HubSpot Marketing Onboarding Plan: The First 30 Days

What are the best practices for onboarding a marketing team to HubSpot? Start with the one decision most plans skip: which contacts count as marketing contacts, and who is allowed to change that. A plan that starts with email templates leaves that decision to whoever imports the first file.

Marketing owns the parts of the portal that decide who enters the funnel: forms, segments, lifecycle stage on entry and marketing contact status. Here is a HubSpot marketing onboarding plan for those decisions in the first 30 days.

Why a HubSpot marketing onboarding plan goes wrong

Sales onboarding is about habits. Marketing onboarding is about defaults: each form, import and integration quietly makes a choice for you.

Two defaults matter most. According to HubSpot’s knowledge base, contacts created by HubSpot forms and non-HubSpot forms are set as marketing contacts by default, while imports, integrations and the API create non-marketing contacts by default. And every HubSpot form has a setting that updates contact and company lifecycle stage on submission. The forms documentation notes that lifecycle stage cannot move backwards this way, so a form that sets the wrong stage is hard to undo at scale.

If nobody decides these on purpose, the portal decides for you. Only marketing contacts count toward your contact tier, as HubSpot explains, so the bill follows those defaults too.

Who this matters for

• Heads of marketing who own the contact tier, the forms and the definition of a lead.
• Founders and CFOs who sign the Marketing Hub renewal. Marketing contacts exist on Marketing Hub Starter, Professional and Enterprise.
• Heads of sales, because the lifecycle stage marketing sets on a form is the handoff signal their team works from. The sales side of onboarding is in our HubSpot onboarding checklist for sales teams.

The first 30 days: who owns what

• Before day 1, the head of marketing and the admin: write down who is a marketing contact, which lifecycle stage a new form submission gets, and who may change either.
• Week 1, the admin: apply those rules to every live form, set user permissions, and review the lifecycle stages with sales.
• Week 2, the marketers: build the segments they actually need for the next campaign, not a library of every possible audience.
• Weeks 3-4, marketing and sales together: check that new form contacts land with the agreed stage and owner, and that the marketing contact count moves as expected.

What waits for month two: automation, lead scoring and attribution reports. They read the data the first month produces.

What to check in your portal

1. Lifecycle stages. Settings, then Data Management, then Objects, select Contacts and open the Lifecycle Stage tab. Only Super Admins can create and edit stages, per the lifecycle stage article.
2. Every live form. Go to Marketing, then Forms, open a form, click Edit form and the settings icon. Check Set new contacts as marketing contacts and the lifecycle stage the form sets on submission.
3. Non-HubSpot forms. In Settings, go to Marketing, then Forms, and open the Non-HubSpot Forms tab. The setting that makes these contacts marketing contacts is on by default, as the defaults article states.
4. Who can change marketing status. In Settings, under Users & Teams, edit a user’s permissions and under Account, then Settings access, review Marketing contacts access. HubSpot documents turning it off for users who should not set contacts as marketing in this article.
5. Segments. Lists are now called segments, under CRM, then Segments. Decide which should be active, updating as records meet the criteria, and which static, fixed when saved, as the segments article describes.
6. Submission notifications. In each form’s submission settings, choose whether the contact owner is notified or named users are. This is where the handoff to sales happens or silently fails.

Our take

Onboarding is where value is lost, and for marketing the loss is quiet. Nobody complains about a form default. Six months later the contact tier is higher than planned and lifecycle stages mean different things to different people.

The portal mirrors the process. If marketing and sales have never agreed when a contact becomes a lead, no setting will agree for them. That is one meeting and a one-page document, before the first import.

On ownership: the checks above are a few hours of admin work once, plus a short monthly review of new forms. If nobody can own that review, keep the number of forms small until someone can. To be fair to HubSpot, the per-form and per-tool defaults are flexible; most teams just never open them. If you are cleaning up an existing tier first, our post on HubSpot marketing contacts and dead records covers that side.

FAQ

What are the best practices for onboarding a marketing team to HubSpot?

Decide the rules before the training: who counts as a marketing contact, which lifecycle stage each form sets, and who may change either. Then apply them to every form, restrict marketing status permissions, and build only the segments the next campaign needs. Automation and scoring come in month two.

Do HubSpot form submissions count as marketing contacts?

By default, yes. HubSpot sets contacts created by HubSpot forms and non-HubSpot forms as marketing contacts, and you can turn that off per form or for non-HubSpot forms in settings. Contacts from imports, integrations and the API are non-marketing by default.

Who should own lifecycle stages in HubSpot, marketing or sales?

Both agree on the definitions, one person maintains them. In HubSpot only Super Admins can create and edit lifecycle stages, so the owner is usually the admin, working from definitions both heads signed off.

This week, list every live form and write next to it two things: does it create marketing contacts, and which lifecycle stage does it set. Fix any surprise before you train anyone.