The HubSpot Setup Checklist for New Accounts

Go to Settings > Account Defaults > General and set your time zone before anything else. Every deal close date, email send time, and reporting dashboard uses this setting. Get it wrong and your data is permanently offset.

Still in Account Defaults, set your currency and date format to match your market. Mixing US and UK date formats in a pipeline is how you misread close dates for months.

Go to Settings > Domains and Urls and set your default HubSpot subdomain (e.g. info.yourdomain.com). This affects meeting links, landing pages, and email tracking. Do it now before those assets go out with a random HubSpot URL.

Go to Settings > Marketing > Email > Sending Domains. Add and verify your sending domain (SPF and DKIM records via your DNS provider). Emails sent without this will hit spam at scale.

Go to Settings > Users and Teams. Add every team member and assign roles (Super Admin, Sales, Marketing, View Only). Never share your Super Admin login. Role-based access prevents accidental data deletion and keeps your audit log clean.

Go to Settings > Users and Teams > Teams. Group users by function (e.g. Sales, Marketing, Client Services). Teams let you filter reports, assign owners in bulk, and control which views each function sees.

Go to Settings > Account Defaults and disable 'Include HubSpot branding in emails and forms' if your plan allows it. The default is on. Sending branded emails with HubSpot's footer logo undermines trust on cold outreach.

Go to Settings > Properties > Contact Properties and filter by 'HubSpot default'. Read every default property before creating a custom one. Duplicating a property that already exists (e.g. creating 'Industry Type' when 'Industry' already exists) splits your data and breaks list segmentation.

HubSpot's default 'Original Source' property is high-level (Organic Search, Direct, etc.). Create a custom single-line text or dropdown property called 'Lead Source Detail' to capture specifics like 'LinkedIn DM', 'Podcast Guest', or 'Newsletter Referral'. Map it in your forms and workflows.

Create a dropdown called 'Contact Type' with values that match your actual audience segments (e.g. Founder, Marketing Manager, Agency Partner). This is how you send different sequences to different people without building five separate lists.

Go to Settings > Properties, select any contact property, and toggle 'Required for contact creation'. At minimum require: First Name, Last Name, Email, and your Lead Source Detail property. Optional fields stay optional; required fields enforce data hygiene from day one.

Create a Yes/No property called 'Do Not Contact'. Then create a static suppression list using that property. Enrol every email and sequence trigger in an exclusion step that checks this list. GDPR compliance depends on this being set up before any outreach starts.

Go to Settings > Objects > Contacts and enable 'Automatically create and associate companies with contacts'. HubSpot reads the email domain and creates or links a company record. Without this, every contact is an island and your company-level reporting is useless.

Create or activate the 'Annual Revenue' and 'Number of Employees' company properties if your ICP has a revenue or size filter. Map these in your lead scoring or use them to route contacts to different sequences automatically.

The defaults are: Subscriber, Lead, Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Opportunity, Customer, Evangelist. Before you touch them, write out what your actual buying journey looks like and assign each stage to a real trigger. If a stage does not apply to your business, note that now so your team does not use it inconsistently.

Go to Settings > Objects > Contacts > Lifecycle Stages. Write a one-line definition for your MQL criteria and save it in an internal note or your HubSpot wiki. Common triggers: downloaded a specific resource, visited pricing page twice, replied to a sequence. If it is not written down, every team member will decide for themselves.

SQL means sales-ready, not just interested. Define the specific criteria (e.g. booked a discovery call, budget confirmed, decision-maker identified). Document the same way as MQL. These two definitions are the backbone of your marketing-to-sales handoff.

Go to Automation > Workflows and build a contact-based workflow that moves contacts through lifecycle stages based on behaviour (form submission, page visit count, email click). Manual updates do not scale and create gaps in your reporting.

In Settings > Objects > Contacts, find the lifecycle stage property and confirm whether HubSpot is set to allow backward movement. By default, HubSpot only moves lifecycle stages forward. If you need to move a Customer back to Lead (e.g. a churn scenario), you need to manually override. Know this rule before it confuses your team.

Go to Settings > Properties > Contact Properties > Lead Status. Edit the dropdown options to match your real sales stages (e.g. New, Attempted Contact, Connected, In Progress, Unqualified, Nurturing). Delete the default values that do not apply. Lead Status lives inside SQL and below; it is the granular view your sales team uses daily.

Go to Settings > Objects > Contacts > Record Customisation. Add Lifecycle Stage and Lead Status to the left sidebar view so every user sees them without scrolling. If it is buried, it does not get updated.

Go to Settings > Objects > Deals > Pipelines. The default pipeline is called 'Sales Pipeline' with generic stages. Rename it to match your offer type (e.g. 'Consulting Pipeline', 'Retainer Pipeline'). Delete stages you will never use. Generic pipelines lead to sloppy data.

If you sell more than one type of offer (e.g. a one-off project and a monthly retainer), create a separate pipeline for each. Mixing them in one pipeline makes your average deal value and win rate meaningless.

In each pipeline, click each stage and set a win probability percentage. These percentages feed your 'Weighted Pipeline' view, which gives you a realistic forecast. If you leave them at 0% or 100%, your forecast report is useless.

