So you recently started working with a team that uses HubSpot. Maybe you’re doing marketing, sales, or customer success; maybe you’re the CEO. Whatever department you’re in, keeping your HubSpot data accurate is huge in keeping a well-oiled revenue machine. I focus mainly on marketing and sales here, but I think these courses are essential for everyone.
Now, of course, HubSpot has different plans, and every upgraded plan allows you access to additional features, but in this article, I highlight the main courses/certifications you need to complete, how long they take, and what you get out of them.
Here are the main courses, in my opinion, that you should complete before you get too deep into HubSpot:
This course is mainly about how to manage your leads in HubSpot. It shows you how to build an effective strategy that aligns both your marketing and sales teams. B2B SaaS leads are expensive.
Every contact or company you have and every workflow you build is worth a lot of money, so this course is huge for sales and marketing teams.
Duration (including exams/quizzes): 4 hours
This is one of the first certifications everyone at Kalungi gets in their first week. It has an introduction to the HubSpot Marketing Hub and how to use the different tools in it. It’s 5 hours long (I think it’s advertised as 3.5 but it really ends up taking longer), so it’s a pretty good dive into how to use HubSpot.
It has an automation portion which I think is great. It has a content management portion, email marketing, and pretty much everything else in Marketing Hub. It’s great for any marketing hire on any level, but I also recommend it for salespeople or anyone that would be in your HubSpot account on a regular basis.
Duration (including exams/quizzes): 5 hours
This is another fundamental certification; I believe it’s one of HubSpot’s most popular courses. It’s designed for marketers, especially inbound marketers, but I still recommend it for your business development team. This is another one that’s advertised as 3.5 hours but might take longer.
It goes into understanding your buyer’s journey and how to create content for it. It also talks about HubSpot’s content distribution tools, which I found very useful, and finally, it gets into attribution and marketing automation as well. Obviously, this is designed by HubSpot, so it’s mainly their way of thinking about these topics and how to use the platform for them; however, I think it’s helpful for any marketer, even if you don’t use the platform.
Duration (including exams/quizzes): 5 hours
This one is huge for sales teams. If you’re using HubSpot to manage your pipeline, create new deals, or pull your sales reports, this one is a must. This course covers your sales process in HubSpot; it helps you create quotes and understand how to build sales and distribute sales content in HubSpot.
It also helps you understand how to build deal automation and workflows. Lastly, it shows you how to build reports and forecasting models. This is a must if you’re trying to scale your sales operations. Having the right workflows and reports in place makes your job so much easier and allows you to just focus on sales.
Duration (including exams/quizzes): 4 hours
This one is a short one. It’s an intro to Sales Hub, so just the basics of the platform. I think if nothing else, your sales (and marketing) teams should complete this course before clicking around in HubSpot and getting into the platform.
Like some of the other courses, it has practical exercises so it requires you to have a HubSpot account, but it’s very helpful and walks you through Sales Hub very well.
Duration (including exams/quizzes): 1 hour
Now that you know how to navigate your way around Sales Hub and have started creating some objects, this is how you actually close deals in HubSpot. I like it because it’s pretty straightforward. It always involves some reporting which you might find very helpful.
They do have a section that talks about the different Sales Hub plans you can get, but I think it’s very much “here’s what you can get,” and it’s not very salesy.
Duration (including exams/quizzes): 30 minutes
This certification allows you to execute inbound sales processes using HubSpot. I think it’s great for all levels of sales professionals. This, in my mind, is the sales equivalent of the marketing inbound certification. It goes through Sales Hub step by step, from identifying good-fit leads to filtering contacts properly and identifying your ICP and tracking it in HubSpot. Also, for those salespeople that are always on the go, this also talks about how to use the HubSpot app on your phone and how to scan business cards and such through it.
10/10 would recommend for any sales professional using HubSpot.
Duration (including exams/quizzes): 3 hours
This one is for sales managers. I wouldn’t recommend it to your BDRs, SDRs, or AEs (even though they can take it), but it’s very much a course about sales management strategy.
It discusses jobs to be done, how to map your sales process, sales coaching training, and even how to hire sales reps. I think it’s an excellent course for sales managers, CROs, and even CEOs.
Duration (including exams/quizzes): 6 hours
If you don’t do anything else on the list, check this one out. This course shows you how to create and manage custom reports in HubSpot. It covers the custom report builder, all the types of reports you can create, and how to filter them by properties. This is obviously very specific to HubSpot’s platform, but it lays out a good way to think about attribution reports and funnel reports.
From personal experience, this one is HUGE for marketers and sales professionals using HubSpot. Also, if you’re a CEO, COO, CFO, Chief of Staff, or someone that pulls reports from HubSpot on a regular basis, invest your time in this.
Duration (including exams/quizzes): 2.5 hours
HubSpot provides many more courses and certifications. The nine highlighted in this article are the most important ones for sales and marketing teams and B2B SaaS companies.
I guarantee you that if everyone on your team takes all of these courses (over a quarter or two, understandably a considerable time investment), you’ll see incredible ROI not just from the platform but from the data-driven teams you would have built and the technical reporting skills that everyone on your marketing and sales teams will acquire.
