect/Customer Data
2. Plan or Define Your Marketing and Sales Handoff Process
3. Set-Up Marketing Tools, such as Landing Page Templates, Email Templates, Lists, Workflows, CTAs, Forms, Campaigns and Personas
4. Set-Up CRM Tools, like Sales Pipelines, Messages, Sequences, Documents, and more
5. Build Your First Campaign
6. Train and Onboarding Your Users

Ready to get started? Download the checklist here.

A Few Tips on the HubSpot Onboarding Process

Don’t skip steps

We know it’s tempting to skip steps that seem unnecessary during onboarding. But just like skipping steps when assembling a piece of furniture, skipping steps during HubSpot implementation will come back to hurt you later. Take the time for you and your team to complete the training videos and certifications. These videos and certifications are offered for a reason: they help you and your team understand the reason behind each execution step and what tools you need to perform them.

Determine naming conventions early

Before you know it, you and your team will be drowning in a flood of documents, images, files, and campaigns, and you need to be able to keep these items organized. Sit down with members of your team and determine your naming conventions and folder structures before diving in. If people are working with different systems in mind, it’s very easy to mistake one file for another, easily slowing down your process due to edits and republishing. Bottom line? Make sure everyone is on the same page!

Minimize the number of forms

Forms are easy to lose track of in large marketing automation systems. The best way to keep track of your forms is to keep them to a minimum. Curate versions of your forms that are fairly universal, but still customizable at the page level — like contact, asset download, and blog subscription —and reuse those forms as needed.

Need a Little More Help?

Getting started with an all-encompassing marketing automation tool like HubSpot can be daunting. It’s difficult to know where to start. Even with the right checklist, who has the time to dedicate to learning and implementing this brand new system? If you’re feeling like you would benefit from a HubSpot implementation partner, our team at Beacon Digital is thoroughly experienced in making the HubSpot implementation process smooth so that your investment is well worth it.