Train Your Users (And Drive Adoption!) in HubSpot

Once your initial setup and configuration is complete, you may think that your project is ready to wind down.

You’d be wrong.

The most common mistake we see with clients who attempt to self-implement before partnering with us is that they did not provide training or take any action to drive user adoption. 

A home construction contractor wouldn't build a house without a plan, right?  He would create a blueprint and construct a solid foundation, ensuring that every brick is in place and every nail is hammered correctly.  He would be proud of the structure he built and ready to make the finishing touches.

So, why not just let everyone choose and decorate their own room, hang their own light fixtures, and move in as they please without any kind of guidance or guardrails?

Because he likely wouldn't like how the home turned out, right?

Similarly, it would be just as unwise to hand over full access to HubSpot to your team without any kind of training. Just like a house needs proper care and understanding to function well, your team needs the right guidance to make the most of your new system. Proper training ensures that your team knows how to use the tools effectively, maximizing the value of your investment.

We recommend taking several key steps when building your training plan.

[Ascend has earned the HubSpot Platform Enablement Accreditation, validating our advanced expertise and experience in driving high user adoption rates through customized training and change management engagements. More on what this means here.]

1. Leverage HubSpot Academy To Familiarize Your Users with HubSpot

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. HubSpot Academy offers hundreds of courses in various aspects of its software. Depending on your needs and priorities, work to identify a list of required training for your team to get up to speed on the basic aspects of the tool. This way, they can go on and become familiar with HubSpot, and your efforts can be focused on your custom settings and processes.

Sticking with our sales examples, here are sales-focused courses to consider:

• HubSpot Sales Software
• Inbound Sales
• Sales Enablement

With the basics covered by HubSpot academy, tailor your custom training to your processes and unique configuration of HubSpot. We recommend a combination of group and individual training sessions. Group sessions cover major processes and the overarching architecture and configuration of your HubSpot instance. Individual sessions can be used to train users on how to manage their daily tasks and allow for more Q&A. Where possible, design and schedule sessions by role and/or job focus so content is tailored to attendees and participants are more engaged.

3. Document Training for Future Reference

Document. Document. Document. As your team members are transitioning to your new CRM, make it easy and fast for them to revisit training when they have a question or need a refresher on how to complete a process in HubSpot. This is also key to maintaining your system as employees come and go, and making it easy for new employees to learn HubSpot quickly when they join your company. 

At Ascend, we deliver both custom training dashboards right within HubSpot as well as a “HubSpot Playbook” for clients once the implementation and training is complete. 

The playbook includes:

• Documentation on the client’s unique HubSpot architecture
• Training materials (reference documents and recorded video training sessions)

Any time there is a proposed change to a client’s HubSpot configuration, the playbook is consulted to check for any downstream implications. Once the build change is approved and live in HubSpot, the playbook is adjusted to reflect the updates. 

It goes without saying, but training references are pivotal to driving long-term adoption as well as maintaining the health of your CRM.