What is a HubSpot Technical Review and Why You Should Care

As you start using HubSpot and entering all your business information in the system, it’s very important to have all your basic information updated and in sync. With your settings correctly set up, you don’t have to worry about adding styles in every email, for example, or looking in several different places to see traffic related to social media.

In this blog, we will explain how to review all your HubSpot’s Settings and make sure your processes are running smoothly in all areas of the CRM.

Getting Started with a Technical Review and Set Up in HubSpot

If you are a RevOps aficionado like us at Remotish, you should have documentation of your company processes. Now is the time to refer to that documentation, to make sure HubSpot’s settings are mirroring that process.

For example, do you want to trigger automatic association between companies and contacts based on domain? This can be a big decision, so having the documentation handy or the right team members around for this discussion is essential to move on with the technical review process.

Put someone in charge

Even though this technical review is essentially a one time operation, processes and needs can change over time. You need someone to be in charge and aware of the whole history on how you got there and why you made these decisions.

If you don’t have a CRM manager in your team, start looking for the person who is the most familiar with HubSpot or who will spend more time in the tool, for example. That way you can hold this person accountable for future updates in the settings moving forward, and have someone in control, to avoid unwanted changes in the system.

**Please note that depending on the level of HubSpot account you have, such as Free, Pro, Enterprise, you may see a few different options under settings.

HubSpot Technical Review and Set Up Steps

Let’s take a look at all options available in the HubSpot settings. Click on the cogwheel on top right of the screen, and see the options on the left of the page. We will explain what each area is below.

Your Preferences

This is the first option available on the left side of the settings screen. This area will only affect one individual account (yours) and it allows you to manage notifications and other individual preferences.

Sometimes a new HubSpot account will send you several emails for any activity such as form submission, chat conversations, etc. If you are receiving unwanted notifications, go to this area and check/uncheck the boxes of your preference.

Step 1: Account Defaults

First, add your company’s General info such as name, language, time zone.

Next, under Branding, add your company’s address, logo, and the main brand colors.

There you can also enable GDPR rules which is especially important if you do business in Europe. This can also be a big operational topic in your organization. Are you currently on top of all things related to privacy and consent? Once you have those answers, go back to this area to enable it.

Step 2: Contacts and Companies

Contacts

Turning on the option ‘Assign company owner to contact by default’ will make the owner of a company also the owner of all contacts associated with that company. You might decide to keep that button off if you have multiple sales reps working with different contacts associated with one company.

hubspot settings contacts

Companies

Lifecycle Stage Sync

By turning this option on, when a company’s lifecycle stage changes, the lifecycle stages of all associated contacts will be in sync. You should consider how your company refers to lifecycle stages and cross-reference with the HubSpot property Lifecycle Stages to ensure contacts will be labeled correctly. If the way HubSpot labels the stages works for you, turn this option on and let the automation make your process easier. Otherwise, rename the Lifecycle Stages in the settings in accordance with your naming convention to make sure your contacts continue with the correct labels.

You can choose to turn off the lifecycle stage sync if you do business with a contact, not a company, or if the company has different departments and divisions that operate differently and could each have different deals.

Automatically create and associate companies with contacts

When you create a contact using an email associated with a company website domain, HubSpot will automatically create a company to associate with this contact, and pull public information from the internet such as company size, URL, logo, etc. To prevent automatic creation of companies, turn this option off in this area.

The best option depends on how your business works. If you want all employees of the same company associated with the respective company record, turn this on.

If you do business with a contact, not the company, or if people operate under the same email domain but are considered independent, turn this off

Automatically fill company properties with HubSpot Insights

When you add a company with a company website domain, HubSpot will fill the company's properties with data using the HubSpot Insights database which can provide you some extant information related to companies and industries.

Privacy and Consent

Here you can find more granular options related to GDPR, and update the copy of the agreement messages that will be displayed in your website pages and forms. Consult your legal team for your specific company’s GDPR compliance needs.

Step 3: Conversations

Filtering Rules

Choose what kinds of emails should be filtered as spam. We recommend turning on all these options to prevent your inbox from filling up with unwanted emails.

Inboxes

Set up shared inboxes that your team can access a shared email address, chats, and other messages. For example, a general Sales email can be forwarded to a shared inbox where every member of your sales team can check for new messages directly in the CRM.

Step 4: Cookies

The Cookies area is another layer of the GDPR rules. This area sets up the actual notification that will appear on your website pages. Earlier we saw how to set up the legal message, here is how the notification appears on the screen and on which pages you want to enable that notification.

Step 5: Domains & URLs

Connect your website URL as a primary domain in order for it to be tracked by HubSpot. That way you can access your website’s activity in reporting tools inside HubSpot. If your website will be on HubSpot’s CMS, the domain needs to be connected.

That also applies to connecting a domain for landing pages, blogs and emails. In the case of emails, completing this step will prevent your marketing emails sent from HubSpot to go to spam folders.

Step 6: Import and Export

When you start importing and exporting contacts, you will be able to view these activities in this area.

Step 7: Integrations

Many types of software can be connected to HubSpot such as SurveyMonkey, Zapier, PandaDoc, Slack, etc. If you have an e-commerce website, you can connect a Shopify account, for example.

