Professional services firms often have a different relationship with HubSpot than companies selling a straightforward product.
Your sales cycle may be long. Multiple people may be involved in winning an account. Relationships matter. Referrals matter. The person who originally generated an opportunity may not be the person who ultimately closes it. And a single client relationship can lead to multiple engagements over several years.
That can make implementing HubSpot more complicated than simply creating a pipeline and moving deals from one stage to the next.
If you’re evaluating HubSpot consulting services for a professional services firm, the consultant’s job shouldn’t just be to configure HubSpot. They need to understand how your firm actually develops business and translate that process into a CRM your team will use.
Why Do Professional Services Firms Hire HubSpot Consultants?
Some firms hire a HubSpot consultant when they’re purchasing the platform for the first time. Others already have HubSpot but aren’t getting enough value from it.
The second situation is extremely common.
HubSpot may technically be up and running, but the firm still can’t confidently answer questions such as:
Which marketing efforts are generating opportunities?
Where are our best clients coming from?
Which services are generating the most pipeline?
How long does it typically take an opportunity to close?
Are people actually using the CRM consistently?
Can we connect marketing activity to closed revenue?
That’s usually not a HubSpot software problem. It’s an implementation problem.
A good consultant should be able to look at the business questions you’re trying to answer and work backward to determine how HubSpot needs to be structured.
What Should HubSpot Consulting Services Include?
This depends heavily on what your firm needs, which is one reason I’m wary of overly standardized HubSpot consulting packages.
For a professional services firm, an engagement might include CRM architecture, pipeline design, automation, lifecycle management, lead routing, reporting, datasets, integrations, custom objects, association structures, marketing automation, sales processes, and team training.
But the list of HubSpot features isn’t really the point.
The important question is whether your consultant can take something like:
“We can’t tell which marketing activities are actually influencing new business.”
and determine what needs to change in HubSpot to answer it.
That may require changes to data structure, attribution, campaign tracking, associations, deal processes, integrations, or reporting. Often, it’s a combination of several things.
The consultant should be solving the business problem, not simply implementing whichever HubSpot feature appears to correspond with the request.
For a closer look at the different ways a consultant can help, I’ve written a guide explaining what a HubSpot consultant does, with examples drawn from my own consulting work.
Revenue Attribution Can Be Especially Complicated for Professional Services
Professional services don’t always have a clean lead-to-sale journey.
A prospect might discover your firm through an article, attend a webinar six months later, get referred by an existing client, speak with a partner, disappear for a year, and eventually return with a project.
Or an existing client might hire you for an entirely different service because of a relationship that began several years earlier.
That makes revenue attribution complicated.
HubSpot can provide powerful reporting, but the reporting is only as useful as the underlying CRM structure and data.
Before building dashboards, I want to understand things like how your firm defines a new opportunity, what counts as new business versus expansion business, how contacts relate to companies and deals, which marketing activities matter, and what leadership actually wants to learn from the data.
Otherwise, you can end up with very sophisticated-looking reports that don’t answer the right questions.
What Should You Look for in a HubSpot Consultant?
There are a lot of HubSpot consultants and HubSpot consulting firms to choose from, and partner status alone doesn’t tell you what working with them will actually be like.
I’d pay attention to a few things.
Who will actually do the work? If you’re talking to a senior strategist during the sales process, find out whether that person will still be involved once the engagement begins.
Will they work inside HubSpot? There’s a big difference between someone who advises your team and someone who can actually build, troubleshoot, and improve the portal.
Do they ask about your business before recommending solutions? HubSpot configuration should follow your processes, not the other way around.
Can they work beyond the initial implementation? Your needs won’t stop the day HubSpot goes live.
Can they explain their pricing clearly? You should understand what you’re buying, what’s included, and what happens when the scope changes.
I’ve put together a more detailed list of questions to ask a HubSpot consultant before hiring one if you’re actively comparing options.
How Much Do HubSpot Consulting Services Cost?
HubSpot consulting costs vary considerably depending on the scope of the work and whether you need a one-time project, ongoing support, or a full HubSpot implementation.
I publish my pricing because I think businesses should be able to determine whether a consultant is realistically within their budget before scheduling a call.
Here’s how my HubSpot consulting pricing works:
- One-off HubSpot projects start at $500. These are designed for businesses with a specific HubSpot problem or defined project, such as automation, CRM architecture, reporting, integrations, custom objects, sales processes, Service Hub, or another focused need.