Go to your pipeline settings and click 'Edit' next to each stage. Under 'Required Properties', add the fields a sales rep must fill in before moving a deal to that stage. At minimum: Deal Name, Amount, Close Date, and Deal Owner. This is how you stop phantom deals cluttering your pipeline.

Go to Automation > Workflows and build a trigger on meeting booked (using HubSpot Meetings). Auto-create a deal in the first stage of your pipeline, associate it with the contact and company, and assign it to the owner. Manual deal creation gets skipped when reps are busy.

Build a workflow that flags any open deal where the close date has passed. Either auto-push the close date forward by 30 days with a notification to the owner, or notify the owner to update it manually. Stale close dates destroy forecast accuracy.

Create a dropdown contact or deal property called 'Lost Reason' with real options (e.g. Price, Timing, No Budget, Chose Competitor, No Response). Make it required when a deal moves to Closed Lost. Without this, you cannot improve your close rate because you do not know why you are losing.

Go to Settings > Privacy and Consent. Enable GDPR features and set your default consent language. Then check every HubSpot form has a consent checkbox with your privacy policy linked. Non-compliant forms put you at legal risk regardless of where your contacts are based.

Every form submission should automatically set a property or add the contact to an active list. Go to Settings > Forms, pick any form, and confirm the 'Set contact property value' action is turned on. Without this, form submissions are just data points, not segments you can act on.

Go to Contacts > Lists and create an active list called 'All Contacts' with the filter 'Email address is known'. This is your total addressable database. Use it as the starting denominator in all reporting and as the exclusion base for suppression lists.

Build an active list called 'Unengaged - 90 Days' with the filter 'Last email open or click is more than 90 days ago AND email subscription status is subscribed'. Exclude this list from all broadcast emails and run a re-engagement sequence to them separately before suppressing permanently.

Create four hidden fields on every HubSpot form: UTM Source, UTM Medium, UTM Campaign, UTM Content. Set each to pull from the URL parameter of the same name. Without hidden UTM fields, you know someone filled in a form but not which ad, email, or post sent them there.

Create an active list called 'Hot Leads' using three filters combined with AND: Lifecycle Stage is MQL, Last Page Seen includes /pricing or /work-with-me, Email Open in the last 14 days is Yes. Use this list to trigger a same-day sales task for the owner. This is the list that closes deals.

Go to Settings > Marketing > Email > General. Set the default From Name and From Email to your primary sending identity. Set a Reply-To address if replies should go to a monitored inbox different from the sending address. Forgetting the reply-to is how prospect replies disappear.

Go to Settings > Marketing > Email > Subscription Types. Create your subscription categories (e.g. Weekly Newsletter, Product Updates, Sales Outreach). Every email you send must be tagged to a subscription type. Contacts can unsubscribe from one type without opting out of everything, which protects your list.

Send a test email to yourself from inside HubSpot and check the contact record to confirm the open and click events are logging. If tracking is not confirmed before campaigns start, your engagement data will be incomplete and your active lists will not filter correctly.

When building any workflow, go to the Enrollment Triggers tab and check the re-enrollment settings. Decide whether contacts can re-enter (e.g. for a re-engagement workflow, yes; for a welcome sequence, no). The default is no re-enrollment. Know this rule before you wonder why a contact only ran through a workflow once when you expected it to run again.

In Sales > Sequences, click into each sequence and set the send window to business hours in your target market's time zone. Sequences sent at 3am local time get ignored and tank your reply rate. The default sends immediately regardless of the time.

Create a global suppression list called 'Workflow Exclusions' that includes your Do Not Contact list, unsubscribes, and hard bounces. Go into each workflow and add this list under the 'Enrollment' suppression setting. This is the one step most new HubSpot users skip and later regret.

Go to Conversations > Inboxes and connect your general or support email. Replies to HubSpot emails that come back to a generic inbox and are not connected here will not log against the contact record. You will lose visibility on replies.

The default dashboards in HubSpot are built for demos, not for running a business. Go to Reports > Dashboards and delete or archive the defaults. Build one Sales Dashboard (pipeline by stage, weighted value, close rate by owner) and one Marketing Dashboard (contacts created by source, MQL rate, email performance). Four reports on one screen beats 14 reports nobody checks.

Go to Reports > Create Report > Contacts. Build a bar chart grouped by 'Original Source'. This tells you which channel is growing your database, not just which one feels busy. Review it every Monday morning for 8 weeks and you will know exactly where to put your effort.

Go to Settings > Tracking and Analytics > Tracking Code. Install the snippet on every page of your website (or use the HubSpot WordPress plugin if you are on WordPress). Without this, HubSpot cannot track page visits, cannot identify returning contacts, and your smart lists based on page behaviour will not work.

Go to Settings > Account Defaults > Fiscal Year. Set the month your financial year starts. HubSpot defaults to January. If your fiscal year runs April to March and you forget this, every year-to-date revenue report will be wrong.

Go to Settings > Privacy and Consent > Data Privacy. Set how long HubSpot stores contact data and what happens to deleted contact records. If you operate under GDPR or UK GDPR, 'delete means delete' and you need to confirm HubSpot is purging the data, not just soft-deleting it.

Go to Settings > Marketing > Email > Subscription Types. Check what status a brand new contact defaults to for each subscription type. Newly imported contacts are often set to 'Not Subscribed' by default, which means they cannot receive marketing emails until you manually update the status. Fix this before your first import.