3 tips to help you become a HubSpot Expert
Can you call yourself a HubSpot Expert? Sometimes my students ask how they can take their HubSpot knowledge to the next level, to potentially work as a consultant offering HubSpot services or join a company in search of a HubSpot Expert.
Today, I want to give you 3 tips on how to become a HubSpot Expert.
Let’s dive into each tip with examples!
1) Think about HubSpot as a whole, not a collection of isolated features
2) Learn how to audit a HubSpot account
3) First, learn how to use a HubSpot account; then, understand how to manage it
Ready to start? Let’s dive into each one!
1) Think about HubSpot as a whole, not a collection of isolated features.
When you use HubSpot daily, it's tempting to focus on specific features that are crucial to your tasks. For instance, if you're a marketing professional, you might use the CRM and HubSpot's marketing features a lot.
You're busy sending marketing email campaigns, creating forms, publishing landing pages, and more. But you might not spend much time in the Sales Hub, that part of HubSpot with deals and other sales-centric tools.
That's understandable. If you don’t need the sales features daily, there's no reason to use them. But you should at least…
Be familiar with their functions and how they relate to the tools you use every day. Why? Because in HubSpot, everything is interconnected.
Say your manager asks you to build a report on revenue generated from event leads. To create this, you'd need data from both CONTACTS and DEALS.
HubSpot pulls financial data from deals. If your contacts – the event attendees – aren't associated with any deals, your report will be empty. That's because HubSpot won't understand the relationship between the "existing deals in the system" and the "event attendees." they correspond to. In other words, HubSpot won't recognize that there might be deals linked to these event attendees! For this reason, even if you don't directly use HubSpot Deals, understanding why they exist and how you should associate them with other elements in your account is crucial.
It's important to know about all features, even if you aren't using them directly.
Throughout my consulting career, I've seen many clients use only the HubSpot features they need and ignore the rest. So, my tip for you: Have a big-picture view of HubSpot, even if you're using just a fraction of what it offers.
Everything inside HubSpot is interconnected!
2) Learn how to perform a HubSpot account audit
Whether you're a business owner, an employee at a company that uses HubSpot, or help clients with HubSpot, it's vital to know how to audit an account. An audit ensures your data is clean and organized and that you're getting the most from your HubSpot subscription. You'll check for duplicate contacts, review workflows, and see if deal pipelines match your sales process. An audit shows areas for improvement and features you might be missing out on.
Here’s a quick summary of what you want to review inside an Audit:
Important Settings (in the Setting sections of HubSpot)
CRM (here, you want to check whether the CRM data is healthy - remember that everything else you’re building inside HubSpot depends on this!)
The Hubs (Marketing and Sales, at least!) - here you want to check the quality of assets created inside HubSpot, as well as proper deals setup
The Automation section - It’s crucial to review how the business is using Automation to ensure our efforts are directly or indirectly moving leads down the funnel
Reporting (broken reports? empty reports? here’s where you tackle this!)
3) First, learn how to use a HubSpot account. Then, learn how to manage it.
These are two different skills. Knowing how to use HubSpot means understanding the basics. But managing a HubSpot account is a completely different thing. Managing a HubSpot account is about making sure things are properly set up and each and every team member is following best practices and keeping things organized. It's less about using the account and more about watching over it.
Managing a HubSpot account involves:
Ensuring that each and every team member is following best practices
Keeping the data healthy and organized
Knowing how to prevent (or deal with) HubSpot common errors
Having a strategy for any type of HubSpot implementation work.
Looking back, this skill set is why I became a HubSpot consultant. Clients didn't just want someone who knew how to use HubSpot. They needed someone to oversee their accounts and keep things running smoothly on behalf of their team.
Hey, do you want to become a HubSpot Expert?
You want to make money offering HubSpot as a service
OR you want to become the HubSpot go-to person at your company
OR you are a business owner and want to make your HubSpot investment worthwhile
Sign up to my free masterclass below!