How to hit the ground running with Hubspot for Sales & Marketing (2023)

Now that I’m out of the private sector, here are some things I wish I had known before using Hubspot to make the most of it.

Define your persona.

In Hubspot, you can define scoring your contacts. Here is the HubSpot article on how to access it.

You have to decide what is important to your company or you. Common ones are:

• Open email
  • # of times they open in an email
• Click on the link in the email
• Specific contact characteristics:
  • Company size
  • Company Revenue
  • Title
• Website visits
• Etc.

There is also a persona tool you can use in HubSpot to use as a guide for onboarding.

Customized your Dashboard on what matters the most

Their predetermined boards are good and are one of the things I enjoyed about HubSpot. Specifically for Marketing, I would suggest a Lead Gen Dashboard. Business is all about how much money you can generate. The marketing part of that is generating Leads/MQLs.

HubSpot offers predefined dashboards which you can explore. It gives you a good baseline to start.

Customized the View

You can choose what view to show for email and contacts. Choose what is best for you. For emails generally have:

• Open Rate
• Click through rate
• Numer sent
• Unsubscribe

Clean up your Properties

I guess this is the nature of the beast, but this kind of grinds my gears. When you create a form for a specific event, you have unique fields that you may only use once. Like “What’s your favourite drink” or something similar. HubSpot will create a unique contact property and attach it to the contact. You only need it for a specific amount of time. What are the chances of you using it again? Perhaps you would like to keep it, but this can become a little unmanageable.

When you are exporting the list, all of the fields you have ever created will show up. You can unclick these options when exporting or deleting them, but it gets a little annoying. So, do a routine cleanup of your contact proprieties.

Of course, that’s not to say you want to keep items for historical data like previous landing pages or emails.

Automate cleaning your list

When people unsubscribe, have them automatically removed from your main marketing list and move to a do not email list or similar. The toughest part of email marketing, I find, is maintaining your list from getting too messy.

That’s it for now, and I am still learning the monster that is HubSpot. They are constantly improving, growing and changing things. That’s one of the reasons I like using HubSpot.