HubSpot Onboarding Explained

You're looking at various CRM, digital marketing and sales platforms and have stumbled across HubSpot. It looks great, packed with features and while it may be a little expensive you figure that your business is worth investing in. After all, if you can't reach new people and sell to them how will you achieve your growth goals?

Adopting a new tech platform can sometimes be as easy as following a few instructions and figuring out the rest as you go. But when it comes to your sales and marketing platform winging it isn't the way to get the most out of your latest investment.

Business technology, and especially marketing technology (MarTech), is big business. Research from Gartner's annual CMO Survey found that businesses typically invested 10%-11% of their revenue in marketing and that, of this budget, MarTech represented 26% of the spend. This is equal to media (advertising) buying and more than what they'd spend on marketing staff and marketing agencies.

The rise of platforms such as Salesforce, HubSpot and Zoho for martech and business support is hardly surprising. Businesses want greater accountability on their marketing spend, they want to see which salespeople are bringing in the most revenue and they want to be able to make business decisions in realtime. These platforms achieve all of the above by offering integrated systems with previously fragmented departments, or remote teams, now operating from a single platform.

But if your business has made the bold decision to implement a new business platform then getting it set-up correctly is essential. Change is hard enough to implement (and there are many reasons it doesn't succeed) without a new platform as an extra reason for it to fail.

It's for this reason that many martech platforms have some form of onboarding process available. After all, your success on their platform equates to greater retention and revenue for them. Here's a brief summary of the major platform's onboarding options:

Salesforce onboarding

• Standard - Two day response time, interactive webinars, support community, events, guided journeys.
• Premium - Additional support depending on your tier, administrative support and 24/7 support access.

ZOHO onboarding

• Online training, paid webinars, technical support.
• In-person training available.

HubSpot onboarding

• Online free academy, knowledge centre.
• Paid for guided onboarding.

As you can see all offer similar types of onboarding, from support articles to webinars with varying degrees of cost and time investment. But if you're reading about HubSpot onboarding then chances are it's because you're reviewing their software and want to learn more about their onboarding service. So let's take a deeper dive into what's included.

HubSpot onboarding

HubSpot onboarding is purchased at the same time as your HubSpot license. It's mandatory so expect it as a line item on your invoice. Its cost and scope will depend on what you're buying from HubSpot, and the level of license you're getting.

Typically, HubSpot breaks down its software offerings into four categories; Free, Starter, Professional and Enterprise. They offer onboarding to suit the features available at each level, with the exception of free, which gets no onboarding services.

The costs vary in line with the tools available. With HubSpot Marketing Hub onboarding, for example, the costs for guided onboarding range from $250USD for Starter to $6,000USD for Enterprise onboarding support. HubSpot's Sales Hub onboarding, however, ranges from $250USD for Starter to $3,000USD for Enterprise.

With all onboarding programmes from HubSpot you, or a member of your team, are guided through setting up your HubSpot tools. You're linked to knowledge base articles and academy courses to up-skill yourself on technically implementing tools and developing them for your business. HubSpot won't actually do anything within your portal but they will check in for an hour each week to ensure your questions are answered and that you're progressing well. It's accountability that helps achieve results.

This does pose a bit of a challenge for some business. Some of which include:

• Requires a dedicated internal resource to implement actions.
• Time spent learning how to complete one-off activities.
• Someone needs to champion this change.
• Time away from day-to-day activities.
• Troubleshooting team issues sucks time from progressing installation.

In some cases, the person in charge of setting up the business's HubSpot account will focus on business-critical tasks. Some 'unimportant' areas may be neglected as they aren't priority one, which may have unforeseen implications later down the track. This can slow further adoption of the platform or result in the business not getting full value for money out of the investment as users experience features that don't work due to being incorrectly setup.

If you're allocating an existing internal resource to HubSpot onboarding then it's important that they have the time and focus to immerse themselves in learning a new platform and becoming an expert on the tools. This will enable others to go to them with questions that don't further reduce their time away from the platform, or their daily activities.

It's well worth a business analysing the cost of a lost human resource within the business for 90 days versus the alternative option, which we'll explore next.

Alternative HubSpot onboarding

While HubSpot's onboarding programme is guided and requires an internal staff member to do the work there are services out there that enable businesses to outsource their onboarding, which frees up the business and gets results more quickly.

HubSpot setup services partner you with a HubSpot agency in your country who will take your business through their onboarding programme. These agencies are certified by HubSpot to onboard new businesses and will tailor their approach to what your business is looking to get out of their HubSpot portal. Ours, for example, focuses on helping businesses investing in Marketing Hub Professional and Sales Hub Professional by getting the two set-up and talking to each other while aligning sales and marketing teams.

The cost of having someone within the business not doing their main job while they manage onboarding can make the outsourcing option seem very cost-effective.

As a cost comparison, HubSpot's guided onboarding for Marketing Hub Professional would be an investment of $3,000USD, with a member of your team needing to do most, if not all of the work. You may also need Sales Hub Professional onboarding at $500USD, depending on your needs. Add the lost hours from your team member and you could be looking at $5,000+NZD/AUD as a result.

Our managed onboarding, with us doing most of the heavy lifting, covers a 90 day period and includes business hour support so it's understandable that it costs slightly more than that, but saves your business time in the long-run. It also helps ensure a fast adoption of the tools. While the entire support period will cover 90 days we aim to have all essential functions live within 30 days.

If you're looking to invest in HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional and would like to be guided through the process then we recommend you investigate HubSpot's onboarding services. If, however, you'd like someone else to do most of the grunt work (database upload, template setting up, etc) then click the button below to learn more about our serviced HubSpot onboarding and enquire about how we can help.