If you’re considering hiring a HubSpot consultant, you may be wondering what that person does or could do for your business.
The short answer is: a HubSpot consultant helps a business figure out how HubSpot should support its specific sales, marketing, and customer service needs, then helps put those plans into practice.
What that looks like can vary considerably from one company to another.
I’ve been working in HubSpot since 2012 and have been a HubSpot Solutions Partner since 2014. Over the years, I’ve been hired to help companies implement HubSpot for the first time, clean up portals that have become difficult to manage, improve sales processes, build marketing automation, fix reporting, launch campaigns, train teams, troubleshoot problems, and provide ongoing HubSpot administration and strategy.
That’s one of the reasons I find “What does a HubSpot consultant do?” surprisingly difficult to answer with a simple list of services.
The better answer is that a good HubSpot consultant helps connect what your business needs to accomplish with how HubSpot is actually configured and used.
A HubSpot Consultant Starts With the Business, Not the Software
One of the most important parts of HubSpot consulting happens before anything is built.
I need to understand questions like:
- How do leads enter the business?
- What happens to them after they do?
- How does sales decide whom to contact?
- What information needs to be captured?
- How are deals managed?
- What should be automated?
- What does management need to report on?
- How are marketing, sales, and customer service working together?
- Which other systems need to exchange information with HubSpot?
- Where is the current process breaking down?
Then we can determine how HubSpot should support those requirements.
For one recent Sales Hub project, for example, the starting point wasn’t “build some workflows.” The company had been using HubSpot for two years, but important sales features were underused or inconsistently applied. The work began with reviewing contacts, companies, deals, data quality, pipeline configuration, segmentation, scoring, automation, and reporting before deciding what needed to change.
That’s HubSpot consulting too.
HubSpot Implementation and Onboarding
Sometimes I’m brought in when a company is implementing HubSpot for the first time.
In that case, consulting can include configuring the CRM, setting up users, importing data, creating deal pipelines, establishing automation, building reports, setting up lead capture and conversion paths, creating segmentation, and training the people who will use the system.
But onboarding shouldn’t just be a checklist of HubSpot features.
The goal is to configure HubSpot around how the company actually operates, so the system is useful after onboarding is finished.
That may require decisions about how contacts and companies should be organized, how leads should be routed, what pipeline stages mean, which processes should be automated, and what the company needs to measure.
CRM Cleanup and Optimization
Plenty of companies don’t need a new HubSpot implementation. They already have HubSpot.
They just aren’t particularly happy with it.
Over time, a portal can accumulate old workflows, lists, reports, integrations, pipelines, data, and processes that no longer make sense. Teams change. Business processes change. Different people build things in different ways.
Eventually, HubSpot can become harder to trust and harder to use.
I’ve been hired specifically to clean and streamline existing HubSpot portals, standardize processes, improve lead routing, simplify reporting and integrations, and put systems in place to keep the CRM cleaner going forward.
A HubSpot consultant can help determine what’s worth keeping, what needs to change, and what is simply getting in the way.
Sales Process and Pipeline Optimization
Sometimes the real problem isn’t HubSpot itself. It’s that the way HubSpot is configured doesn’t match the way the company sells.
That can mean reviewing and restructuring deal pipelines, defining when deals should be created, improving contact segmentation, introducing lead scoring, building sequences, adding appropriate automation, and improving visibility into sales activity and pipeline health.
One of my Sales Hub engagements, for example, included refining pipeline stages around actual sales behavior, improving sequences, introducing automation, reorganizing contacts for multi-market selling, improving reporting, and training the team on how to use and maintain the system.
The goal isn’t simply to configure features. It’s to make HubSpot better support the sales process.
Workflows and Automation
Automation is another significant part of HubSpot consulting.
That might mean building a simple internal notification workflow, or it might mean designing a much larger automated customer journey.
I’ve built automation around lead assignment, sales pipelines, presale processes, abandoned carts, customer onboarding, re-engagement, renewals, lead nurturing, customer retention, and many other business processes.
The work often involves much more than building the workflow itself. Someone needs to determine who should enter it, what should happen, in what order, which data it depends on, what should cause someone to exit, how it interacts with other automation, and how success will be measured.
For example, one implementation included automated programs for abandoned carts, onboarding, reorder reminders, subscription renewals, win-back campaigns, and practitioner nurturing, along with defining the audience logic, timing, sequencing, and workflow rules behind them.
That’s the difference between knowing how to build a HubSpot workflow and knowing what workflow should be built in the first place.
Marketing Campaigns and Lead Nurturing
My own background is in marketing, so marketing strategy and execution have always been a substantial part of my HubSpot work.
That can include lead capture, forms, landing pages, email campaigns, segmentation, nurture programs, lifecycle campaigns, re-engagement, testing, and reporting.
And sometimes I’m involved from beginning to end.
