How We Actually Onboard a Client Onto HubSpot
Ten workshops, one a week, and the portal gets built while your team learns it. Here is the sequence and what happens in each session.
Most HubSpot onboarding goes wrong the same way. Someone works through a stack of HubSpot Academy videos, comes out with a certificate, then opens a portal nobody has configured and has no idea what to do first.
We run it the other way. The portal gets built while your team is being taught, using your data, your pipeline and your reporting questions, so the thing they learn on is the thing they keep using.
Here is the actual sequence.
Ten workshops, one a week
Dreading the data migration part?
That is usually the bit that stalls a move for months.
- Kickoff
- The Essentials
- Contacts
- Marketing Hub
- Marketing Automation
- Sales Hub
- Service Hub
- Reporting
- Full recap
- Your call
Each week covers one related set of tools, with a small piece of homework, so the next session starts from something real rather than an empty portal.
Kickoff
Every NBH project starts here. We get clear on what you want out of the project, the goals, the current pain, what has already been tried and what went wrong. For an onboarding it also tells us which parts of HubSpot you need and which you can skip, and that changes the rest of the plan.
We hold this one in person wherever we can. Everything after it works fine over video.
The Essentials
Housekeeping, and the part everyone wants to skip. Users and permissions, the tracking code installed and verified, where the settings live, who can see what. Get this wrong and every week after it inherits the mistake.
Contacts
The contact record and everything hanging off it: properties both default and custom, forms, lists, segmentation. This is the week your data model gets decided, so it is worth arguing about. A property you invent here is a property you report on for years.
Marketing Hub
Email, blog, landing pages, campaign tracking, ads. Most clients come to HubSpot for this and most of them already have a version of it running somewhere else, so a good chunk of the week goes on deciding what moves across and what gets retired.
Marketing Automation
Workflows: triggers, enrolment criteria, branches, and how to turn one off again. Once a team sees what a workflow does to a process they have been doing by hand, the questions get noticeably better. This is also where the RevOps work we do later starts to make sense to them.
Sales Hub
Deal pipelines and stages, deal records, tasks, sales automation. Your sales team gets the tools in front of them and decides which parts they will use, which is a more useful outcome than us deciding for them.
Service Hub
Tickets, ticket pipelines, and how support conversations end up recorded against the customer instead of sitting in one person's inbox. If you already have a ticketing system, this is the week to compare the two honestly rather than assume a move.
Reporting
Dashboards, custom reports, traffic analytics. Knowing the tools matters less than being able to prove they worked, and this is the week your team stops asking us for numbers.
Full recap
Week one is nine weeks old by now, so we go back over it. Anything that has faded gets covered again, against the portal in the state it is in rather than the state it started in.
Your call
The last week is yours. Most teams spend it on whatever turned out to matter most, which is rarely the thing they picked in the kickoff.
Why weekly, instead of one block of training
Three reasons, and they are why the format has survived several rewrites.
- Sections come out. Not every team needs every hub. If there is no service function, the Service Hub week goes and the sequence gets shorter.
- We learn your business while you learn the tool. By week ten we know your data, your process and your reporting questions. When build work starts, none of that has to be worked out again.
- Someone internal ends up the expert. The best outcome is your team fixing their own problems in the portal without calling us. That is not us talking ourselves out of work, it is what keeps the portal usable after someone leaves.
Who is teaching it
We have been working in HubSpot since 2015, which is eleven years, and we are a Diamond HubSpot Partner with 17 HubSpot Impact Awards. The reason that matters to an onboarding is narrow: almost every question your team asks across these ten weeks is one we have already answered for another Australian business of roughly your size.
Wondering how your team would learn a new CRM?
Most training gets forgotten within a fortnight of going live.
Where to start
There is a shorter version of this written up as the step by step of getting set up, and a plainer explainer on what HubSpot onboarding covers and why it matters. The phases, week by week plan and costs of a full build are on our HubSpot implementation and onboarding page.
If you would rather work out which of the ten weeks your team actually needs, that is the same conversation we would have in a kickoff, and it is worth having before you buy anything. Tell us what you are trying to run in HubSpot and we will tell you which weeks you can drop.