9 Things To Check To Ensure Your HubSpot Was Set Up Properly

During a new client call and a prospect call recently, both company leaders expressed some concern that they weren’t getting full value for their investment in HubSpot. This is a fairly common sentiment when clients talk with us.

One of the best ways to make sure you get full value for HubSpot and leverage all its potential out of the gate is to make sure it’s set up properly.

Some of what can get in the way of a complete and successful setup is not thinking through your strategy before you kick off onboarding and configuration. If you don’t know how you intend to use HubSpot, you might end up with a generic setup instead of one that sets you up for optimized lead generation, streamlined sales efforts and efficient customer service.

Here are nine areas to check to make sure your HubSpot was set up correctly.

1. Account and User Settings

Start by reviewing your account and user settings. Verify that your company information, time zone and other account details are accurate. Additionally, ensure that user roles and permissions are assigned correctly to maintain data security and control.

This part of the setup goes a bit deeper than just filling in names and turning on permissions. You should set up teams and roles with role-based permissions. You should agree on the level of security you want to deploy. HubSpot recommends turning on two-step authentication for all users. 

You should also consider installing a process for adding new team members, removing people when they leave the company and assigning the ongoing support of teams and roles as promoted people move into new roles.

2. Integration and Data Import

Almost every client we work with needs to integrate HubSpot with some other system already running in the company. This might be integrating Marketing Hub with a non-HubSpot CRM or integrating Marketing Hub and Sales Hub with an ERP or financial management suite.

These integrations are tricky. It’s not always hard to connect two APIs, but it can be challenging to make sure the data is syncing correctly, ensure the syncs are working as designed (one way or two way) and run proper QA processes to check that the integrations are working correctly.

You’re also going to want to make sure the fields map correctly. This means getting a common understanding around the fields in HubSpot and the other system you’re connecting with. Often this means having to clean up the data so that the fields map correctly.

Simple integration projects sometimes turn into larger data cleanup projects. Make sure your data is in a good place before you start any integration projects.

3. Contact Properties

Contact properties play a vital role in personalizing your interactions with leads and customers. Often, clients aspire for their marketing to do certain things that their current data can’t support. They’re often also missing important contact properties that they should be collecting but haven’t historically collected.

Review your contact properties to ensure you’re capturing relevant information and that they are correctly mapped to your CRM.

It might make sense to discuss in detail what goals and objectives you have for your marketing and sales follow-up first before you do any detailed customization of your properties.

It might also make sense to discuss in detail the types of marketing tactics, marketing campaigns and sales follow-up you have planned. This is also going to inform you about what custom properties are needed to suit your business requirements.

4. Lead Scoring

Implementing lead scoring helps you prioritize and segment leads based on their engagement and readiness to convert.

A lot of companies push lead scoring back during implementation of HubSpot. It’s a tool they haven’t used before, are only beginning to understand and in some cases are concerned about how sales will use the data.

However, it’s relatively easy to use and should be part of any initial HubSpot setup. Getting a lead score for all your prospects doesn’t mean you have to do anything with the score out of the gate. But having it is going to help you move sales opportunities through your pipeline faster.

Get a basic score model built during initial implementation. This requires answering some basic questions about what characteristics make up a high-quality lead. Some of that data might be demographic and some might be psychographic.

However you define it, include those fields in HubSpot, set up the scoring model and start reviewing it. It’s likely you’ll have to tweak it over time to dial it in, so the sooner you start. the faster you’ll get to a high-quality lead score.

5. Email and Communication Settings

Many new HubSpot users view email as one of the major value propositions associated with HubSpot. Marketing and sales are going to be able to benefit from the email capabilities in HubSpot if it’s set up correctly.

One of the areas that should be set up during the initial configuration is the communication settings to ensure proper domain authentication, email sending configurations and contact subscription preferences. This step ensures that your emails reach the intended recipients and comply with relevant regulations like CASL, GDPR and CPPA.

But there’s a bit more that should be done here. Spend a little time outlining what emails you intend to send. Start with marketing requirements. Are there general marketing emails? Do you have specific marketing emails you want to send, like perhaps to promote a podcast you publish? Do you run webinars? If so, will you need webinar-specific emails?