One long-term engagement includes end-to-end campaign support across email, forms, testing, automation, and reporting, along with nurture strategy, email deliverability, sales pipeline automation, reactivation campaigns, and sales sequences.
Another involved importing and segmenting contacts, building lead capture paths, defining nurture triggers, developing drip campaigns, testing and launching the program, establishing KPIs, coordinating integrations, and training the internal team.
So a HubSpot marketing consultant may be both advising on the strategy and working directly inside HubSpot to execute it.
Data, Segmentation and CRM Structure
A lot of HubSpot problems are really data problems.
Contacts may not be segmented properly. Data may be incomplete or inconsistent. Teams may not agree on how information should be entered. Leads may not be routed correctly. Data coming from another system may not map cleanly into HubSpot.
Consulting work can therefore involve data hygiene, segmentation, contact strategy, lifecycle stages, associations, CRM architecture, imports, integrations, and, when appropriate, custom objects.
In one of my ongoing engagements, for example, I monitor contact and company data quality, implement data hygiene workflows, work with internal developers on syncing issues, and build and manage custom objects when the standard HubSpot data model isn’t enough.
The goal isn’t a theoretically perfect CRM. It’s a CRM that contains the right information, organizes it in a useful way, and can reliably support automation, reporting, and the people using it.
Reporting and Dashboards
Another common reason companies hire me is that they aren’t getting useful information out of HubSpot.
Sometimes reports need to be built. Sometimes existing dashboards need to be simplified. And sometimes the problem goes much deeper because the underlying data or process isn’t structured in a way that makes accurate reporting possible.
Reporting work might include sales activity, pipeline health, deal progression, campaign performance, conversion rates, attribution, revenue, or other KPIs.
One of my project scopes included not only building dashboards for pipeline health, deal length, and sales KPIs, but also validating website tracking and lead-source attribution so the underlying information would be reliable.
A dashboard is only useful if you can trust what it’s telling you.
Integrations and Connected Systems
HubSpot rarely operates completely on its own.
Companies may have billing systems, ecommerce platforms, data warehouses, communications tools, proprietary systems, or other applications that need to exchange information with HubSpot.
Depending on the project, my role may be hands-on integration work or working alongside developers and integration partners to define what HubSpot needs, validate mappings and data flows, identify problems, and make sure the technical implementation supports the business requirements.
I’ve worked with external integration partners to connect systems that improve lead nurturing and customer experiences. I’ve also served as the HubSpot-side consultant on larger implementations where another technical partner owns migration, backend configuration, and integration development.
That’s an important distinction. A HubSpot consultant doesn’t necessarily need to personally code every integration to play an important role in making sure the integration actually supports what the business needs HubSpot to do.
Training and User Adoption
Even a beautifully configured HubSpot portal isn’t particularly useful if nobody knows how to use it.
Training is therefore often part of my implementation and consulting work.
That can mean teaching a sales team how to use its pipeline and sequences, showing marketers how their data and automation work, training administrators to maintain the system, or helping individual users become more comfortable with HubSpot.
For one sales engagement, the training wasn’t generic HubSpot instruction. It was hands-on, role-based training around the person’s actual workflow, including segmentation, scoring, sequences, and pipeline use.
That’s generally how I think training works best: teach people how to use their HubSpot, not an imaginary demo portal.
Ongoing HubSpot Administration and Support
Not every HubSpot engagement has a defined beginning and end.
Some companies need someone who can stay involved, understand the business, and continually manage and improve HubSpot as new needs arise.
My ongoing work has included contact administration, list hygiene, reporting, workflow monitoring, error resolution, integration support, troubleshooting, email deliverability, campaign execution, new HubSpot functionality, and ad hoc platform support.
That’s very different from completing a single implementation project.
Over time, I become familiar with why the portal was configured a certain way, what the internal teams need, which systems connect to HubSpot, and what the company is trying to accomplish. That context makes it much easier to evaluate new requests and determine how they should fit into everything that’s already there.
So, What Does a HubSpot Consultant Actually Do?
There isn’t one universal job description.
A HubSpot consultant might help you:
- Implement HubSpot for the first time
- Audit and clean up an existing portal
- Improve CRM structure and data quality
- Design sales processes and pipelines
- Build workflows and automation
- Develop marketing campaigns and nurture programs
- Improve reporting and dashboards
- Plan or support integrations
- Configure custom objects
- Improve email health and deliverability
- Implement Service Hub processes
- Train your team
- Troubleshoot things that aren’t working
- Provide ongoing HubSpot administration, strategy, and optimization
But I think the common thread is simpler:
A HubSpot consultant helps make the platform work for the way your business actually operates.
Sometimes that means strategy. Sometimes it means implementation. Very often, it’s both.
And in my experience, the most useful HubSpot consulting happens when the person advising you on what should be done is also capable of getting into HubSpot and helping you do it.