Hello fellow HubSpot Admins! 
I’m working on improving our onboarding process for new HubSpot users and would love to learn from this amazing community.
1) What topics or training areas do you cover when onboarding someone new to your HubSpot portal? Are there any modules, tips, or habits you’ve found especially helpful?
2) Also curious: Do your users struggle to differentiate between HubSpot objects like Contacts, Companies, Deals, and Leads?
I’ve noticed that our users often mix them up, and sometime miss to associate one object to another. Would love to know if this has been a common hurdle for you too, and how you’ve addressed it.
Drop your thoughts, tips, or even resources below. Keen to learn from each other!
Many thanks!
Hi @marie9423498,
Great question! A lot of my reply will be flavored with personal preference but based on the experience of setting up dozens of teams with HubSpot.
First of all, I would not attempt to create one learning experience for all users and I am convinced that there is no such thing as the one correct onboarding path for all HubSpot users. In my opinion, learning paths should be role-based and reflect the business processes. For example, there’s no point in suggesting that everyone complete the HubSpot Sales Hub certification is you also have back-office users who simply need to now how to edit and extract records.
(Still, the HubSpot Marketing, Service and Sales Hub certifications are great starting points for people who have those roles in your company and in your HubSpot portal. Make sure to review these certifications before hand as some processes might be framed differently than how they’re executed at your company. When sharing Academy content with your users, you always want to point out where the course differs from your business reality.)
By creating learning paths for different roles, you’re reducing how much each invidual has to learn and the risk of them feeling overwhelmed. Academy playlists are great for that: Create and share Academy playlists
Secondly, I would design learning materials in step with permissions. A simple distinction could be learning materials to gain access to a junior/editor role, and advanced materials to a senior/admin role. The former would be designed to not generate any risk for damage (no deletion permissions, no workflows, no bulk permissions, etc). This helps build confidence with the tool and reduces risk of something going wrong.
Regarding your second question, this is mostly a matter of training and hammering it into users until they have a good grasp of it, in my opinion. Use examples for how to do it and not to do it, cover it early in your onboarding materials, explain how it’s different from other CRMs that your users might have used before and explain its benefits (and why things are possible with this object model that otherwise wouldn’t be). It can also help to build reports and show how this model translates into insights.
Hope this helps!