5 metrics to track the success of your HubSpot onboarding

How to track if your HubSpot Onboarding has been successful

More than 177,000 companies use HubSpot to optimise their marketing and sales efforts by forming more robust, personalised, and deeper relationships with target audiences throughout their buying journey.

This figure is from HubSpot, and there is a good chance that your company is one of them and has invested in this CRM platform to improve your sales and marketing efforts, increase productivity, break inter-departmental silos, and back your customer-centric decision-making with meaningful data.

One of the critical components of effective HubSpot adoption is HubSpot onboarding. It is a comprehensive process that takes new users through the various features of HubSpot. This is a hands-on process whose fundamental objective is to improve the user group's comfort with HubSpot and decrease time to value. In addition, the onboarding process focuses on ensuring users can achieve their pre-determined functional goals with this platform.

But here’s the thing, any companies see this as a checklist item, without measuring the results of the onboarding process. They do not ask themselves a pertinent question - Has the HubSpot onboarding plan delivered value? The answer to this question is simple, yes, no, or you don’t know. If it’s the first, well and good, but if you are unhappy with your onboarding’s ROI or have no clarity on whether things have improved, you have a problem.

Insider Intelligence says B2B and B2C marketing spending will hit $8.51 billion and $18.60 billion, respectively. This is in the US alone, and irrespective of where your company is based, if you are investing in marketing technology, you are contributing these marketing spend figures. While this is good news for the companies selling these technologies, it must also work for you.

It all begins with onboarding.

The Necessity of HubSpot CRM Onboarding

Gartner estimated that in 2021, 26.2% of the marketing budget comprised marketing tech spend. There is a reason why companies are spending money on technologies like end-to-end CRM platforms. For a long while, most companies have been challenged by the various departmental pillars of customer experience management, like marketing, sales, customer service, content, and operations, working in silos. This means critical stakeholders do not have a single source of truth regarding data from these departments, resulting in them working at cross-purposes with one another rather than leveraging an integrated approach.

Another problem is data inaccuracy resulting from human errors, outdated data, and an inability to track customer relationship activities, monitor results in real-time, and record this data automatically.

In order to address such issues, most companies decide to implement a CRM solution like HubSpot for customer success that helps them approach their customer relationship activities in a more strategic, planned, and efficient manner; this helps them accelerate customer acquisition and improve retention.

However, the adoption of any new technology comes with its set of challenges. One of the biggest challenges is the ‘natural’ resistance to change, which interferes with technology adoption and being able to maximise its potential. Let’s think of this from the perspective of a marketing team that has been asked to ready themselves for HubSpot. They are well aware how this platform will help them improve marketing efficiency. But they are concerned that using a new technology will be difficult for them, forcing them to rethink their marketing strategies, and they will have to reimagine their existing workflows, which might or might not result in team realignment.

This is where HubSpot onboarding plays a vital role. It seeks to ease the process of using new MarTech solutions and remove any doubts or fears new users might have regarding using it. It impresses upon them that HubSpot will help them do their jobs better and achieve their marketing KPIs faster and more efficiently.

Telltale Signs of HubSpot Onboarding Not Delivering Returns

Think of a scenario wherein your teams have gone through the onboarding process, and over time you realise that the productivity hasn’t improved, teams are unable to structure outcomes-focused workflows and still unable to rely on data to improve campaigns. As a result, the platform is not delivering the ROI you expected from its deployment. Both marketing and sales cannot create personalised messaging at every stage of the buyer journey, which results from improper customer segmentation.

According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect personalisation, meaning the inability to deliver personalised messaging will harm the ability of marketing and sales to push customers through the buyer funnel. This will impact revenue.  

This scenario is completely antithetical to what you hoped to achieve with HubSpot and its onboarding. Some of the significant deliverables you were looking for were better productivity and efficiency backed by automation, improved lead management nurturing, and better campaign results with improved customer insights courtesy of accurate and meaningful data. Couple that with a much-improved customer experience, a streamlined sales process that accelerated sales pipelines, and more data-driven decision-making, and you will have a winning business on your hands.

But since that is not the case, you have to find reasons. One of them is that you did not track the success of HubSpot onboarding.

What are the Key HubSpot Onboarding Success Metrics?

