HubSpot CRM Tutorial for Beginners 2026 (Step-by-Step)

In this video, I'll show you how to set up your HubSpot CRM step by step, all for free, so that you can ditch your spreadsheets and organize your business. You'll learn how to add contacts and companies, how to connect and send email, and how you can start tracking deals, all in just a few minutes. HubSpot CRM is easy to adopt. The free plan can take most small businesses pretty far, and you don't even need a credit card to sign up. By the end of this video, you'll have set up a fully working HubSpot CRM. You'll know the basics and you'll feel comfortable continuing to learn about how HubSpot CRM can improve your business. To get started, simply scroll down to the video description and click the first link that you see. It will take you to the correct HubSpot page where you can create your free account. Once you're on this page, click get started free to sign up. Then sign up using your preferred account or email address. I'll enter my email and then click verify email. Enter the verification code from your email inbox and then click next to create a password in the next step. Once you've satisfied the password requirements, click next again. In the next part of the signup flow, HubSpot will ask a few simple questions about you and your business. So, I'll enter my name here. Then, choose what industry best matches your business. Then, pick your role, enter your company name, and click next. Enter the approximate number of people that work at your company and finally your company website. Then you can click create account. Before we get to the CRM dashboard, HubSpot will ask a few more questions in order to tailor your experience. But don't worry, I'll show you exactly where to go once we land on the dashboard. So, you can enter any one of these. Automate marketing is what I'll settle on. Then click next. And here you can select some of your current tools if you would like, but at this point you can skip the rest of the questions. So I'll do that to get us started faster. Skip for now. Adding contacts is key to getting value out of your CRM. But I'll show you how to do that in a minute. So I'll skip this step as well. And for the fourth step, I'll skip for now. again. That will start this tour and you can click through it, but I'll move past it for now so that we can get to our contacts. All right, now that we're signed up, let's get some of your own contact data into your HubSpot CRM. Contacts are the most important object within HubSpot, and I'll show you how to add a contact manually and how to import a list of contacts, assuming you already have a list in a spreadsheet. Let's start by expanding the navigation pane on the left. Here you can see all the major areas in HubSpot. If you aren't already in the contacts area, click CRM, then click on contacts. And I like to bookmark the contacts so that I can easily get back here later. So if you click this add to bookmarks now, you can get to contacts through your bookmarks as well. At the top here, we have our views. Views are basically a filtered portion of your entire contacts data. All contacts is what we're viewing now. Below your views, you have your filters. For example, you can filter for contacts with a create date of today. And we only have two, so you can click here to remove a filter. Anytime you see this blue dot, HubSpot has learning on the feature. So once we have more contacts, it might be a good idea to come back here and learn about advanced filters. And then below the filters, we have our contacts organized in a table. The column headers in this table are called contact properties. And we can search, we can sort, and we can even freeze a column here if we'd like. To manually create one contact, let's click on create contact in the top right. I've created some sample data for this tutorial, so I'll enter my contacts email and their first and last names. I'll leave myself as the contact owner, but you could select no owner if you are entering leads and want to use this property for assignment later. Then I'll enter the job title and phone number. And I'm going to change this life cycle stage to subscriber. Maybe your contacts aren't yet leads and you have them from another email list. So subscriber might make more sense. And I'll leave lead status blank so that I can change that later for subscribers that I turn into leads. Then I'll click create. That will automatically open the contact so that we're viewing the record. Before we import a list of contacts, let's briefly see what the contact record looks like. On the left side, we have some of our properties, we also have actions that we can take with this contact. In the middle column, we have a few more tabs of info on Emma. So, if I click here to create a note, I can say Emma was the first subscriber on our old mailing list. I can create the note and you'll see it in the recent activities for this contact. Under the activities tab, you can see all the details around this contact including how and when it was created, changes to the life cycle when we made Emma a subscriber and the new note that I just added, which you can also see in the activity subtabs. Here on the right hand side, we can see all the associated records for this contact. We are starting fresh, so we don't have any details here, but we will revisit these throughout this setup video. Now that you know the basics about the contact object, let's see how you can import a list of other contacts all at one time. Click this link to go back to contacts and then instead of clicking create contact, click import here. If you have a spreadsheet or export of your contact list from another CRM, click import a file. We are importing contacts. So I'll click start import. Here we want to select the objects that we're importing data for. For now, I'm only importing contacts. So I'll select contacts and click next. Before uploading a file, you can download HubSpot's example file if you haven't already structured a file yourself. My file is an expanded version of theirs, so I'll include the link to my template in the video description. These columns were included in the original example file and then I've added these ones. Click choose a file and then select your file. I'll select create and update contacts because my list contains the contact that we already added manually and I don't have contact to contact associations. So I'll click next. And then you'll have the opportunity to check your mapping. HubSpot is very good at aligning your column name from your spreadsheet with the correct contact property in the CRM. But if you have errors here, you may need to make small adjustments in future imports. You can check this don't overwrite box if you ever want to be sure not to overwrite certain properties in later contact updates. Everything looks good here, so I'll click next. For the import name, I like to append today's date in case I didn't already have it as part of my file name. Here, you can create a new contacts list based on this import, but I just want to add these contacts to my all contacts list. Agree that you are able to import these contacts and then click finish import. It may take a few minutes until HubSpot shows you the banner that the import has completed and you should get a notification. You'll see that we've landed on the data management tab after the import. And if we click back to return to data integration, you can see your list of past imports. Hover over the import. Let's click here to check the contacts that we just imported. Once we have some contact data loaded into our CRM, we can now add companies and link our contacts to the companies that they belong to. In the navigation, click CRM and companies. I'll add this one to the bookmarks as well. Let's do the same thing as we did with our contacts by first adding one company manually, then the rest with an import. Click create company and I'll set up myself. For now, I'll just add the required fields for the new company which are company domain name and company name. Then I'll click create. While this record is pretty empty, what's interesting are the associations that we can make between contact and company objects. To add associated contacts, you can click the add button here. And Ryan, Jake, and Emma are my contacts at Brightside Creative. I'll click save. Now, these contacts show as associated contacts. And if I scroll down and click view associated contacts, our contacts are filtered down to just the associated contacts under the advanced filters. And if we edit filters and click on group one, you can see how that filter was built. Let's close this and use an import to add the rest of our companies. Click import, import a file again, and start import. I'm going to select companies and contacts this time so that we can create the companies and the contact associations. Click next. I'm still going to use a single file, but this time I've added my company and company domain name data to my contact import sheet. I'll select that new file. I'll make sure that I've selected to create and update both companies and contacts. Then I'll click next. As I review the property mapping, I want to make one change and that is to map company from my sheet to company properties instead of contact properties. And I want that to come over as company name. Then I'll click next. I'll agree like I did before and click finish import. This summary is a good check to make sure that we did what we intended to do with that import. So my 10 rows were imported as I expected. The two new records here represent the two new companies that were created. 11 records are updated because 10 of them were the existing contacts plus the one existing company. And then remember we already made three contact company associations manually. So seven of our 10 contacts still needed to be associated. Let's click view imported records and then view companies to double check. Now, ideally, you would have more of the company properties filled out on your import. For example, you can fill in some of the missing ones right from this table view. Let's open up Apex to check the associations. And here are the new contact associations that we would expect. If we open one of these contacts, we should also see a company association, which we do. Tracking communication and interactions that you have with your contacts all in one place so that your team can see is one of the main benefits of using a CRM. If we wanted to contact Mia, let's see how we can use the email and calendar functions in HubSpot to reach out to our contacts. Under the actions, let's click email and within this pop out window, connect inbox. If you want to enable inbox automation to access these features, you can, but I'll just continue here. Then I'll enter my email address and we'll click next. And then I'll connect to Gmail. When you're ready, click agree, and that