Moving your sales and marketing system and teams is a big decision. There are multiple stakeholders to serve, long history to maintain, and years' worth of content and asset creation to move and rebuild. As you work through the decision process on whether or not to invest in an Enterprise HubSpot license you'll want to consider a few important questions:

1. How long with the transition take?
2. How will this move drive bottom-line results?
3. Do we have the resources we need to activate the project successfully?
4. Who can we lean on for support through the process?
5. What will the true cost of ownership be?
6. What could cause the project to fail?

This article details the onboarding process, what to expect, what to watch out for, and what you'll need to ensure gets included for a timely and successful migration.

HubSpot Enterprise Onboarding

The core of the HubSpot Enterprise Growth Suite is the CRM. The free centerpiece of the platform can be built upon by purchasing different HUBS. Most organizations look to implement the Enterprise Marketing and Sales HUBS above else, providing their team enhanced abilities to architect an amazing customer experience. Once you've purchased your HubSpot license you'll have to consider how to get it properly configured, your team trained, and all of your existing marketing and sales data and records migrated into HubSpot. This article details what you'll need to consider in order to find success with one of the most powerful sales and marketing software platforms on the market.

Onboarding Is Required For HubSpot Enterprise Purchases

When you buy HubSpot you're also required to purchase onboarding support. HubSpot offers their own consultative onboarding services. HubSpot allows you to waive those fees, (as high as $12,000) when you onboard through a certified agency. My agency is a Certified Elite HubSpot Agency Partner, successfully onboarding organizations in HubSpot since 2012. Let's briefly review the options so you understand the differences.

Purchasing Enterprise Onboarding by HubSpot

What You Get: A dedicated onboarding consultant who will teach you how to configure HubSpot yourself. HubSpot follows a 90-day timeline that includes consulting meetings and homework for you to complete between meetings. With HubSpot Onboarding Services you'll be able to do-it-yourself-with-help.

Why You Should Buy It: This is a good route if you're able to dedicate the time, plan to run your own growth strategies, and are comfortable waiting three months to truly activate the entire Growth Platform.

Purchasing Enterprise Onboarding from a Certified Solutions Partner

What You Get: Instrumental Group offers an expedited onboarding process that provide global settings configuration and complete training. We compress the timeline to 30 days to ensure a swift activation timeline, and standby your team for the full required 90 days to answer questions and provide support. Our goal is to provide more hands-on support and help you begin achieving value from the investment into HubSpot as soon as possible. 

Why You Should Buy It: If you're looking to launch HubSpot fast, get some help completing the 1-time global configuration settings, and get a customized training sequence based on your actual needs our HubSpot Onboarding Services are perfect. Our agency will provide a customized approach to the onboarding process that includes support with the data migration and re-establishes existing integrations with other software platforms.

Global License Configuration & Technical Setup

Before you can start your journey leveraging HubSpot to support growth you'll need to get the basics in place. There are a series of settings that need to be configured. If you decide to onboard with Instrumental Group we’ll guide you with setup tasks including: 

• Connect your subdomains and configure your settings
• Install the HubSpot tracking code and filter out your internal traffic
• Set up your email sending domain and CAN-SPAM policies
• Configure email types
• Connect your social accounts
• Team invitations and mailbox configuration
• Audit existing Marketing Automation & CRM
• Set up your languages and currencies

Onboarding HubSpot Enterprise Marketing HUB

The Enterprise Marketing HUB hosts a bundle of capabilities to seamlessly coordinate multiple marketing assets, contacts & campaigns. The Enterprise HUB includes all Pro features such as social media, email, capture, conversion, and deep automation capabilities. The Enterprise version includes additional features specifically built for large organizations such as: 

• Social media permissions
• Content partitioning
• Email frequency safeguards
• Password protected content
• Enhanced reporting capacity

Data Capture & Lead Conversion

You'll need to configure your contact settings to match your existing build and serve your business use case. This includes matching critical fields for qualification and segmentation such as persona, organization, and role in the business. Our agency will support yours by configuring your forms to capture the proper field data. We'll then set up landing pages with forms, thank you pages for redirection, and add the appropriate contacts for lead response.

Lead Routing, Response, and Nurturing

Converted leads must be properly routed based on assignment criteria. Knowing how your existing marketing automation is built, we'll ensure all new leads receive the proper automatic response and redirection to appropriate follow-up resources.

We'll cover that the proper way to handle HubSpot lead routing is to use assignment criteria to route leads into Smart Lists or trigger automatic enrollment into workflows. You'll learn how to trigger the nurturing process based on lifecycle stage and other criteria, ensuring each lead is best handled based on who they are and their stage in the buyer's journey. Welcome flows should be created for each new lead from there.

