Dear Reader,Welcome to Ask Achan. Who's Achan, you ask? He's one of our in-house HubSpot experts and the Head of HubSpot Delivery here at Concentrate by Ilaria.
Each month, we dive into your HubSpot questions with simple, actionable tips to help you get the most out of the platform. This month's question is one we hear in almost every kickoff call and it's also been lighting up r/HubSpot this week, so let's get into it.
Got a question? Send it my way.
Quick answer: Adoption doesn't fail because people don't understand HubSpot. It fails because the portal wasn't set up around how each team actually works, day to day. Fix that, and usage takes care of itself.
It's tempting to treat a HubSpot implementation like flipping a switch: migrate the data, run a training session, done. But a CRM setup only sticks when the people using it feel like it's making their job easier, not adding a second system to keep updated. That's the gap most teams hit around month three, right after the novelty wears off and old habits creep back in.
Here's what's I’ve seen work for the teams we've worked with:
HubSpot adoption gets studied to death, but the single biggest predictor of it working is whether leadership uses the platform themselves to make decisions and drive performance, not just reads the dashboards it produces. If the exec team is still running the Monday meeting off a slide deck someone built from a personal spreadsheet, nobody further down the org believes usage is genuinely mandatory. Get sponsorship locked in before you touch configuration; everything else on this list runs on that authority.
Achan top tip: "If your leadership team can't tell you the last time they opened HubSpot themselves, that's the adoption problem right there. No workflow or training plan fixes it."
Untidy data kills adoption faster than almost anything else. If three people can create a deal three different ways, your reporting becomes noise and nobody trusts it enough to rely on it. Agree on naming conventions, required fields and process rules early, document them somewhere findable, and enforce them through the tool itself (required properties, workflow validations) rather than relying on people remembering a rulebook. HubSpot then becomes a powerful tool for locking in consistent process around revenue generation.
Give each role only the properties, pipelines and dashboards relevant to their job, nothing else. A rep and a marketer shouldn't be looking at the same cluttered view; every field someone sees should map to what they need to get their job done that day. Cut anything that only matters to leadership or ops, and the portal stops feeling like admin overhead.
Achan top tip: "If a property doesn't help someone see their own work reflected back to them within the first week, it's not essential yet. Add it later, once the basics have stuck."
Name a peer champion in every function: someone a few steps ahead who's genuinely bought in. IT and RevOps can configure the platform, but they can't sit next to every rep and marketer answering "how do I..." questions in real time. A champion closes that gap far faster than a support ticket ever will and normalises using the tool properly as "how we do things here."
A single all-hands training in week one teaches people to click buttons, not to change how they work. It's also usually forgotten within a fortnight. What sticks is role-specific sessions spread across the first 90 days. Short, practical and tied to scenarios people actually hit that week plus recordings and regular office hours so help is there when someone needs it, not just on launch day. Treat HubSpot onboarding as a drip, not a dump.
Achan top tip: "If your training calendar has one date on it, it's not a training plan. It's a launch event."
Don't open with the ambitious lead-scoring model or the twelve-step nurture sequence. Open with the automation that saves someone twenty minutes today for example, auto-assigning leads, chasing overdue tasks, or pre-filling a quote. Quick wins build trust in the system fast, and trust is what gets people to log the next thing without being asked.
Once your quick wins have landed and trust is building, cut off the spreadsheet or legacy CRM people have been quietly leaning on. As long as a familiar fallback still exists, some portion of the team will always reach for it under deadline pressure, and your data stays split across two sources of truth. Set a hard cutover date, migrate anything still living outside HubSpot, and revoke access to the old system. It's the single most effective forcing function for adoption, but it only works once the new system is genuinely ready to carry the load.
Achan top tip: "Don't turn off the old system on day one. Turn it off the day the new one is easier to use than reaching for the spreadsheet."
Executive engagement doesn't come from a dashboard tour. It comes from leadership opening HubSpot because it answers a question they were already going to ask in the Monday meeting e.g. pipeline coverage, campaign ROI, ticket backlog. Build that reporting once the data's clean and make it their default source of truth, and you'll find compliance further down the org tightens up on its own, because the numbers people are measured on now live inside the system. If HubSpot helps with accountability, it also helps drive adoption across the organisation.
The first 90 days set the habits, but the next two years are where they either compound or quietly erode. Review usage data quarterly, watch for the warning signs (activity dropping off, duplicate records creeping back, people reverting to spreadsheets), and keep refining the setup as your team, product and sales process change. A HubSpot onboarding programme that stops the day training ends is a HubSpot onboarding programme that's already decaying.
Achan top tip: "Adoption isn't something you launch. It's something you maintain the same way you'd maintain any other piece of business-critical software."
Why this compounds beyond one teamNone of this is unique to Sales Hub or Marketing Hub. The same principles apply across a full marketing automation setup, a sales tool configuration project, or a wider business software implementation touching service and ops too: the platform only earns its keep when it's shaped around real workflows, not the other way round. Point solutions and disconnected legacy platforms make this even harder as people burn time context-switching between tools, and that friction is one of the biggest drags on adoption we see, especially the more tools a team is juggling day to day.
If you can't answer all three with confidence, that's usually where adoption starts to slip.
Getting HubSpot adoption to stick takes more than a one-off training session, it takes a HubSpot implementation built around how your team works, and a partner who sticks around after go-live. If that's where you're at, the team at Concentrate can help. Contact the Concentrate team today.
See you in the next edition of Ask Achan.
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