Integrations allow HubSpot to collect data from third-party software, providing you more complete and accurate reports, while also allowing you to operate certain apps from inside the CRM.

If you connect PandaDoc to HubSpot, you can easily send contracts from the CRM without logging into PandaDoc in a separate tab, for example.

Check out the App Marketplace and see if an integration is available for the other tools you use.

Step 8: Marketing

Ads

If you are running ads on Facebook, connect your account to HubSpot and collect data and reports inside the CRM. You can also connect Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads.

Email

Update your email configuration with a physical address and brand colors. This will allow you to create emails inside HubSpot with colors and fonts aligned with your brand, and with the correct footer information required by law. Updating this setting will ensure all your emails are following the company branding guidelines and you don’t need to do any extra updates for each email.

Subscription Types

Choose what kind of emails you will send to your database and name those subscription types in this area. Subscription types are the legal way to ensure your contacts agreed to and choose what emails they want to receive from you.

Make sure to keep this list short so you have better control of what emails your team will write and what your readers can expect.

A good way to get started with this is analyzing your current routine of marketing emails and narrowing down the topics you cover.

Forms

Same as email configuration, add your brand colors so all forms created in HubSpot are automatically aligned with your brand.

Social

Connect your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts to HubSpot using the social media tool. This will allow you to post, schedule posts, and access reports to help you see your most popular posts, new followers and more.

Step 9: Properties

Properties store data about contacts, companies, deals, products and tickets. There are several basic default properties already in HubSpot. As you start using the CRM you will discover what kind of data you need to collect from the contacts and companies you do business with. From there, you can create custom properties to fit this need. However, be mindful and avoid creating repeated or unnecessary properties.

Step 10: Reports

Goals

Create user-specific quotas for your sales and services teams. Managers can then assign these goals at the user, team, or pipeline level.

Tracking Code

The HubSpot tracking code is unique to each HubSpot account and allows HubSpot to report on your website traffic. If your website is not hosted in HubSpot (i.e you use WordPress or another system) you need to install the HubSpot tracking code manually to capture analytics for those pages. Do this as soon as possible when you start using HubSpot so you have more data in the CRM faster.

Step 11: Sales

Calls & Meetings

Enable and customize calls and meeting types for your team. By turning this option on, you can use the default names for meeting types or rename the call meeting types to accommodate the way your team operates. That option allows your team to choose one of these options to log their calls and makes it easier to search and report on. For example, you can run a report on how many calls of a certain type were completed in a certain period of time.

Deals

Sync lifecycle stage to associated contacts and companies.

By turning this option on, when a deal is created, the lifecycle stage of associated contacts and companies will be automatically updated to Opportunity. When a deal is won, they will be automatically updated to Customer. If you have different naming for lifecycle stages, or if different deals exist within the same company, turn this option off.

Deal Pipelines

Enter the name of your Deal Pipeline, its stages and their win probability. There is a default Sales Pipeline already in this area. We recommend keeping the number of pipelines to a minimum.

sales pipeline

Meetings

Connect your Gmail or Office 365 email account to HubSpot, and create a meeting link you can share with others. This is an easy way to have meetings scheduled without too much back and forth. This tool automatically blocks the occupied times on your calendar and reroutes the person scheduling to the next available time.

Product Library

Add your products with their description and price to HubSpot or import a spreadsheet with all the information by following the sample spreadsheet available in this area. This allows you to create deals, generate quotes, and create reports easily as all your products’ information is already in the CRM.

Step 12: Service

Tickets

Similar to the deal stages screen, here you can set up a Support pipeline and the stages using the Tickets tool that will help your service team be more efficient once they receive a customer request.

Knowledge Base

Set up your knowledge base URL and make it public or private. A public knowledge base is a good way to help your customers find the information they need without having to contact you, if you provide answers to common customer questions and concerns.

If you make a private internal knowledge base, take this opportunity to document your company processes. Share these with your team to add that RevOps touch to your HubSpot.

Step 13: Users & Teams

Here you can add new users to HubSpot and define what kind of permissions this team member should have. You only need to add an email address, and the person will receive an invite to join your HubSpot portal.

If you need to revisit this person’s permissions, you can come back to this tab in Settings.

Create Teams to group your team members in a common category. This will also allow view reports based on teams, and allow you to set permissions in bulk according to teams..

A good way to revamp the user permissions in HubSpot is to add to a spreadsheet all your team members name and role, and cross reference with the permission options in HubSpot. That way you can establish who needs what access. For example, import, export, and delete records is the type of permissions that most people should not have. That step is important to make sure no data disaster is possible, and keeps the team focused on their essential tasks in HubSpot.

Step 14: Website

Here you can set up a HubSpot blog, set up your website themes and your navigation at any point. To stay focused in the technical review right now, make sure to click on Pages and see if there is any branding that needs to be included in the settings, as well as checking SEO crawlers and integrations with Google Analytics. That will ensure the CRM is tracking data at all times.

Conclusion

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If you need help to audit your HubSpot portal and clean your data, feel free to book a call below with a HubSpot expert: