When businesses find themselves facing limitations or inefficiencies with their current CRM, they often make the tough but necessary choice to switch CRMs. This is probably the situation that you encounter yourself in now. Your business is not the first to make the switch, and it won’t be the last, but just know that in our experience this type of change is always for the better.
Switching CRMs will allow your business to harness the power of advanced tools and technologies to:
If you’re considering the HubSpot CRM, you’re making the right choice. We won’t go into detail in this article, but here’s the answer to “Why HubSpot?”. And here's a handy guide if you need to convince your Sales team.
What is a HubSpot Onboarding?
Once you’ve opted for the HubSpot CRM, the next question is, how do we even begin to change CRMs? Onboarding is a crucial step that a business must undertake when implementing a new CRM system. An onboarding project involves the initial setup, configuration, and integration of the CRM in line with the company’s business needs and processes.
At mbudo, we take things a step further by conducting an advanced HubSpot onboarding that includes a strategic definition of assets and processes, full data migration, and personalized training so all players know how to use the tool right away.
Opting for a guided onboarding with a HubSpot agency partner like mbudo can significantly contribute to the success of your CRM implementation. We offer expert guidance, support, and implementation of the latest best practices. Additionally, mbudo will help you leverage advanced features and strategies to optimize your processes and achieve Marketing and Sales goals. It will guarantee that you get the most out of your investment and ensure a smooth transition to the new system.
Let’s dive into the 6 steps that a HubSpot Partner Agency in Spain like mbudo will carry out during a guided HubSpot onboarding.
6 key steps to an advanced onboarding for HubSpot CRM
Step 1: Project Organization
- Understand the business: At the start of any onboarding project, you’ll hold a meeting with all important stakeholders. At mbudo, the first thing we do is hold a meeting to understand the client's business goals and processes. Any agency you work with should do this first and foremost. Only then can a personalized implementation and optimization strategy be developed. This will set the foundation for success for the project.
- Get logistics out of the way: It’s essential to not let time and tasks slip by as the days go on. The account manager will have a checklist of first steps, involving setting recurring meetings, establishing a timeline for all tasks, sharing access to tools and platforms such as the existing CRM, new HubSpot CRM, social and paid media channels, your company brandbook, etc. This collaborative approach ensures that all players have the necessary resources and information readily available to hit the ground running.
- Set up the team on HubSpot: Your agency partner will take charge of configuring users, teams, and roles within the HubSpot platform. This process can be as simple as assigning default roles and standard permissions. However, in cases where more personalization is required, the agency tailors access based on the client’s needs.
Step 2: Technical Setup
- Define account details: The team working on the project will set the Account Default information for your company, which includes details such as company name, contact information, and branding elements. Additionally, they will ensure GDPR and legal compliance by configuring privacy settings, consent forms, and cookie usage. They will also work with you to establish domains for your website, landing pages, blog, and email within HubSpot.
- Integrate analytics: Your partner agency will give you all the information you need to incorporate the HubSpot tracking code in your organization’s web assets, so that you can capture all data within HubSpot. This will track relevant domains and analytics views. The team will also set up advanced analytics using tools such as Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager. All of these analytics will enable your business to gain valuable insights into website traffic, user behavior, and marketing performance—all within HubSpot!
- Perform integrations: Your partner agency may assist in performing integrations with other tools that your business is currently utilizing. Here, the goal will be to minimize third-party tools and switch to HubSpot tools that offer the same functionalities, where possible. The agency’s expertise in the HubSpot ecosystem will come in handy here.
Step 3: Database Setup
- Assess the data: Your database is the lifeblood of your CRM, it holds all the information collected about your contacts, companies, and deals. Only clean, quality, up-to-date data should be brought over to HubSpot. Your onboarding team will engage in discussions with you to understand the properties and data in your existing system. Together, you will identify redundant, unnecessary information that can be excluded and pinpoint ways to homogenize fields and data. This will streamline data transfer and avoid migration errors. Having quality data in your new HubSpot CRM will make a huge difference in efficiency going forward.
- Prepare HubSpot: After data assessment, the HubSpot CRM needs to be readied to properly map all data, so that all fields (called “properties” in HubSpot) align with your previous system. Default HubSpot properties may not match your previous structure, meaning custom properties or objects will need to be created. This will ensure that you maintain familiarity with data and fields after the transition. If you want more info, discover the 5 keys to a seamless CRM migration.
- Perform various imports: Now we’re ready to import—but not all the data! First, a test import will be conducted to identify any errors or issues that may arise during the data transfer process. This test import serves as an opportunity to validate the accuracy and integrity of the imported data, ensure that everything is correctly mapped and integrated within HubSpot, and correct any errors. After another round or two of test imports, you’ll achieve a smooth transition to HubSpot with the final import of all your data.
