More than 177,000 businesses – across 120 countries – now use HubSpot to align and streamline their marketing, sales and customer service efforts. 

Much like Hoover, Google or PhotoShop, HubSpot is a brand that’s become synonymous with a concept it pioneered and perfected – in HubSpot’s case, inbound marketing.  

Put simply, if you want a cloud-based software that helps you attract an audience, nurture and convert leads, close customers and build advocacy – all while maintaining tight control over your graceful B2B ballet – then HubSpot is your best bet.   

In fact, for many businesses, HubSpot is almost viewed as a utility – as essential to everyday operations as a reliable broadband connection or a steady flow of caffeinated drinks. 

Done thoughtfully, HubSpot implementation sets your business up for serious growth, while boosting efficiency, visibility and accountability across every team it empowers. 

And it’s nothing to be scared of. Saying that, HubSpot does have some tricky aspects, the majority of which you’ll face during your initial setting-up period. 

Because here’s the thing: if you’re considering HubSpot for your business, you won’t, unfortunately, be able to watch a couple of YouTube tutorials and then ‘wing it’. Any ideas you may have of zero-cost DIY HubSpot onboarding are, sadly, unlikely to pan out. 

So before you dive head-first into HubSpot, here are four key questions to ask yourself.

Question one: What do you actually want HubSpot for?

So, you already know that HubSpot can help with your business’s sales, marketing and customer service needs. But what would that actually mean for your business, practically and specifically, on a day-to-day basis? Put simply, what could HubSpot do for you? 

HubSpot is massively powerful and intimidatingly huge. And because of its sheer scale, it can be hard to envision how it will meld with the machinery of your business; how it will become the revving engine that drives everything from email campaigns to KPI reports. 

But there’s no shame in admitting that you don’t know what you don’t know.  

Because HubSpot is so deeply customisable, what it ‘looks like’ for you will be different from what it looks like for other businesses – even your close competitors. 

For a truly effective HubSpot implementation, we’d advise you to bring in a HubSpot Partner Agency that can undertake a holistic audit of your business, mapping out every aspect likely to be touched by HubSpot – from your processes to your buyer personas. 

Your HubSpot Partner Agency can then devise a HubSpot model that will meet your business’s current needs, while also fostering its future growth and evolution. 

While doing so, they’ll identify opportunities and efficiencies that simply wouldn’t be possible without HubSpot. So you get to feel confident that you’re on the right track by moving onto HubSpot, no matter how dizzying it may occasionally feel during those early days. 

Question two: What will your HubSpot implementation look like?

So you’ve pinned down what HubSpot will do for you – now you need to pin down how it will lead you to this promised land of B2B milk and honey.

When your HubSpot solution goes live, what will it actually look like? How will it function? What will it require from you and your team? What will be fed into HubSpot, and what outputs will it be giving you in return?

Things to consider including:

• What your new HubSpot sequences and workflows will entail, and how they’ll coexist with each other 
• How ads and social posts will be made, monitored and managed via HubSpot
• How your biddable media campaigns will benefit from the control and visibility offered by HubSpot’s dashboard 
• How your SEO and content strategies will be upgraded by HubSpot 
• Who will be responsible for contact and database management within HubSpot  
• Conversational marketing tools – i.e. chatbots – that may need to be created within, or integrated into, HubSpot 
• The migration of customer self-service – e.g. customer portal, automated help desk, SLAs – into HubSpot 

The above list does not represent the full extent of everything you’ll want to consider, but it’s a good starter-for-ten.

Again, this is where is a HubSpot Partner Agency can help – by joining dots and devising ideas that allow your HubSpot implementation to hit the ground running from day one.   And while your HubSpot Partner Agency is at it, they can also help with this head-scratcher:   

Question three: How will HubSpot implementation affect your existing systems? 

Thankfully, implementing HubSpot doesn’t require you throwing out all your existing ways-of-working and starting over from scratch. That would be… exhausting. 

But you do need to think about how your current systems are going to integrate with HubSpot. 

The more complex your current systems and processes – and the greater their reliance on legacy technology – the more thinking will need to be done about how HubSpot will connect to them. 

At the most basic and fundamental level, there’s your existing contact and sales databases to consider. All that priceless info will need remapping and transferring across to HubSpot, so that it can start its exciting new life inside the planet’s most powerful CRM. 

Question four: Have you factored in HubSpot’s ‘hidden’ costs?

Used judiciously, HubSpot will make your business money. That’s pretty much a done deal. But there are costs involved. Some are clear, some are less so.

Let’s start with the clearest: the price of a HubSpot subscription plan. HubSpot currently offers UK customers three tiers: the bare-bones Starter tier, starting at £18 a month; the weighty Professional tier, starting at £702 a month; and the all-singing, all-dancing, world-conquering Enterprise tier, which starts at £3,000 a month. 

The tier best suited to you will depend on the number of marketing contacts you want to reach, and the level of flexibility and control you need. Simple enough.

Then, however, there’s your HubSpot onboarding to consider – and this is where things become less cut-and-dried. For a fee – determined by your business’s size, complexity and specific needs – HubSpot will train up a HubSpot Power User within your team. In turn, this person then brings the rest of your staff up-to-speed with HubSpot, so that your business is prepped and ready for the Big Bang of implementation.  

Aside from the fee to HubSpot, you’ll obviously also need to factor in the cost of ‘losing’ your HubSpot Power User during their training period, which will be anything from one to three months. Then there’s the time your designated HubSpot Power User will spend training your teams, and the time your teams will themselves spend being trained.

HubSpot’s relatively hands-off approach to training and onboarding isn’t for everyone. If it doesn’t sound like it’d be a good fit for your business, consider bringing on a HubSpot Partner Agency that can manage the training and onboarding process for you. 

That way, you get dedicated, bespoke training that’ll take your team from HubSpot newbies to HubSpot big shots in days and weeks, not months.

It just so happens that Lesniak Swann is a certified HubSpot Gold Partner. Our deep technical expertise and award-winning strategic thinking means we can help you with all of the above, and more. Much, much more. 

Truth is, if we detailed every HubSpot capability, alongside all the ways we can help you work with them, this blog would be several hundred thousand words long. Best thing to do is get in touch, so we can talk over your ambitions for your business, and how HubSpot – and Lesniak Swann – can help you achieve those.

Your HubSpot journey starts here, now. You’re going to love it – promise.

Let’s talk HubSpot