Segmentation & Automation

Existing email workflows will need to be rebuilt inside HubSpot. While there may be some opportunities to improve your nurturing sequences, that will largely depend on which platform you're leaving. If you're leaving Pardot, improvement will be easy as HubSpot's behavioral-based branching logic affords extremely enhanced capabilities. 

We'll cover everything you need to know about segmenting your contacts into SMART Lists, building automated nurturing workflows, and reviewing performance data of live workflows to improve underperforming emails based on real consumption data.

Calculated Properties & Custom Reporting

One of the valuable features of the Enterprise Marketing HUB is the ability to create custom calculation properties and use them for reporting. Calculation properties allow you to set up custom equations based on other number properties you have in your database, giving you the ability to automatically calculate things like min, max, count, sum, or average value for these properties.

We'll review during onboarding, providing guidance to help you build custom reports based on your most important KPIs like lead response time, engagement, and more. Enterprise Marketing HUB also comes with the ability to create multi-touch revenue attribution reports, allowing you to drill further into what lead sources and campaigns are performing best and driving the most revenue.

Permissioning, Team Setup, and Multi-domains

Enterprise Marketing HUB gives you advanced abilities to partition and control different team and user permissions and experiences in HubSpot so everyone can be more efficient and effective. We'll teach you how to add individuals to teams (think Sales, Marketing, Admin, HR) and control what they can and can’t access in HubSpot based on how they’ll be using the software and what they’ll need for their day-to-day duties.

We'll also provide training on creating different views for different teams based on what is most relevant to them (Marketing may want to see something different on a contact record than sales, for example). Finally, one of the greatest functionalities of Enterprise Marketing HUB is the ability to connect multiple domains and partition analytics and assets per domain, ensuring you are keeping everything clean, easy to find, and easy to report on. We'll help you with this too!

Migrating Contact Records & Engagement History

There are several ways to migrate your contacts out of your old marketing software and into your Enterprise Marketing HUB. One thing to remember, the free CRM is at the center of the platform. That means that contacts live in the CRM, not in the Marketing HUB. If you're able to export your contact records into a .CSV or .XLS file you'll be good. From there HubSpot has a fantastic import tool with the ability to adjust fields, map nuanced differences in fields, etc. 

If you're hoping to retain all of the interaction and engagement history you'll have a more difficult path ahead of you. Moving this 'soft data' will require additional migration support. Our agency can help you accomplish the job through custom script development, writing the precise rules and actioning them to extract the data from your existing platform and port it into HubSpot properly.

• Hard Data Migration: you'll need a total count of records/objects. All deals, company records, and contact records should suffice. If you don't know or can't find these totals we can help you take inventory.
• Soft Data Migration: you'll need to evaluate your existing inventory of forms, landing pages, workflows, and calls-to-action. 
• Asset Re-creation: you'll need to evaluate your existing inventory of forms, landing pages, workflows, and calls-to-action. There's no good way to migrate these assets from most marketing platforms, so your goal should be to use that inventory as a punch list for recreation inside HubSpot. This is a great opportunity for improvement too!
• Integrations: If you have any augmentation software that you'll need to establish a new integration with HubSpot you should be careful to note them. If you're leveraging SeventhSense for email send time optimization you'll be happy to know that HubSpot has built-in native integrations that can be configured with ease.

Onboarding HubSpot Enterprise Sales HUB

Intelligent Prospecting

At the core of HubSpot Sales HUB's capabilities is intelligent, sophisticated communication capabilities that provide sales reps extreme efficiency and deep insights into the engagement history. There's no better sales trigger than a sudden alert that a top prospect has opened your email, clicked on your link, or is viewing your proposal. To take advantage of these tools we'll help your entire sales team get set up and connected with HubSpot Sales.

Communication capabilities are centered in the CRM. We'll get your team set up with the ability to send emails directly from the CRM, or through their existing email client with HubSpot integration. My experience has been that very rarely will sales teams change their email client to HubSpot, but the plugin for Gmail and Outlook365 keeps them working in the tool they're used to.

Our onboarding process will provide instruction and advice for setting up chatflows on your website, leverage conversations and live chat to answer questions in real-time, and even enable prospects to book meetings directly to your sales team's calendars. You'll learn how your team can center their outreach through the CRM by leveraging the Sales HUB tools to schedule communication, log activity, and manage the deal pipeline too!

Automate Your Sales Process

It's easy to operate in HubSpot's CRM, especially when your team has access to the amazing enablement tools included in the Enterprise Sales HUB. However, it can be even easier and faster with the proper automation. The ability to increase active selling time by making sales' job easier through automation is a real opportunity. Everyone can produce more in less time by leveraging their capabilities properly. 

To get there you'll need to explore your current sales process and identify opportunities for improvement in HubSpot. You'll need to set up your regions, line out your pipeline stages, and map out the common communication points that reps spend a lot of time doing on a 1-1 basis, (or manually). We'll walk you through all of this during onboarding, helping you customize your pipeline, activity reporting, lead routing, and show you how to leverage templates to pre-build common emails.

