We break the HubSpot onboarding and implementation process into clear, objectives-based milestones. This reference lists and describes all the major milestones, but doesn't include the more advanced milestones.
Our HubSpot implementation milestones align with the main organic growth principles:
- Core CRM for aligning teams and orchestrating organizational growth.
- Marketing for attracting prospects and customers.
- Sales for engaging and converting customers.
- Customer Service for delighting and evangelizing customers.
All companies must follow these principles to propel scalable, organic growth, regardless of which CRM platform or other technologies they use. That's why milestones are specifically designed to take universal business growth objectives and apply them to the HubSpot CRM.
Core CRM
These milestones focus on the importance of CRM design considerations for maximizing growth, efficiency, and alignment across your organization. By focusing on data cleanliness and integrity, customization and configuration, automation and workflow optimization, and reporting and analytics, we can ensure that your CRM becomes a powerful tool that drives growth and enables seamless collaboration between marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
HubSpot Account Setup
Start here when setting up a new HubSpot portal. Configure account defaults like company information, user defaults, branding information and more. Define your account users, organize them into teams and customize their permission sets.
Subscriptions Required: All plans
Relationship and Lifecycle Stage Design
Remember, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Define the relationships your business has with prospects, customers and the community at large. Create a lifecycle stage value for each relationship. Then define rules for (a) why a contact would be assigned a specific lifecycle stage and (b) what happens once a contact has progressed into a new lifecycle stage. Ultimately, build a self-regulating CRM that automatically sets and updates lifecycle stages based on the actions of contacts in your database. And use this setup to trigger appropriate list segmentation, automation, follow-up actions and customer journey reporting.
Subscriptions Required: Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise
What if you don't currently have a subscription required to implement a milestone?
That could mean either:
- The HubSpot feature is entirely unavailable to you, or
- Our standard implementation milestone is designed for a particular subscription level, but we can still implement a scaled-down version of the milestone.
Example: We can still customize lifecycle stage design and reporting with a Starter subscription, but we won't be able to automatically update lifecycle stages and manage marketing contact statuses without a Professional or Enterprise subscription.
It's always best to ask us for clarification before making any assumptions.
Native CRM Integrations
Conduct a review of your existing tech stack and configure apps that have native integrations with HubSpot. Additionally, install the HubSpot tracking code to your website and integrate other tracking tools like Google Analytics.
Subscriptions Required: All plans
CRM Objects and Property Design
A good CRM contains quality data. So the data must be customized to your organization for it to be valuable. Determine the main objects (i.e., contacts, companies, deals, etc.) in your CRM, how they should be configured and if any custom objects should be created. Next, create and organize custom properties (fields) for each of those objects. Finally, customize the default views for each of your objects.
Subscriptions Required: All plans
CRM Data Integrity
Map how data should flow through your CRM, both internally and externally with imports and connected applications. Configure workflows to update or sync data between objects based on triggering events. Ensure all contacts and companies have associations, owners and lifecycle stages. Build a dashboard to help your organization monitor the health of your core CRM data. Develop a CRM maintenance plan.
Subscriptions Required: Any paid subscription (Starter or above)
CRM Adoption and Activation
Following your core CRM customizations and maintenance plan, create training materials for your entire team to teach them (a) how HubSpot functions and (b) how HubSpot was specifically configured for your company's use case. Conduct live training sessions with your team to help them fully adopt the CRM and activate them in their specific roles.
Subscriptions Required: All plans
Marketing
These milestones focus on driving organic growth by attracting prospects, nurturing relationships, and converting leads into customers. Through strategic use of your website, content creation, social media presence, and email marketing efforts, we aim to position your company as a trusted leader in the its industry. By leveraging the power of HubSpot's Marketing Hub, we can optimize your marketing initiatives and create a seamless customer journey.
Marketing Asset Development
Deriving from your existing brand guidelines, design all the baseline marketing assets you'll need to implement your strategy. When approved, develop them. This may include marketing email templates, blog templates, website page templates, CTAs and more.
Subscriptions Required: Marketing Hub Starter, Professional or Enterprise
Inbound Marketing Ecosystem
Along with your marketing assets, configure everything you'll need to conduct effective inbound marketing campaigns. Set up the SEO tools and build your first topic cluster. Migrate your blog and/or existing website and connect domains and subdomains to HubSpot. Configure default blog, social media and email marketing settings. Organize your strategies and marketing assets into campaigns.
Subscriptions Required: Marketing Hub Starter, Professional or Enterprise
Organic Lead Generation
Build a repeatable system for conducting organic lead generation campaigns. This includes a landing page, form, thank you page, follow-up email, CTA or pop-up form and a workflow template that will engage a lead through a conversion. Build all the assets as templates so they can easily be cloned and customized for each campaign.