- HubSpot training is available at $120 per hour. This can be used for individual or team training on the parts of HubSpot you actually need help with.
- Ongoing HubSpot consulting is priced as a monthly retainer based on the amount and type of support your business needs. My ongoing consulting engagements typically range from $3,500 to $7,500 per month.
- HubSpot onboarding is scoped according to the products you’re purchasing and the complexity of the implementation. This is hands-on implementation, meaning I’m actually configuring HubSpot around your business rather than simply providing guidance for your team to do the setup itself.
Those numbers also aren’t interchangeable. A company that needs a few hours of training shouldn’t be pushed into a monthly retainer, and a business with one defined HubSpot problem may only need a $500+ project. On the other hand, a company that needs ongoing strategy, administration, optimization, and hands-on execution may be better served by a consulting retainer.
That’s why I try to match the engagement to the work rather than force every client into the same package.
You can see more about my one-off HubSpot projects, ongoing HubSpot consulting, and hands-on HubSpot onboarding.
Independent HubSpot Consultant or HubSpot Consulting Firm?
Professional services firms can get excellent HubSpot support from either an independent consultant or an agency.
The working models are different.
A larger HubSpot agency may give you access to a broader team of strategists, developers, designers, content specialists, and other resources. That can make sense if you need several disciplines working simultaneously.
With an independent consultant, you’re typically working directly with the person doing the HubSpot work.
That’s how I operate.
If we discuss a reporting problem, I’m the person who goes into HubSpot and investigates it. If your automation needs to be reworked, I’m the person building it. If we need to rethink the way your CRM is structured, I’m involved in both the strategy and the implementation.
Neither model is inherently right for every firm. I’ve written a separate guide to choosing between a HubSpot consultant and an agency if you’re comparing the two.
Do You Need a HubSpot Consultant With Professional Services Experience?
Industry experience can certainly help, but I wouldn’t make it your only criterion.
What’s more important is whether the consultant understands the complexity behind relationship-driven sales.
Professional services firms need a CRM that can accommodate people, companies, opportunities, relationships, referrals, multiple services, long sales cycles, repeat business, and whatever else makes their particular business model different.
A consultant should be able to understand those nuances and determine how HubSpot should represent them.
That’s much more important than forcing your firm into a template simply because it worked for another professional services company.
What Does Hands-On HubSpot Implementation Mean?
This is an important question to ask because HubSpot implementation services can mean very different things depending on who’s providing them.
Some engagements are primarily guidance. Your consultant tells you what to configure and your team does the work.
My approach is hands-on.
I work directly in HubSpot to build and configure what we’ve agreed on. Your team still needs to be involved because I need to understand how your business operates, but you aren’t hiring me simply to give you a checklist of things to build yourself.
That’s particularly useful for smaller and midsize professional services firms that don’t have a dedicated HubSpot administrator sitting in-house.
The Goal Isn’t a More Complicated HubSpot Portal
It’s a more useful one.
Professional services firms can easily fall into the trap of building increasingly complicated systems in an attempt to capture every possible nuance of the business.
Complexity should have a reason.
Your HubSpot portal should make it easier for your team to understand relationships, manage opportunities, follow up with prospects, measure marketing, report on revenue, and make better decisions.
If a sophisticated workflow, custom object, integration, or reporting structure helps accomplish that, great.
If it doesn’t, you probably don’t need it.
The best HubSpot implementation isn’t the one with the most impressive architecture. It’s the one your team can actually use.
Finding the Right HubSpot Consulting Partner for Your Firm
When you’re comparing HubSpot consultants, start with the problems you need to solve rather than a list of HubSpot features.
Maybe you’re implementing HubSpot for the first time. Maybe your existing portal has become difficult to manage. Maybe you can’t connect marketing activity to revenue. Or maybe your team needs ongoing HubSpot expertise but doesn’t need another full-time employee.
Those situations require different kinds of support.
I’ve been working with HubSpot since 2012 and have been a HubSpot Solutions Partner since 2014. My work combines hands-on implementation with the marketing and sales strategy behind it, and I work with clients both on individual projects and through long-term consulting relationships.
You can learn more about how I work with professional services firms using HubSpot or schedule a 15-minute introductory call to tell me what you’re trying to accomplish.