How to Customize Your CRM for Your Onboarding / Implementation Team in HubSpot

Most teams set up HubSpot once and leave every user looking at the same generic contact and company records. Sales, service, and your implementation team all see an identical layout that was designed for no one in particular. The people onboarding your new clients end up scrolling past fields they don't use to find the handful they need — on every record, every day.

Customizing your CRM for the implementation team fixes that. It's not about adding data; it's about arranging the information that's already there so the people doing onboarding see what matters to them first. Here's what that involves, why it's worth doing, and where the real decisions are.

What "customizing the CRM" actually means here

There are three levers, and none of them require new data — they reshape how existing information is presented.

The record layout controls what your team sees when they open a client's contact or company record: which details sit at the top, which cards and tabs appear, and what gets pushed down or hidden. Tailoring this so an implementation specialist sees onboarding-relevant details first — rather than sales or billing fields they don't touch — is the core of the milestone.

The list (index) views are the saved lists your team lives in: everyone actively onboarding, anything that's stalled, clients grouped by owner or segment. Building these once means the team opens a ready-made, filtered list instead of rebuilding it every time.

The preview is what shows when someone hovers over a record without opening it. Setting this up means a quick glance surfaces the right at-a-glance details.

Why it's worth doing

A record built around the implementation team's job pays off in ways that compound.

Your team stops hunting. The details that matter to onboarding are where they expect them, so daily work gets faster and less frustrating. A cleaner record is also an easier record to keep accurate, which means better data feeding your reporting and automation later. And when the CRM finally reflects how your team actually works, people use it — adoption is the quiet return on this kind of setup.

One decision that shapes what's possible: your HubSpot plan

The most important thing to sort out early is whether you want your implementation team to see a view that's genuinely their own — different from what sales and service see on the same record — or whether a single shared view works for everyone.

A view that's specific to one team depends on team-based record layouts, which are available on HubSpot's higher tiers and require teams to be set up. On the starter tiers, you can still fully customize the record and build saved list views — but that customized layout is shared across everyone, rather than tailored per team. Knowing which situation you're in avoids promising a team-specific view that your plan doesn't support, and it's the first thing we confirm. You can read HubSpot's own overview of record customization and team layouts to see how the tiers differ.

Where this fits with the rest of your setup

This milestone covers your contact and company records — the client records your implementation team references. The records they work in day to day — the onboarding tickets or projects that move through your implementation pipeline — are customized as part of building that pipeline, not here. Deal records belong to your sales team's view. Keeping those lanes separate is deliberate: it means each object gets customized once, for the team that actually uses it, without duplicated or conflicting work.

How we approach it

We start with the people, not the platform. Before touching any settings, we get clear on what your implementation team needs to see first, what they can hide, and the lists they keep open all day — then we confirm what your HubSpot plan supports. From there we shape the record layout, build the saved views, set the previews, and add any "required at this point" or "show only when relevant" rules that fit your plan. Then we open a real client record with someone on your team and fine-tune it live, because the only real test of a view is whether the person using it nods.

The goal isn't a reconfigured settings page. It's an implementation team that opens any client and immediately knows where onboarding stands.

Common questions

Does this add new fields to our CRM? No. This milestone arranges the information you already have into a view built for your implementation team. Creating new fields is a separate piece of setting up your CRM.

Can we give our implementation team a different view than sales and service? On HubSpot's higher tiers, with teams set up, yes — each team can have its own record layout. On the starter tiers, the customized layout is shared across teams. We confirm which applies to you before we build.

We run a fairly simple onboarding process — is this still worth it? If your onboarding is light on custom fields, this is usually a quick pass: order the handful of fields that matter, build a couple of saved lists, done. Even then, the time your team saves not hunting adds up.

If you want your implementation team's HubSpot records built around how they actually work, contact The Gist.