Subscriptions Required: Marketing Hub Starter, Professional or Enterprise
Lead Nurturing
Create buyer personas and segment your contacts into lists based on their persona. Build mechanisms for capturing buyer personas at scale through your forms, feedback surveys and sales processes. Then create a customized lead nurture specific to each buyer persona. Additionally, build a system for converting and engaging general newsletter subscribers.
Subscriptions Required: Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise
Lead Handoff to Sales
Implement lead scoring, which will automatically score contacts based on their behaviors and qualifications. Then, build a workflow that automatically assigns a subscriber or marketing lead to the sales team once a specific behavior and/or a target lead score has been achieved.
Subscriptions Required: Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise
Marketing Attribution
Build a report dashboard that analyzes vital customer journey and revenue attribution metrics. Gain an understanding of how contacts are attracted and engaged. Learn where revenue comes from. Identify opportunities to improve.
Subscriptions Required: Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise
Marketing Performance Reporting
Build a report dashboard - or a collection of dashboards - that breaks down marketing vitals list website performance, lead generation, social media engagement, email marketing and more. Additionally, drill down on specific campaigns to learn which efforts are producing the most results.
Subscriptions Required: Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise
Marketing Team Activation
Document key marketing processes like customer journey goals, marketing campaign checklists, how files are organized and more. Build an internal reference that anyone on the marketing team can use. Then train each team member on (a) how HubSpot functions and (b) how HubSpot was specifically configured for your company's use case. Conduct live training sessions with your team to help them fully adopt the CRM and activate them in their specific roles.
Subscriptions Required: Marketing Hub Starter, Professional or Enterprise
Sales
These milestones focus on optimizing your sales activities, improving close ratios, and facilitating a smooth handoff from marketing to sales. By equipping your sales team with a meticulously designed CRM and providing valuable content, tools, and resources, we can empower them to have effective sales conversations and close deals more efficiently. HubSpot's Sales Hub plays a vital role in organizing and prioritizing sales activities, enabling seamless communication, and providing visibility into performance and forecasts.
Deal Pipeline Configuration
Customize your deal pipeline to better enable your ideal sales milestones and outcomes. Determine how deals should be created both manually and automatically. Define the stages, required data and other automations like tasks, escalations and communication.
Subscriptions Required: Sales Hub Starter, Professional or Enterprise
Sales Activities
Help your team prioritize, organize and track all of their activities with minimal effort. Define call and meeting types for better insights into sales activities. Do the same for meeting outcomes. Set up tasks, task queues and task automation. Build a report dashboard that helps drill down on all sales activities.
Subscriptions Required: Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise
Streamlined Sales Outreach
Open the treasure chest of productivity tools that help your sales team streamline their outreach and become more effective. Build sales playbooks. Create snippets and email templates. Build sales prospecting sequences. Upload and organize documents. Show each rep how to integrate their email inboxes, calendars and phones to automatically log and track activities. Help them create their own meeting (calendar) links to make it easier for them to book meetings with prospects.
Subscriptions Required: Sales Hub Starter, Professional or Enterprise
Configure, Price and Quote
Remove the friction associated with pitching and closing solutions. Import and customize your product library. Build custom quote or proposal templates. Set up HubSpot payments. And implement a system that allows your team to configure, price and quote your solutions with ease, reducing friction in the buying process for both your customers and your internal team.
Subscriptions Required: Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise
New Customer Handoff
Get new customer relationships off on the right foot by implementing a seamless handoff to implementation or customer service. Require your sales team to enter important onboarding information in order to move a deal to closed won. Automatically assign the customer to a member of your service team, with all the details they need to begin the setup process. Automate updates to your customers as they progress through the onboarding process. Delight them with your diligence, professionalism and attention to detail.
Subscriptions Required: Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise
Sales Goals and Forecasting
Always know how your team is performing and what you can expect to come in. Add both individual and team goals for your entire organization. Build accurate forecasts that calculate based on proposal totals and forecast probabilities. Build reports that allow you to accurately look back and look ahead. Give reps the ability to always know where things stand.
Subscriptions Required: Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise
Sales Insights and Reporting
Unpack the insights into sales and growth that go far beyond goals and forecasts. Report on trends captured in your deal pipeline. Analyze how long it takes to close deals and where in the sales process they tend to stall. Break down your win rate (or your loss rate) based on important criteria like industry, size, pain points, product offering and more. Gain real insights into your growth that can inform strategic decisions for the future.
