This post is for teams looking to implement HubSpot for marketing, sales, or service, but want strategic coaching and in-depth direction on learning the Hubs and tools. If you'd rather have the experts handle all the work setting up your HubSpot portal for you, tailored to your business needs, click here!
So you've just purchased one or more of the HubSpot Hubs. Now what?
You have a few different options when it comes to how you'll onboard and how you'll learn the various tools needed for your everyday marketing tactics. If you choose HubSpot's Onboarding package, you may get assigned to a HubSpot employee. You could be randomly paired with a partner agency since HubSpot has started outsourcing some of its onboarding. Alternatively, you can choose an elite partner like New Breed to help you get started. Let's take a closer look at these options and their differences.
In this article, Alayna Pineiro, New Breed's HubSpot Implementation Team Lead, speaks on the HubSpot Onboarding process and New Breed's Elite Onboarding Offering. You'll learn more about the difference between the two and ultimately know which option is the best fit for your company.
Alayna has led HubSpot Onboarding at New Breed for over a year. Before that, she was a Customer Onboarding Specialist at HubSpot. Alayna saw hundreds of customers come through onboarding and worked with various audiences and businesses. In her two and a half years at HubSpot, she was part of multiple teams and projects and has brought that level of expertise with her to New Breed.
One of the most significant benefits of working with New Breed is that onboarding multiple hubs doesn't have to run concurrently — unless you want them to. After you go through the sales process and choose a Hub or Hubs, you'll get the option to purchase HubSpot Onboarding. If you choose to, you'll get passed to a Customer Onboarding Specialist at HubSpot or a partner agency where your onboarding could last up to 90 days for Marketing Hub (as it's a little more labor intensive) or up to 60 days for Sales or Service Hub.
It's important to note that even if you purchase more than one Hub, your onboarding timeline will overlap. For example, if you are buying and onboarding both Marketing and Sales Hubs, you don't get 150 days, but a max of 90 days since the first 60 days is an overlap of marketing and sales onboarding.
With HubSpot, onboarding starts the moment you sign your contract with the goal of familiarizing yourself with a set of tools, like being able to schedule a social post, build a workflow, or send an email. This helps you learn how to use these tools and get comfortable with the platform. You’ll have 45-minute calls with your onboarding specialist every 1.5-2 weeks, and in between calls you’ll be assigned work to leverage different tools within the platform.
During your last call, you'll discuss what you covered in onboarding and outline the next steps. Once onboarding is complete, you'll connect with HubSpot's Customer Success Team or work with a dedicated Customer Success Manager who will take over your engagement for the long term and meet with you every 2-3 months after that.
If this is what you're looking for, great! We're glad we could help, but there's so much more that onboarding can offer, depending on your needs. As Alayna states,
"With HubSpot onboarding, you may be fortunate enough to get paired with an Elite partner agency like New Breed, one with a lot of backend experience to get you ready, but it's not a guarantee."
Not all agencies share the same expertise and standard of onboarding, and some lower-tiered partners may not have the expertise to give you the best experience.
When you sign on for HubSpot onboarding, it's a roulette of who you'll be connected with for onboarding. Naturally, you want to ensure you get the most out of your onboarding experience. You likely don't want a smaller agency training you when you could go with an Elite partner with the industry knowledge and expertise to move you forward. You may get placed with a HubSpot employee working with 35 or 40 clients at a time, "whereas here at New Breed, our volume is smaller to ensure that we have a solid quality customer experience," Alayna notes.
When you work with New Breed for your onboarding, you're guaranteed to work with someone like Alayna, who has a lot of experience with HubSpot best practices.
She notes, "Our team of implementation strategists has been trained by someone who has worked at HubSpot. Our in-depth training goes beyond the training shared with us from the HubSpot partners sourced onboarding program. We have a lot more in-depth, granular training that our team has been given to provide that full customer experience."
During onboarding at New Breed, you'll also have more face-to-face time with your specialist, with up to two 45-minute calls a week.
“When we sell New Breed onboarding, it's still "coaching” you through a process, but the caliber of strategic guidance and advice and setup is going to be much greater and more standardized than you might get through HubSpot Onboarding.”
New Breed Onboarding gives you up to 90 days to onboard each Hub. Unlike HubSpot, this onboarding doesn't have to start and run concurrently, ensuring you don't have to onboard through all the Hubs simultaneously. Onboarding could begin with one Hub and move to another depending on the progress and speed at which you work. As a result, you have the opportunity to prioritize which Hubs are most important to your business.
New Breed Onboarding is also a great fit for professionals trying to accelerate the process. Being able to adjust meeting times, days, and cadence allows greater flexibility for busier marketers. New Breed also holds itself to a 6-hour response time window faster than the 24-hour window HubSpot adheres to. This means you'll never have to wait long to get the necessary answers.
Working with New Breed for onboarding also opens the doors to other services, whether that's:
New Breed prides itself on giving customers exceptional service and a great overall experience.
"We enjoy what we're doing! We love providing a great experience and want to keep working with folks. When we get folks in our door, we aim to make them happy and help them feel well-established and confident using HubSpot."
While HubSpot does a great job with onboarding and the experience you'll get as a customer, their training is still very high level. With New Breed, we can explore your unique issues and use cases and rely on the expertise of our greater team to strategize and point you in the right direction.
Alayna states, "If you're working with New Breed, you benefit from our in-depth knowledge, experience, and confidence in marketing, sales, and service hubs and having those hubs talk together." While there's no way to know who you'll work with through HubSpot onboarding, you see the value you get when you partner with New Breed.
At New Breed, we have the experience and technical knowledge to take customers' visions, goals, and objectives and translate that into workflows, processes, and systems that work together on the backend. If you decide to extend our services, we can work with your team on strategy and growth, operate within your portal to execute initiatives, audit and suggest improvements, and optimize your portal. We'll make sure HubSpot is working like the well-oiled machine it's meant to be.
Our team at New Breed is excited to help you get set up and familiar with HubSpot and the many tools within all Hubs. We strive to get you comfortable with these tools quickly and efficiently, and are always looking for additional ways we can streamline your demand generation and marketing initiatives to give you the results you are looking for.
Reach out to one of our reps to schedule a time to talk and see how we could help you accelerate your company's growth.