topic Re: Best Practices for Onboarding to Starter in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

Best Practices for Onboarding to Starter

WDIMcKenzie — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 18:55:44 GMT

We are part of the hubspot partner program & want to know what would be the best way & process to set our clients up on free or starter plans as a starting point. As we work with our clients to help them build their business we want to be able to have their hubspot plan grow along with this. I just can not figure whats the best route to do this partner program seems to only kick in at professional levels of sales.

Re: Best Practices for Onboarding to Starter

STierney — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 19:33:55 GMT

Hey @WDIMcKenzie - thanks for posting in the Community!

I'd like to clarify the goal here. Are we looking for best practices on setting up your client on a free or starter plan? If so, what are their long-term goals as their business continues to grow?

Or, are we looking at how a free/starter plan would interact with the Partner Program?

Any clarifications will be helpful in getting you the best support possible.

Shane, Senior Community Moderator

Re: Best Practices for Onboarding to Starter

WDIMcKenzie — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 16:32:16 GMT

Yes thanks for your response so a little of both as our goal is to work to help grow our clients businesses. We find that getting clients started is very difficult as they want to see results before making a serious spend. We ultimately want to get our clients to the professional and above plans but we tend to need to start them on free or starter so we can build that trust and rapport. We have determined that it's best for us to just include the hubspot free or starter plan with our packages to be able to show the client how everything works get them familiar with the product and getting them to see the result of the product as well as the limitation of the free and starter vs professional, which once we are able to get them familiar and educated about hubspot that conversation and sale will be so much smoother.

Re: Best Practices for Onboarding to Starter

WDIMcKenzie — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 16:33:43 GMT

Also most of our clients that we work with are looking for consistent lead generation, social media management,

Re: Best Practices for Onboarding to Starter

STierney — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 18:19:34 GMT

Hey @WDIMcKenzie - thanks for following up here!

I'd like to tag in some experts here to see what they would recommend in terms of best practices regarding set up for your clients' accounts! @karstenkoehler, @danmoyle, and @Mike_Eastwood - any thoughts for this based on the context above?

Shane, Senior Community Moderator

Re: Best Practices for Onboarding to Starter

danmoyle — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 15:53:23 GMT

Hey there @WDIMcKenzie and welcome to the Community! Thanks for the tag @STierney.

It's an interesting question. In my experience, getting folks from free to starter to professional is quite a journey. And not always the most fun. However, I think a key is education.

Do you have educational content your clients consume? And do you have a couple of journeys they can take to show them the value of HubSpot? For instance, if I'm a client with free, and I want to expand my reach beyond my initial network, do you have a path you can take them on to define their personas and then build ads around them? Or if I'm on starter and want to create automatic nurturing based on behavior, do you have a workflows journey you can teach them and show them the value of professional?

I think from there, it's a matter of your brand understanding your own ICPs and personas, and talking to them about the problems you solve with lower-tier HubSpot. Because then you know how to scale them into higher tiers.

Hope that helps a bit!