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If you’re a business owner or executive using HubSpot Marketing or HubSpot Sales, the chances are high that you’re looking to maximise your investment. With our deep expertise as HubSpot Diamond Partners and a decade of experience working with clients, we have mapped out a guide that shows you the best HubSpot practices for Marketing Hub and Sales Hub to ensure you’re fully leveraging the power of HubSpot.
It’s no secret that HubSpot has the power to transform your business. However, to unlock its full potential, it’s not enough to merely have a subscription.
What’s required is the knowledge of how to effectively leverage its tools and features.
In this article, you’ll learn about the best HubSpot practices, including:
Best Practice #1: Customer Journey Mapping
A Customer Journey Map is a journey representing all interactions a customer has with your brand, starting from when they first become aware of you, through to the point of purchase and beyond.
A Customer Journey Map can be created in various software or tools (such as Miro) but is not a part of any HubSpot tool or feature. Here’s an example of what a customer journey map might look like:
Understanding your customer’s journey is the first step towards leveraging the full power of HubSpot. Without a customer journey mapped out, your team won’t be able to effectively use all HubSpot tools and features available to reach customers at the right time.
Although a customer journey map isn’t a part of HubSpot, it helps you decide where each HubSpot tool fits into your overall strategy, which is why it makes it on our list. Before you do anything with HubSpot, you need to get your customer journey map right.
So, how can you do that?
To learn about how you can build a customer journey map for your business, check out our comprehensive guide.
Best Practice #2: Checking off Housekeeping Items
Housekeeping within HubSpot refers to basic setup tasks that should be completed in your portal before fully utilising the software. These tasks can differ for the marketing hub, sales hub, and your CRM.
To help you with this, HubSpot provides what they call “Projects”, which are a list of tasks that can be assigned to different users in your portal. There are specific projects that have been created by HubSpot to help your team check off these basic housekeeping items.
Here are the project templates for each hub:
For a video explanation on accessing and using these projects, watch this guide
Best Practice #3: Importing Your Data Correctly
Having a clean, well-organised database is essential for your HubSpot portal to function optimally. Ensuring data is imported correctly into HubSpot is crucial to achieving this.
If you want your team to truly use HubSpot to its full potential, then you’re going to want to make sure that the import process is followed correctly.
You can learn about how to import data into HubSpot in our guide here.
Best Practice #4: Setting Your Tools Up
Once you’ve got your Customer Journey Map and you’ve checked off your housekeeping items and followed the correct data import processes, it’s time to set up your tools.
From marketing to sales and CRM, each HubSpot hub comes equipped with powerful tools, some of which are easy to miss. If you want to take advantage of your HubSpot portal, you’re going to want to be aware of all the tools available to your team and understand them before deciding which tools to use, and which not to use.
HubSpot provides Project templates that help you learn about and use their tools.
For the Sales Hub, work through these Projects:
For the Marketing Hub, work through these Projects:
For the CRM, work through this Project:
Keep in mind that the CRM underpins everything in your HubSpot portal, so some tasks in the CRM Project may overlap with the Sales and Marketing Hub projects.
Once you’ve gone through these projects, you’ll be aware of all the tools available to you, and only then are you ready to customise your HubSpot portal for success.
Best Practice #5: Customising Your HubSpot Portal
Now that you have a clear picture of your customer journey and your tools are set up, you can start customising your HubSpot portal to align with your business needs.
You’ll want to setup your portal so that your team and you only see the information that is most relevant to your business.
Within HubSpot, there is so much you can customise and how you choose to edit your portal depends entirely on your business needs and goals. It may involve tailoring records, lists, workflows, and more to suit your processes and goals.
For example, you might want to customise the ‘about this contact’ card on the left hand side of a contact record, so that you have visibility on the most important properties for you in HubSpot.
Check out this HubSpot knowledge base article which explains how to customise the left sidebar of any record object.
Remember, the aim is to make your HubSpot portal an extension of your business. You should invest significant time and resources into customising your portal, but how you do this is dependent on your specific needs and objectives.
Hot Tip: One important aspect of this is ensuring a consistent naming convention. This practice aids in keeping your portal organised and user-friendly.
Best Practice #6: Training
HubSpot have so many free training resources, and you would be crazy not to leverage these!
- You can use HubSpot’s free knowledge base.
- You can learn from HubSpot Academy.
- You can hire a HubSpot expert, from HubSpot.
- You can work with one of HubSpot’s Agency Partners (such as RedPandas) to either onboard your team onto HubSpot, optimise your existing portal, or receive 1:1 ongoing coaching.
Rather than trying to figure it all out yourself, it may be beneficial to receive coaching from experts who’ve worked across hundreds of HubSpot portals.
So, what’s next?
HubSpot is a canvas, ready for you to customise according to your unique business requirements.
With these best practices in mind, you’ll not only utilise HubSpot to its full potential but also enhance your overall business strategy.
As HubSpot Diamond Partners with a decade of experience, we’re here to support you through this journey. You can contact us here for support.
Alternatively, if you’re not ready to work with us, check out our article on the Best HubSpot Agencies in Sydney (P.S. We humbly removed ourselves from the list).
