You’ve finally made the decision to purchase HubSpot. Or perhaps you’re looking at a trial account and wondering whether you signed up for a Ferrari even if you don’t yet have a driver’s license. Avoid panicking. When you see that blank dashboard, it’s perfectly reasonable to experience a mixture of exhilaration and complete horror.
HubSpot can help you process customer support tickets, automate marketing, sync your sales funnel, and basically handle your entire business while you are sleeping. The problem is, it will only work if you configure it properly when you set it up.
If you try to wing it, you will most likely end up with a poorly organized database, angry employees and a software package that you rarely use that costs a lot of money. A HubSpot onboarding agency can help with just that. They do all the hard work to make what you’ve paid for, what you’ve got.
Why Is HubSpot Onboarding So Confusing on Your Own?
HubSpot seems very user-friendly on the surface. They’re very user-friendly and easy to drag and drop. However, when you open the hood you discover you need to define the contact properties, link your domain names, configure tracking pixels and figure out the data transfer from marketing to sales.
The Trap of the “Default” Setup
When you first log in, HubSpot gives you a generic setup. It’s built for everyone, which means it’s built for no one. Your business has a specific way of closing deals, a unique customer journey, and specialized data points you need to track. If you stick with the default settings, your sales team will instantly hate it because it doesn’t match how they actually work in the real world.
The Nightmare of Messy Data Migration
If you’re moving data from spreadsheets, an old CRM or three random software applications, you’re moving a lot of data. Importing that data wrong is like tossing all your old paperwork in a blender and dumping it in your new digital desk. The agency makes sure your data is cleaned, mapped, sorted before it even hits your new account.
What Does an End-to-End HubSpot Setup Actually Look Like?
When we refer to “end-to-end” setup, we’re talking about an entire, from-the-ground-up system that is created uniquely for your business. Don’t expect a specialized onboarding agency to give you a log in and wish you good luck. Their support is available throughout the process.
Phase 1: The Technical Foundation
You can’t send an email or make a sales call until the technical plumbing is right. Your agency takes care of the mundane but essential details:
- Connecting your website domains and subdomains.
- Installing tracking codes to watch user behavior.
- Configuring email sending domains so your newsletters don’t end up in spam.
- Setting up user permissions so employees only see what they need to see.
Phase 2: Customizing Your Pipelines
You’re not selling software, nor is your sales process the same as a local retail business. Your sales stages are clearly defined by an onboarding agency. They design custom deal pipelines, develop your contact properties based on those relevant to your business, and define your customer lifecycle stages. This allows leads to be seamlessly transferred from ‘interested’ to ‘ready to buy’.
Phase 3: Automation and Workflows
The agency creates automated procedures in place of your staff manually emailing each individual who downloads a guide or seeks a quote. In order to let your sales representatives know precisely when a hot lead is seeing your price page, they set up internal notifications. It keeps negotiations going ahead and gets rid of the uncertainty.
The Secret Sauce: Hands-On Team Training
You can have the most beautiful, automated CRM in the world, but if your team doesn’t log in, it’s completely useless. User adoption is the absolute biggest hurdle in any CRM implementation. A great HubSpot onboarding agency spends just as much time training your people as they do configuring the software.
Training Tailored to Roles
Your sales representatives don’t care about email newsletter statistics, and your marketing staff doesn’t need to understand how the sales pipeline operates. A competent agency divides the training. They instruct sales representatives on how to use tasks and sequences, teach marketers how to create landing sites, and instruct management on how to generate reliable data.
Overcoming Traditional Mentality
Your team will probably resist using a new tool at first because they are used to their old spreadsheets or legacy habits. Onboarding agencies act as neutral third parties who can show your team exactly how HubSpot will make their daily lives easier, save them time, and help them close more deals with less administrative headache.
Should You Hire an Agency or Use HubSpot’s In-House Onboarding?
If you buy certain tiers of HubSpot, they actually require you to purchase their built-in onboarding. While HubSpot’s internal team is great, there is a massive difference in execution style.
For some levels of HubSpot, you need to purchase their built-in onboarding. HubSpot has a tremendous difference between the execution style of their own team and outside contractors.
Onboarding is largely advisory for HubSpot. They provide you with a checklist, join you on a weekly call, teach you what buttons to click and then let you do the real job. If your team doesn’t have a specialist in the IT field, this could still seem daunting.
Conclusion
HubSpot is an investment in the future expansion of your business. It would be equivalent to purchasing a home without hiring a qualified plumber if you were spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a month for a high-end software package.
A few weeks of seamless, well-planned rollout may be achieved by collaborating with an end-to-end HubSpot onboarding company, such as 3 & Four Technologies. Your staff actually loves working with the platform, your information is safe, and your systems work together seamlessly.
Give up fiddling with the settings and hope for the best. Call in the professionals, create your system properly and get started on creating your business as you should.