Here’s a closer look at the metrics you need to track to check whether the onboarding process has been successful:

CSAT Score

The customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is an ideal and one of the most direct ways of calculating the success or failure of the onboarding process. When it comes to HubSpot onboarding, you can create a survey that clearly mentions the objectives of the onboarding process and whether it has been of help and will address the users' challenges. E.g., if your team wanted to automate their email marketing and accelerate this process, and improve the efficiency of lead nurturing with email marketing, a simple question on whether the users think they are confident that the HubSpot onboarding process will help them realise their email marketing goals will provide the answer you are looking for.

The CSAT score aims to understand whether the team is satisfied with the onboarding process. If the CSAT score is not good, you can ask for another round of onboarding to address their queries and the features they did not understand fully.

User Satisfaction Surveys

Typically, sending such surveys a few days after the onboarding process and when users have just started their HubSpot journeys is advisable. There might be a few users who were already aware of HubSpot and its various features and others who would have been using it at a previous company, so a bit of personalisation across the user satisfaction surveys that take note of the usage maturity levels will help. Such surveys must be sent at regular intervals. The first surveys can be sent out immediately after the onboarding, asking for feedback on the nature of onboarding and whether it was comprehensive and took care of all their queries and concerns.

The next stage of surveys can be built around specific onboarding outcomes. Such surveys can have open-ended questions in terms of ‘how the onboarding has helped them achieve their objectives. E.g., ‘How is HubSpot helping them create a better content calendar for TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU? Or ‘How is HubSpot helping push better quality leads to sales.?’

Time to Value (TTV)

One of the essential customer success metrics to track is TTV. If you are measuring TTV against a parameter like ‘revenue earned’ or ‘TCO’ it might take some time to evaluate HubSpot’s performance on this particular parameter. Instead, the TTV, specifically for onboarding, should be measured in short-term deliverables. E.g., improvement in lead management in areas like lead scoring.

While TTV is a long-drawn-out metric, you must be a little patient, onboarding is a different ball game. With onboarding, the time to value can be measured in the efficiencies you can discern in the marketing team. Say it took 3-4 days to perform a drill-down analysis of a marketing campaign (thinking conservatively). With HubSpot, these insights are gained almost immediately by leveraging its built-in analytics, made available through custom dashboards. If your team has experienced this tangible benefit, it tells you that the TTV seen from the lens of this specific deliverable is reduced substantially.

As a manager, it is imperative that you track TTV based on the expected deliverables from HubSpot and whether these can be achieved within an accelerated time frame. If the onboarding process is successful, you will realize that the pre-determined objectives from HubSpot are all set to be achieved in a limited timeframe.

Alignment with Business Objectives

Setting realistic marketing objectives aligned with business goals helps you underline critical KPIs for your team that can help achieve pre-determined and positive business outcomes. With HubSpot becoming the nerve center of your marketing and sales activities, you must be able to measure the success or failure of your onboarding process by benchmarking with business objectives. Again, this cannot happen immediately, but to get started, you need an onboarding process that keeps your business outcomes in mind.

The HubSpot implementation checklist (a critical part of onboarding) must cover configurations and workflows aligned with your business objectives. E.g., business revenue needs to be aligned with more extensive sales pipelines and faster sales closures; this, in turn, must be aligned with marketing strategies, campaigns, and workflows that deliver better quality MQLs that have a better chance of becoming SQLs, which in turn can becoming meaningful opportunities. Everything is connected, and these connections can be made in HubSpot, and the onboarding process needs to facilitate these connections and alignments.

Retention Rate

Earlier in the blog, we talked about the barriers to accepting new technology. The comfort or discomfort of users with any new technology can be measured by the retention rate. Irrespective of whether users are excited or not too keen on using HubSpot, retention is a critical success metric. How many users in your team stopped using HubSpot or decided their traditional working methodology was better suited to deliver on their OKRs or KPIs? How many decided HubSpot was not working for them because it was too complicated to use?

HubSpot onboarding strives to smooth all concerns and rough edges and bring more acceptability for using a CRM platform. This process amplifies the benefits of automation, accurate data, customer segmentation, generative AI, better sales and marketing alignment, and more, so that users can see a lot of merit in using this platform.

Conclusion

A HubSpot onboarding plan can come undone if clear success metrics aren’t established before the process begins. Also, the onboarding team must be given clarity on these metrics so there is no misalignment. This will ensure that you can make the most of HubSpot onboarding and maximize HubSpot’s potential over the long term.

Look no further if you need a perfect HubSpot onboarding process. TransFunnel, a HubSpot Onboarding accredited partner can ensure all the above mentioned 5 metrics are adhered to while onboarding you onto HubSpot.

Get HubSpot onboarded with ease!