If the answer is yes to any questions like this, set up email templates for each of these use cases. This is going to make it easier to get your team using HubSpot and make it more efficient for them to use it to build emails to promote these specific items.

The same should be done on the sales side. Do the salespeople send similar emails at different stages of your sales process? These can be built in advance and installed into HubSpot during the implementation so sales reps can hop in and start sending immediately.

6. Form and Landing Page Setup

Forms and landing pages are essential for lead capture and conversion. Check that your forms and landing pages are correctly designed, have relevant fields and are properly integrated into your website. Verify that the submitted data is being captured accurately.

Again, what seems simple needs to be thought out first. You should design specific forms for specific stages in the buyer journey. Early buyer journey forms should be short (less than three fields). Later-stage buyer journey forms can be longer, but they can also be filled in progressively if you set them up correctly.

You should design a set of landing page templates to make it easy to launch campaigns and new educational offers. These too should be set up based on the stage of the buyer journey your prospects are in when they land on these pages.

During the form setup process, make sure you also set up the notifications associated with these forms. If no one is notified after a form is completed, no one can follow up if necessary. These notifications also need to be monitored and updated. When people leave or change jobs, your forms need to be updated.

Forms and landing pages are where visitors turn into leads. This is an important part of the initial setup process that needs to be done right.

7. Marketing Automation Workflows

If your marketing is working correctly, then people are coming to your website, finding engaging educational information and sharing their email address to get access to your content.

Once they convert, they should be nurtured in the background with automated email nurture campaigns. Marketing automation workflows enable you to nurture leads and automate repetitive tasks.

However, these emails need to be designed to strategically move people through their buyer journey by offering them additional educational materials. If you do this correctly, they’ll signal you their intent, and if you have lead scoring in place, you can actually see their lead score rise as they work through their own buyer journey.

The automated HubSpot emails need to be set up to ensure they are correctly configured, trigger the desired actions and have appropriate conditions and delays.

They should be tested to confirm they work as intended and reviewed monthly to make sure they are working as desired. More importantly, check that they have a high open rate and a high click-through rate.  

You should also plan on optimizing these on a regular basis.

8. Lifecycle Stages and Sales Pipelines

Understanding the buyer journey or the lifecycle stages for your prospects is critical for creating scalable revenue growth. There are stages during the prospect’s buyer journey that marketing will influence, and there are stages during the prospect’s buyer journey that sales will influence. These need to be set up correctly when you configure HubSpot.

On the sales side, you should set up your pipeline with your deal stages. This matches your documented and visual sales process. If you don’t have that, this should be an exercise you go through to define your sales process and then build those stages and pipeline in HubSpot.

Most companies have multiple pipelines. This could be by product or by division. Regardless, these pipelines and sales cycles should be set up and reviewed before rolling out HubSpot to the sales team.

On the marketing side, this should be set up too inside the buyer journey reporting tab in HubSpot. Knowing how prospects are flowing through their buyer journey and getting data on conversion points at each stage of the journey is going to unlock incredibly valuable insights that will help accelerate leads and new customer revenue.

9. Reporting and Analytics

When it comes to reporting, most companies don’t know what they don’t know. We typically set up a handful of recommended dashboards for clients that in conjunction with what HubSpot delivers out of the box check 90% of the requirements for initial setup.

However, I would also run a reporting workshop after 30 days of using the tools to see what additional data is needed, what additional dashboards make sense and how the initial set of dashboards are being used.

This will inform the second stage of dashboard development so that this set meets the needs of the team and is actually providing insights that are being used to drive ongoing action plans and optimization efforts.

A well-configured HubSpot instance can be a game-changer for your business, empowering you to streamline operations, nurture leads and drive revenue. By checking these nine key areas during your HubSpot setup, you can ensure that you've laid a strong foundation for success.

Regularly review and update your HubSpot configuration to adapt to evolving business needs and leverage the full potential of this powerful CRM platform.

If you want us to take a quick look under the hood, click here to schedule a FREE 13-point checkup of your HubSpot portals today.