Personalizing Outreach

Efficiency is one advantage of HubSpot, but effectiveness is the name of the game. This is all about helping your sales team learn how to really sell better. Selling better is really all about customizing and personalizing its outreach to help them stand out from old-school salespeople and their tired, predictable tactics.

Your onboarding will include advice and training on how to personalize your sales outreach based on the personas they're targeting. Leveraging 1-1 sales video in email, effective follow-up based on deep insights into engagement history, and continual optimization of communication-based on that engagement history are all included. We'll teach your team how to add videos to their emails, create automated communication sequences for easy enrollment on the fly, use personalization tokens, and take all the manual actions out of the sales process.

If you want to increase those closed-won rates and decrease the average days to close, get really excited about this element of your onboarding. Get your sales team ready to open their minds to a whole new method of doing the things they've been doing forever. The impact on results will soon make them all believers.

Migrating Companies, Deals, Notes, Attachments, and Engagement History

Migrating CRM data is usually much more complex and critical than migrating marketing contacts because there is deep history and context to retain. This can't really be done within a standard onboarding from HubSpot, you'll need some help from a migration expert like Revenue River. We deploy a host of technology and experience to help you map out all of your records, export it all out of your current CRM, and successfully import it all into HubSpot.

Similar to the Marketing migration, we'll help you accomplish the job through custom script development, writing the precise rules to extract the appropriate CRM data and port it into HubSpot properly.

Ongoing Activation Support Beyond Onboarding & Migration

As we approach the completion of your onboarding, we'll work with you to determine what your next goals will be after onboarding. Your HubSpot Success Manager will bring a list of ideas and potential next steps to the table, including options for support and do-it-yourself activation advice.

HubSpot Support

You’ll be transitioned to a HubSpot Customer Success Manager who will be there to ensure you’re thriving in HubSpot. This is a smooth transition, with a quick introduction at the end of onboarding. If you're looking to do-it-yourself HubSpot will stand behind your team with some regular checkups to ensure you're adopting and achieving value beyond your onboarding and migrations project. 

Consulting & Support Blocks

We've found that many organizations have capable and deep teams, well prepared to activate HubSpot and execute growth strategies without a lot of help. They don't require an ongoing engagement, but like having some on-call support. For these customers, we like to suggest a small support block. You can buy a block of hours (10-20) and leverage our easy-to-use ticketing system through HubSpot Service Hub to request help at any time. Just looking for a quick review of a delicate workflow before you schedule it? Look us up and we'll jump on a short call to review together. We'll supply the brainpower or the horsepower, whenever it's needed. 

Custom Configuration

Sometimes onboarding just isn't enough. When your sales and marketing system needs considerable customization our team is built to help you bend HubSpot to the fullest extent. Deeply automated sales systems, custom objects, custom integration work, behavioral-based email nurturing, and conversational marketing are all good examples of the types of projects you might want to explore once HubSpot Enterprise is fully onboarded. Your dedicated HubSpot Success Manager can support the evaluation and scoping during your onboarding project if needed. 

Growth Campaigns

If you're interested in support building and actioning an inbound growth strategy inside of HubSpot but don't have the muscle to do it all yourself, consider a growth campaign. We can structure growth campaigns to both attacks your inbound foundations and run highly-targeted growth campaigns. Here's a little detail on what that could look like. If nothing else, consider this inspiration for your own strategy checklist.

Attack Those Inbound Foundations

If you want to be found widely and frequently on the internet for the services and solutions you offer you have to perform some inbound tactics with disciplined consistency. We consider the continual creation of optimized content, maintaining your website, and maintaining a consistent social media plan as foundational. To get started, work on the following:

1. Technical onsite & office SEO according to strategy
2. Regular blogging according to your content strategy
3. Social media publishing, monitoring, and engagement
4. Continual website conversion rate optimization (CRO)
5. Email marketing, nurturing, and database hygiene

Run Targeted Lead Generation Campaigns

If you're consistent with your inbound foundations you'll start to see leads flow as relevance and traffic increases. However, it takes more than the basic inbound philosophy to generate a lot of the ideal leads you're looking for. This is where targeted lead acquisition campaigns come in. Targeted campaigns should follow a simple process for creation:

1. Who are you going to target?
2. What are you going to promote?
3. What creative assets will be needed?
4. How will you reach and convert the audience?
5. What results do you want to achieve?

What's Hot: With the fall of in-person conferences virtual events are on fire right now. You might want to consider hosting and promoting your own virtual event. Promoting events like this is at the core of Instrumental Group's strength so if you need help reach out.

I hope you found this article helpful in identifying what to consider when moving to HubSpot's Enterprise Sales & Marketing HUB. If you have any questions please reach out. We're always happy to lend a little advice!