Subscriptions Required: Sales Hub Starter, Professional or Enterprise
Sales Team Activation
Following the configuration of your entire sales operation in HubSpot, create training materials for your entire team to teach them (a) how HubSpot functions and (b) how HubSpot was specifically configured for your company's use case. Conduct live training sessions with your team to help them fully adopt the CRM and activate them in their specific roles. Teach them how to contact leads, log activities, send quotes, submit deals, access reports and more. They will leave realizing that HubSpot is a tool that saves them time and helps them become more effective in their roles.
Subscriptions Required: Sales Hub Starter, Professional or Enterprise
Customer Service
These milestones focus on providing exceptional support, gathering customer feedback, and nurturing existing customers to drive renewals, upsells, and evangelism. By implementing efficient support systems, enabling self-help options, and leveraging HubSpot's CRM and customer service tools, we can ensure that your customers receive prompt and satisfactory assistance, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Customer Onboarding System
Build a streamlined and effective process for onboarding new customers. This begins with deal pipeline requirements and the handoff from the sales team but also includes an implementation ticket pipeline, workflow automation, reporting and more. Automatically assign new customers to an onboarding rep. Automatically communicate updates, set expectations and keep all parties in the loop. Reduce friction for your customers and your team. Report on a variety of metrics to help measure the success of your customer onboarding process. Set new customer relationships off on the right foot.
Subscriptions Required: Service Hub Professional or Enterprise
Customer Support System
While the onboarding system is proactive, the support system is more reactive. Give your customers the ability to request support quickly and easily. Open communication channels like chatbots, request forms and shared inboxes. Then create a ticket pipeline that seamlessly routes and assigns tickets to the right reps. Use automation to communicate updates, escalate tickets and update CRM data as needed. Give your team the ability to support your customers effectively and at growing scale.
Subscriptions Required: Service Hub Professional or Enterprise
Service Activities
Help your team prioritize, organize and track all of their activities with minimal effort. Define call and meeting types for better insights into service activities. Do the same for meeting outcomes. Set up tasks, task queues and task automation. Build a report dashboard that helps drill down on all service activities.
Subscriptions Required: Service Hub Professional or Enterprise
Streamlined Service Outreach
Open the treasure chest of productivity tools that help your service team streamline their outreach and become more effective. Build meeting playbooks. Create snippets and email templates. Build sequences to help with important customer communication. Upload and organize documents. Show each rep how to integrate their email inboxes, calendars and phones to automatically log and track activities. Help them create their own meeting (calendar) links to make it easier for them to book meetings with customers.
Subscriptions Required: Service Hub Professional or Enterprise
Customer Feedback Surveys
Your customers are the most important part of your company — and listening to them is one of the most powerful ways to grow your business. Truly understand what your customers are thinking and spot opportunities to make them happier — so they stay with you longer. Build a system of feedback surveys that automatically collect, follow-up with and report on valuable feedback from your customers. Automatically address customer problems. Automatically engage your happiest customers to turn them into advocates. Improve retention, referrals, upsells and advocacy. Turn your customer service function into an instrument for growth.
Subscriptions Required: Service Hub Professional or Enterprise
Knowledge Base Configuration
Your customers will call or email your support team when they want your help. But modern day customers also want to be able to solve problems on their own terms whenever they want. So provide them with a knowledge base. Create articles that answer questions visitors may have about your business. You can organize these articles into categories and subcategories, as well as tag them with relevant search terms. A knowledge base will empower customers, streamline support and even help your website rank for new keyword search phrases.
Subscriptions Required: Service Hub Professional or Enterprise
Customer Portal Configuration
Give customers control over their communication with your company using a customer portal. A customer portal is a home behind a login where customers can view, open, and reply to their support tickets. Typically, customers can access the customer portal via the knowledge base, but you can also share a link to the portal directly with your customers. The portal will organize tickets and communication and provide an additional level of visibility for your customers.
Subscriptions Required: Service Hub Professional or Enterprise
Customer and Service Team Reporting
Build a report dashboard that analyzes key customer and support team metrics. Break down your customers by size, product usage, longevity, NPS ratings and more. Break down your customer service team by tickets worked, activities, response times, retention and more. Gain real insights into your growth that can inform strategic decisions for the future.
Subscriptions Required: Service Hub Starter, Professional or Enterprise
Service Team Activation
Following the configuration of your entire service operation in HubSpot, create training materials for your entire team to teach them (a) how HubSpot functions and (b) how HubSpot was specifically configured for your company's use case. Conduct live training sessions with your team to help them fully adopt the CRM and activate them in their specific roles. Teach them how to contact customers, log activities, open tickets, close tickets, access reports and more. They will leave realizing that HubSpot is a tool that saves them time and helps them become more effective in their roles.
Subscriptions Required: Service Hub Starter, Professional or Enterprise