What Your Team Has to Do During HubSpot Onboarding

Shifting to new business software normally falls somewhere between frustrating and extremely, bloody frustrating. Working out the small differences, migrating the data, training people who did not ask for a new system: the whole thing can be daunting enough to put you off moving at all.

So our onboarding teaches your team HubSpot while building the portal you are going to use, in the same sessions. We have written up how our onboarding process actually runs today, and separately why onboarding matters in the first place.

This page is the other half, the one nobody asks about until week two. What your team has to do.

Who needs to be in the room

The best predictor of how onboarding goes is who your side puts in the workshops, and whether the same people come back the following week.

Four roles, and one person can hold more than one of them:

• Someone who can decide. Onboarding is a long run of small decisions: what a stage means, who owns a lead, which of the three date fields is the one everybody uses. If every one of them has to go to somebody who is not in the room, ten weeks turns into a lot more than ten weeks.
• Someone who knows the data. The person who can tell you why there are two spreadsheets of customers and which one is trusted. Often not a manager.
• One person from each team that will use a Hub. Sales in the Sales Hub week, service in the Service Hub week. They are there to say "that is not how we do it" before it gets built that way.
• Someone who will still be here. The portal needs an owner after we stop. Pick them in week one.

Sending different attendees each week is the common failure. The workshops build on each other, so week five with a fresh room means teaching week two again.

What to have ready before the kickoff

The kickoff meeting is where we get clear on what you want out of the project, the goals, the constraints and what you have tried before. We will always try to do that one in person, because people learn better from somebody they have met.

Four things to have in hand for it:

1. Your data, exported and looked at. It does not have to be clean. It has to have been opened. Where does each list live, who owns it, what does a duplicate look like, which fields does anybody actually use. If two systems disagree about a customer, decide which one wins before the migration, because a migration is a bad time to be having that conversation.
2. Your sales process as it really runs. The real stages, including the one where everything gets stuck. It is worth mapping your sales process before you start, because we will build the pipeline out of it either way, written down or not.
3. A user list with what each person should see. Names, teams, and a line each on what they need to do. This is the input to permissions, and it is a faster decision over a coffee than in a workshop.
4. Your consent records. For every marketing list you plan to bring across, how those addresses were collected. Under the Spam Act 2003 the burden of proving consent sits with the sender, so decide what happens to a list of unknown origin before it moves.

The bit that is genuinely a compliance matter

Onboarding usually means moving a live database of real customers into a new system, and handing a group of people access to it. Both of those are Privacy Act questions, and they sit with you, because it is your data.

Reading the OAIC's quick reference to the Australian Privacy Principles, four of them turn up in week one whether anybody mentions them or not:

• APP 11, security of personal information. Take reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse and unauthorised access. In practice that is permission sets matching what people need, and no shared logins.
• APP 6, use or disclosure of personal information. A CRM makes it very easy to use a record for something it was not collected for. Worth a sentence of thought before the workflow gets built.
• APP 10, quality of personal information. The duplicates and stale records you are about to migrate are more than a reporting nuisance.
• APP 8, cross-border disclosure of personal information. Relevant because CRM data is hosted overseas, so it is worth knowing where, and what your privacy policy currently says about it.

None of this is hard. It is much easier in week one than in month six, which is the only reason we raise it early.

The shape of the ten weeks, and what each one costs you

Onboarding runs as a kickoff plus a series of weekly workshops, each on a related set of tools, with activities and a small amount of homework in between. In order:

1. The kickoff meeting
2. The essentials: users, permissions, the tracking code, where the settings live
3. Contacts: the contact record, properties custom and otherwise, forms, lists
4. Marketing Hub: emails, blogs, landing pages, campaign tracking, ads
5. Marketing automation: workflows
6. Sales Hub: pipelines, deal records, tasks, sales automation
7. Service Hub: tickets, chat, what happens after the sale
8. Reporting: personal reports, dashboards, site-wide traffic analytics
9. A full recap, so week one has not faded by the end
10. Your call: whatever you want more of

Your cost in that is a room, the same people each week, and the homework. The homework is small, and it is the part that does the teaching, because nobody learns a CRM by watching somebody else use one.

Sections come out when they do not apply. Plenty of businesses have no use for the Service Hub week, and skipping it beats sitting through it.

What done looks like

Onboarding is finished when your people can do the work without us on the call. Concretely, by the end somebody on your team should be able to:

• Add a user and set their permissions correctly.
• Build a form, put it on a page, and find the submission on the contact record.
• Build a workflow, and explain what enrols a record into it.
• Move a deal through the pipeline the way your team agreed it works.
• Build a report that answers a question somebody actually asked.

If nobody on your side can do those five things, the portal is built and the onboarding is not done. That is the honest test, and it is why the teaching and the building happen in the same sessions.

One side effect worth naming: teaching you HubSpot means we learn your business properly. By the time we get to the bigger work, we already know what your stages mean and which report your board reads.

If you are weighing it up

The reasonable question is whether you could do all this yourself out of HubSpot Academy. You could. It is many, many hours of video, and it teaches HubSpot rather than your business, so the translation is on you and it is the slow part.

What we sell is that translation, plus a schedule that makes people turn up. If you want the fuller version of how we run it, start here, or have a look at our RevOps and HubSpot work. Bring the data export and a list of who should be in the room, and the first conversation is a useful one either way.