How-to · HubSpot
How to create HubSpot onboarding documentation
New reps don't need a tour of every HubSpot feature. They need to know how your team creates contacts, logs activity and moves deals, with your properties and your pipeline. Here's how to document that in an afternoon.
Step by step
- 01
List the five tasks a new rep does in week one
Ask your best rep what they did most in their first week. Typically: create a contact, log a call or email, create a deal, move a deal stage, and find their open tasks. Each becomes one short guide.
- 02
Use a test contact
Recording with a real customer puts their details in screenshots. Create a test contact such as 'Test Onboarding' with a test email, and delete it when you're done.
- 03
Record creating a contact
Go to CRM > Contacts, click Create contact in the upper right, and fill in the properties your team requires. Include the email: HubSpot uses it to deduplicate contacts and to associate them with companies automatically. Guidie records the property labels, never the values you type.
- 04
Record logging an activity
Open the test contact and log a call or email the way your team does it, including the outcome property if you use one. This is the step managers care about most in reports.
- 05
Record creating and moving a deal
Create a deal from the contact record, choose your pipeline and stage, then move it to the next stage. Show any required properties that appear when the stage changes.
- 06
Review the AI steps and add your rules
Guidie writes each instruction with the button or property name in bold. Add one line of team policy where it matters, for example 'Always set Lead status to Attempted after the first call.'
- 07
Bundle the guides into an onboarding checklist
Put the five guides, in order, on one onboarding page and add the narrated videos for people who learn by watching. New reps can work through them on day one.
HubSpot workflows worth documenting first
Creating a contact without duplicates
Show searching first, then creating, and why the email address matters for deduplication.
Logging calls and emails
Which activity type and outcome to choose so reporting works.
Moving a deal through your pipeline
Your stages, the properties each stage requires, and when to mark a deal lost.
Handing a contact over to support
Who changes owner or lifecycle stage, and what note to leave.
Importing a list from an event
Imports touch many records at once; a guide prevents messy data.
Onboarding docs are about your process, not HubSpot's features
HubSpot Academy teaches HubSpot. Your onboarding should teach how your team uses HubSpot: which properties are required, what each pipeline stage means, when to log what. That's the part no course covers, and the part new reps get wrong.
Keep each guide to one task
A 40-step "Using HubSpot" document is never read. Five guides of six to ten steps are. Name each one with the task: "Create a contact", "Log a call", "Move a deal to Negotiation".
Watch for data in screenshots
CRMs are full of personal data. Record with a test contact, and check every screenshot before sharing. Guidie helps by masking fields you type into and flagging emails and phone numbers elsewhere on the page, but a test record is still the safest option.
Plan for change
HubSpot updates its interface regularly, and your admins will add properties. Give every onboarding guide an owner and re-record it when a screen changes. With a recorder, a five-minute task takes five minutes to redo.
Questions people ask
Why do my HubSpot screens look different from the guide?
Can I record HubSpot without exposing customer data?
How many onboarding guides should a new rep get?
Sources
- HubSpot Knowledge Base: Create contacts · checked
- HubSpot Knowledge Base: Create records on the index page · checked
- HubSpot Knowledge Base: Manage your CRM database · checked
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