A leader in lead generation and sales enablement capabilities, HubSpot offers a range of tools to streamline operations. The CRM and its suite of "Hubs" provide real-time visibility into all activities throughout the end-to-end revenue cycle. With HubSpot, revenue leaders can attract and convert high-quality leads, optimize marketing to sales handoff, and create engaging multi-touch experiences to drive long-term, scalable growth.
This guide covers everything from setting up your account to customizing your dashboard to drive the most value from your HubSpot investment.
Create a Company and User Accounts
The first step in HubSpot implementation is to create a company and user account. This process involves setting up an email address and password and selecting the type of account you'd like to use. You can opt for a free or paid plan, whatever best suits your business's needs. Once your account is created, you'll be able to access all of HubSpot's features.
Once your company has been created, take the time to personalize your user account. This means adding all relevant information, including your full name, business address, and contact details. Finally, set up a payment method if you choose a paid plan. Ensure that all of these steps have been completed properly before you start using HubSpot – now you're ready to begin optimizing for success!
After setting up your company and user accounts, you should configure HubSpot according to your business's needs. Start by selecting the settings and templates matching your brand image and the company's mission.
You can also create custom properties to ensure your data is organized and structured. Another crucial step is adding modules such as HubSpot Sales or Service Hub, as each module adds powerful features specific to team operations. Note that additional settings, such as tracking codes, may need to be implemented for full integration with other platforms or tools.
Set Up HubSpot Domain and Profiles
Now that your account is live, it's time to set up a domain and profiles: Start by entering the name of your company and desired web address into the appropriate fields. Next, create a profile for each individual contributing to or managing your account — whether from your internal team or external partners. This step ensures everyone can access HubSpot's tools, datasets, and knowledge bases as necessary.
Once you've added the requisite profiles, you can move on to a more advanced configuration. For example, giving users access rights—to edit blog content or perform administrative tasks—as well as setting up data collection methods and customizing automation workflows. You'll also want to connect any additional domains and customize tracking URLs when configuring the domain. That way, all visitor activity is properly tracked in your dashboard, no matter which URL they enter. Finally, set up analytics goals to easily monitor KPIs over time.
Connect Your Current CRM (Optional)
This is a crucial step if you're not using HubSpot as your primary CRM. Connecting your CRM in HubSpot will enable you to track how visitors interact with your website and log essential data that may help inform decisions. The CRMs you can connect with HubSpot include Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho CRM, Oracle CX Cloud Suite, and more. Then all the information related to your customers and prospects will be tracked in one place, giving you a better understanding of their behaviors and interests.
HubSpot's integration with your CRM allows you to gain visibility over the entire customer journey, enabling you to adjust campaigns and messaging based on customer interactions. When a lead is created or updated in your CRM, it will be sent to HubSpot and associated with any applicable contacts. This will ensure that all data from your CRM is reflected in both HubSpot and your other systems used to manage leads and customers.
To start with CRM configuration, you'll want to set up a one-way sync from your CRM to HubSpot. This will allow HubSpot to receive data from your CRM but won't feed changes into your current system. Afterward, you'll be able to easily manage all of your sales and customer communication with real-time visibility into both frameworks.
Configure Tracking & Analytics
Properly setting up tracking and analytics is essential for understanding how users interact with your website and which forms positively impact your KPIs. In HubSpot, this includes setting up UTM parameters and Google Analytics integration. Once everything is in place, you can start measuring the conversion rates across your assets.
UTM parameters allow you to see where your website visitors are coming from and which links they click. Creating custom UTM tracking is quick and easy when using HubSpot's Tools. Integrating Google Analytics allows you to access more in-depth data, including the demographics of your visitors, the paths they took to get to your site, and more. Once everything is configured correctly and running smoothly, you can make more informed decisions about your products, services, and operations based on actual user data.
Add Custom Contact Properties
Add custom contact properties to your HubSpot configuration to store data about individual contacts, such as their interests, preferences, and buying decisions. Custom objects can be added to email forms and other marketing campaigns across diverse channels such as webpages, landing pages, and website forms.
With this data, you'll be able to view the buyer's journey holistically and deliver relevant content to improve engagement from the first touch to the deal stages. Additionally, it's easier to designate segments in your audience by creating lists based on contact properties, making segmentation much quicker.
Integrating custom properties into your HubSpot is a simple, two-step process. The first step is to create the contact property, which involves selecting the property's name, data type, and field options. Once you've created the contact property, you can add it to email forms and other marketing campaigns across diverse channels such as web pages, landing pages, and contact forms. With enhanced segmentation of your contacts and categories for storing data more readily available, you'll be able to personalize each customer's experience with the brand.
To add a custom contact property, start by navigating the Contacts Settings tab on your HubSpot account's 'settings' navigation bar. From here, you can click on 'Properties' and select 'Create property.'
Then, enter a name for your custom contact field and select your desired data type (radio buttons, checkboxes, or dropdown menus). Finally, set up any field options you need and save your changes. Once the custom contact property is set up properly, you can get specific about segmenting contacts and automating personalized messages.
