When you are tasked with taking over management of an existing HubSpot account as a result of employee turnover or a well-deserved promotion you’ve been working toward, you may not know where to start.
Consider this your guide to getting started as a new HubSpot admin. First, you’ll need to know what you’re working with by auditing the existing portal setup. Next, ensure you start off on the right foot by cleaning up dirty data and unused assets. Lastly, start to learn the ins and outs of the HubSpot tools available to you with certifications from HubSpot Academy so that you can crush your marketing and sales goals.
Step 1: Audit Existing Setup
In order to be successful in your new account, you must first understand what has already been set up. Download this self-guided audit checklist from HubSpot partner Campaign Creators to walk through your portal’s current setup and identify action items. After completing this audit, you will have answers to the following questions, among others:
- Is my primary domain/website connected to HubSpot?
- What subscription types do I have?
- Are my social accounts connected?
- What deal stages are in my sales pipeline?
If you are looking for some more hands-on help with your audit, check out our New Admin Audit service to work with a HubSpot Inbound Consultant.
Step 2: Clean Up Your CRM Data
Now that you have a better understanding of how your HubSpot account has been used to date, there’s a chance you’ve identified some data hygiene issues and want to do some cleanup before you begin your HubSpot usage. You can use Insycle’s free CRM Data Grader tool for a quick assessment of the health of your contact, company, and deal data.
Here are some common ways to clean up dirty CRM data:
- Deduplicate contacts and companies
- Delete contacts that hard bounced on marketing emails
Learn more about email bounce types. - Delete contacts that have unsubscribed from all email
NB: You may want to add criteria to this list of unsubscribed contacts to exclude any contacts with a lifecycle stage of SQL, Opportunity, Customer, or Evangelist. We may not want to delete contacts who are current customers or actively engaged with your sales team just because they don’t want to receive your marketing emails. - Delete or suppress contacts who are unengaged with marketing emails
To access a list of unengaged contacts, as defined by HubSpot in the linked article above, navigate to a marketing email that is in draft mode > Edit > Send or Schedule > click “unengaged contacts” hyperlink.
NB: At the very least, you should suppress unengaged contacts from your marketing email sends so as not to damage your email sender reputation, which could result in your emails going to recipients’ Spam folders.
You may also decide to delete these contacts. As noted above, you may want to create a new list based on membership in the Unengaged Contacts list and then add criteria to this list to exclude any contacts with a lifecycle stage of SQL, Opportunity, Customer, or Evangelist. We may not want to delete contacts who are actively engaged with your sales team or current customers just because they don’t engage with your marketing emails.
Follow the steps here to check if your subscription includes Marketing Contacts. If it does, you can choose which contacts you’ll be marketing to and only those marketable contacts will be counted toward your contact pricing tier. If your subscription includes Marketing Contacts and you don’t want to delete unengaged contacts outright, you should still mark unengaged contacts as Non-Marketing Contacts so that you are not paying for contacts you don’t want to market to.
- Check your marketing email deliverability score with the email health tool.
Does your email deliverability score need improvement? If so, what needs the most work? Suppressing sends to unengaged contacts, creating more targeted recipient lists, and A/B testing your email subject lines and content may be helpful strategies to clean up your contact lists and improve email deliverability.
Key Skills:
Need to understand why or how a property was set to a certain value? Learn how to view property history and identify the source of the value change.
Need to update existing information for a group of records? Learn how to bulk edit records.
Step 3: Clean Up Your HubSpot Assets
Cluttered and outdated content can make it difficult to find the assets you are looking for, so it’s important to clean up unused content and keep assets organized with folders and clear, consistent naming conventions.
Clean Up Lists: Lists help you segment your contacts based on property information or engagement activity with your business. Contact lists can be selected as recipients in your marketing emails, filters for your reports, or candidates to go through an automated workflow. After watching the video lesson below, perform an audit of your existing lists.
- First, watch Understanding Segmentation in HubSpot.
- Then, delete unused lists in HubSpot.
- Finally, organize remaining lists into function-based folders to stay organized.
Clean Up Workflows (Professional or Enterprise Subscription): Understanding your existing workflow setup is critical as you ramp up in your role. You need to know what automated processes are happening behind the scenes. You may have workflows set up and running for lead nurturing, qualification, or routing processes, amongst other things. Once you watch the video lesson below, perform an audit of your existing workflows. You can delete unused workflows that are no longer necessary and organize workflows into function-based folders to stay organized.
- First, watch Understanding Workflows in HubSpot.
- Then, audit and clean up your workflows in HubSpot. You can use the unused workflows section to identify workflows that are turned off or haven’t executed any actions in the last 90 days.
- Finally, organize remaining workflows into function-based folders to stay organized.
Step 4: Get to Know Your HubSpot Tools
Now, it’s time to learn about the HubSpot tools included in your subscription so that you can get to work engaging your customers. If you have HubSpot Marketing Hub and are responsible for your company’s marketing efforts in HubSpot, complete the HubSpot Marketing Software Certification. If you have HubSpot Sales Hub and are responsible for your company’s sales efforts in HubSpot, complete the HubSpot Sales Software Certification.
There are lots of ways to learn more about the HubSpot tools, including video courses from HubSpot Academy and step-by-step tool guides on the HubSpot Knowledge Base. If you don’t know where to look, head over to Google and type in “HubSpot” and your question or the name of the tool you’d like to learn more about.