Step 4: Strategy for each Hub
Marketing Hub
- Template Creation: Recreate your current web, landing, email, and blog page templates on HubSpot. HubSpot offers pre-designed templates in the marketplace, or you can start from scratch within the Drag & Drop editor, allowing for easy customization and personalization. Unify your presence across channels.
- Audience Definition: Buyer Personas and Lifecycle Stages help us define our target audience and their stage in the customer journey. Understand their behaviors and pain points to create the right message in the right place at the right time. Maximize efforts to drive engagement and conversions.
- Lead Capture: It’s best to employ varied inbound lead generation techniques such as lead scoring, forms, CTAs, email nurturing, etc. We help you develop a lead scoring strategy based on lead behavior and activity, focusing sales efforts on only the top prospects. Forms and CTAs capture data and drive traffic. Email nurturing guides prospects through the customer journey through relevant, personalized campaigns. Workflows automate processes where possible, saving your team time and effort.
Sales Hub
- Sales pipeline definition: Work together to define and create pipelines and deal stages that align with your organization’s sales processes. Identify required deal properties for each stage so that your salespeople have enough information at each point in the process. Structured sales process, effectivelytrack and manage deals.
- Customize products & quotes: Creating a comprehensive product library allows sales teams to easily access and present relevant products to prospects. Plug them into your quotes and make your offers professional and compelling. Furthermore, integrating approvals and e-Signature capabilities streamlines the quote approval process.
- Sales tools: There are an array of Sales tools available in HubSpot to help your team: Sequences, playbooks, documents, meetings. Sequences are automated emails and tasks to ensure consistent and timely communication with leads. HubSpot playbooks let you compile best practices for reps, HubSpot documents let you see when leads view files, and the HubSpot meetings tools allows for seamless meeting booking.
Service Hub
- Ticket pipeline definition: Like your deal pipeline, your ticket pipeline must align with internal processes and serve as a streamlined way for managing customer inquiries and support requests. Stages go from ticket creation to resolution and involve relevant properties needed to categorize the ticket or move it further down the pipeline. An efficient ticketing pipeline ensures better team management and ticket prioritization.
- Conversations: A live chat or chatbot can serve as avenues for both lead capture and customer service. The proper configuration of your conversations inbox and channels (with notifications and assignment to the corresponding agent) will help engage with prospects and customers quickly. After all, people expect a rapid response and the faster that you answer, the better it is for your business and brand.
- Knowledge Base: HubSpot offers a valuable Knowledge Base tool to enable your business to build a repository of helpful articles, guides, and resources that customers can access for self-service support. The strategy behind this involves curating and organizing content so that it is easy to search and navigate. A Knowledge Base reduces the need for repetitive support requests, boosting customer empowerment and lowering customer service workload simultaneously.
Just considering Marketing Hub? Why not consider other HubSpot products as well? Discover how the HubSpot Sales Hub and Service Hub can enhance your Marketing strategy. And here's an article on everything you need to know about Service Hub.
Step 5: Reports
Reporting is one of the most important aspects of a HubSpot project, and it will affect your business at every level. Many people focus all their efforts on implementation, execution, and all the little day-to-day activities, that they often forget to place importance on how they are going to measure the results or impact of all of these actions. HubSpot Reports provide a way to create reports to capture data and visualize it all in one spot, so that you can make better decisions for your company and clients.
HubSpot Dashboards are groups of related reports. As an agency partner, mbudo helps you build a series of reports around your database contacts, website and landing pages, email campaigns, deals, and every other metric relevant to your business operations. These reports can be configured for different time periods, comparing previous data, and choosing the data visualization method that you prefer. Understanding the data and making future decisions based off of concrete data, will help your company prosper. If you're interesting in learning more, check out our ultimate guide to HubSpot reporting.
Step 6: Training
After the completion of an advanced HubSpot onboarding, the worst thing your partner agency can do is just leave you to figure out your new CRM on your own. Personalized training about your unique HubSpot implementation is absolutely crucial for your team to properly use to tool and maximize its performance. At mbudo, our HubSpot training encompasses guidance on how to navigate each area of the HubSpot platform, as well as the specific details of your setup on the Marketing, Sales or Service Hub. This usually lasts several hours (it can be broken up into several sessions) and participants have time to ask questions and resolve doubts. We empower your team to use HubSpot at an optimal level for the continued success of your project.
Now that you know the process, are you ready to make the switch to HubSpot? Make sure you understand why choosing a specialized HubSpot Partner agency will make all the different in the success of this switch. mbudo would be happy to accompany along the process and make sure that your business undergoes a successful, rewarding, and positive onboarding experience. Get in touch with us to learn more about our guided HubSpot onboarding services.