Tracking and property configurations are just the beginning of customizing HubSpot to suit your teams and operations. Depending on your marketing and revenue objectives, other areas that need adjusting include workflows and automation, content creation methodology, lead sources, email campaigns, and more.
Optimize Workflows and Automation
As mentioned above, optimizing your workflows is an important aspect of your HubSpot configuration. Workflows are automated sequences of tasks that trigger based on specific events, such as lead scoring or email opens. Automation allows you to streamline your marketing and sales processes and ensure your lead generation and follow-up processes run smoothly.
In HubSpot, you can create custom workflows and automate tasks such as lead nurturing, email campaigns, and lead follow-up. This allows you to focus on other aspects of your business while ensuring your lead-generation processes run smoothly. Native integrations like Distributely also allow for the automation of advanced tasks like lead routing and sales team performance management.
Additionally, it's important to continually review and refine your workflows to ensure they are delivering the desired results and meeting your objectives. Here are a few tips for optimizing your workflows in HubSpot:
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Segment your audience: Create workflows that cater to different segments of your audience based on their behavior, interests, and demographics. This will help you personalize your communications and improve engagement.
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Define clear goals: Before setting up your workflows, define your specific goals. This could be anything from increasing open rates, to generating more leads and improving customer satisfaction. Having clear goals will help you measure the success of your workflows.
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Test and refine: Regularly review and test your workflows to ensure they deliver results. Make adjustments as needed to improve their effectiveness.
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Utilize branching logic: Use branching logic to make your workflows more dynamic and tailored to actions. For example, if a lead opens an email, you could set up a branch that triggers a follow-up email; if a lead doesn't, you could trigger a different follow-up action to re-engage.
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Take advantage of analytics: Utilize the analytics features in HubSpot to track the performance of your workflows and make data-driven decisions on optimizing them across your operations.
Customize Dashboards and Reports
After completing your HubSpot account's initial setup, it's time to personalize and optimize your dashboard. HubSpot dashboards visually represent your marketing, sales, and customer service data, and they can be customized to meet your specific needs. Here are some of the types of widgets you can add to your HubSpot dashboard:
- Metric widgets: A single data point, such as the number of contacts in your database or the number of website visits in a given time period.
- Report widgets: More detailed information about your data, such as a report on the performance of your blog posts or a breakdown of your website traffic sources.
- Trend widgets: How a particular metric has changed over time, such as the number of leads generated each month.
HubSpot's Custom Reporting Capabilities
HubSpot custom reporting capabilities enable a more in-depth look at your marketing, sales, and customer service data and can be used to identify trends and make data-driven decisions. The reports can be created using various data sources such as Google Analytics, AdWords, and other integrations, making it easy for businesses to get a complete view of their marketing performance.
In addition to custom reports, HubSpot also provides a wide range of pre-built reports, including marketing performance reports, lead source reports, and deal reports. These reports are designed to give users quick insights into their performance, allowing them to quickly and easily make data-driven decisions.
Here are some of the types of reports you can create in HubSpot:
Lead Conversion Report: Track the progress of your leads through the sales funnel. This report provides insight into which campaigns and tactics are most effective in driving conversions, including metrics like lead response time. It provides data on the number of leads generated, the conversion rate of those leads, and the revenue generated from those conversions. These insights are helpful in understanding the impact of your efforts and optimizing your lead generation and sales strategies.
Sales Performance Report: Delivers valuable insights into the effectiveness of your sales team and their efforts to drive revenue growth. This report offers a comprehensive view of your sales pipeline, including data on deal creation, deal velocity, and the conversion rate of leads to opportunities.
You can also use the Sales Performance Report to track individual sales representatives' performance, allowing you to identify top performers and areas where your team may need additional training or support. By regularly monitoring this report, you can make informed decisions to optimize your sales processes, improve the performance of your sales team, and ultimately drive greater revenue growth for your business.
Revenue Attribution Report: A detailed analysis of how different channels and campaigns contribute to revenue. The report shows channels are driving the most conversions and which campaigns are most effective in terms of ROI. Key metrics include touchpoints with the highest impact on revenue, time to first conversion, conversion rate by marketing channel, and more.
The multi-touch report also explains how different sales funnel stages contribute to revenue. The report can be customized to display data for specific time periods, geographic locations, and other criteria, allowing specialists to fine-tune their strategies for the most mission-critical impact.
The Takeaway
The goal of a properly configured HubSpot is to enable your business to collect, store, and act upon customer data to optimize the customer journey. With the help of an experienced agency or consultant, you can create a successful configuration that will allow you to capture valuable insights about customers and prospects.
An expert can provide guidance on setting up the CRM connection, custom contact properties, and integrations with systems like Salesforce. HubSpot's configuration capabilities will enable you to personalize customer experiences and drive a more meaningful buyer's journey — resulting in increased customer satisfaction and conversion rates that result in growth.
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