will automatically open a new tab and prompt you to log in. I'll select that account, and we'll click continue. I'll allow HubSpot the appropriate permissions and we'll click continue again. Once successful, it will check the connection and then we'll recommend the HubSpot extensions for Gmail and Outlook. This is helpful if you want some of the CRM functionality within your inbox, but personally, I like to keep them more separate, so I'll say no thanks for now. And then your email is all set up. You can see your email in parenthesis here as the sender. Be aware that some of the marketing automation features like email sequences are an upgraded feature within HubSpot, but you'll still have access to email templates on the free plan. Let's close this email dialogue for now and set up our calendar so that we can meet with Mia instead. Under the actions, I'll select schedule a meeting. And here I'll click connect your calendar. I'll select my calendar type here, then connect. And finally, I'll accept HubSpot's data notice. I'll sign back into Google when prompted and allow HubSpot access to my calendar. Now, back in HubSpot, the schedule a meeting action will now bring up your scheduling interface. From there, I can schedule like any other meeting. So, I can enter a title and a time and click save. Once saved, I can see the upcoming meeting on the activities tab. And if you want to allow others to schedule meetings with you, you can create a meeting scheduling link within HubSpot. To do so, go to sales on the lefth hand side, then meetingsuler. This is the interface that we want to create. So, click get started. Then if you click get me started here, I found that this walkthrough is especially helpful because your link is created automatically and you can follow the prompts to edit it. The 10 easy steps walk you through how to customize the meeting, how to customize your availability, and how to set up reminders. In just a few minutes, you'll have a scheduling link that you can share with others that looks just like this. Remember the meeting that we scheduled with Mia? Your scheduling link automatically knows your calendar and HubSpot won't offer time slots that would conflict with existing calendar appointments. Now that we can reach out and track our interactions with our contacts and companies, the last object we'll take a look at in the setup process are deals. I'll show you how to create a deal and how deals work within your sales pipeline to enable better forecasting down the road. Deals in HubSpot are used to track potential revenue through your sales process. To find deals, go to CRM in the left sidebar, then click deals. Here, I'll say help me get started as that will launch an easy three-step process. In this first step, we'll name our sales pipeline. The sales pipeline is like a map that shows you how your deals or sales opportunities are progressing. On HubSpot's free plan, you can only have one sales pipeline, so I'll just keep the generic name here. The sales pipeline is made up of several deal stages. You'll see those represented in the header of this graphic. So, let's click here to define the deal stages. These stages are the default ones in HubSpot's sales pipeline. We can edit the names. We can add stages down here. For this tutorial, let's assume my product offerings and thus my sales pipeline is much simpler. Let's say we don't have presentations and our initial contacts are the decision makers themselves. You can see my changes reflected in the preview. Next, let's customize our closing stages. These two stage names indicate whether your deals are successful or not. You can rename them if you would like. Then let's create a deal. Here we can edit the deal information. I'll call this one Apex Media Group sponsorship because Apex is interested in sponsoring some of our upcoming videos on Medics Media. And I'll list the amount at $10,000. Then I'll click next to choose a deal stage. In this deal stage drop down, we can see our newly edited stages and I'll keep appointment scheduled selected. Then click here to see your pipeline in action and finally finish once your pipeline is finalized. The deal views here work in a similar way to the other views that I've already shown you. Here we're looking at all deals. We have our filtering options here and our search. You can collapse these stages using this button, which becomes helpful if you have a more complicated sales pipeline with many stages and you still want to view the deal counts at a glance. And moving deals through the pipeline is as simple as dragging them to a new deal stage column. To view the deal record details, simply click on the title to open it. Like the records that we have for other objects like contacts and companies, you'll see the important properties on the left, like close date and stage. Apex hasn't sponsored our channel before, so we can edit properties like deal type to label this deal as new business. As always, if I click on the activities tab, I can see the changes that have been made for this deal. For example, when I moved it to a new stage within the sales pipeline. And on the right hand side, we can add our contact to the deal. So, I'll click add. I'll find Mia, then save. And I'll add an association for the company here, too. I'll select Apex, and we'll save that as the primary company. Now, if we open our contact, we can check to see the deal is now associated there as well. Now that I've shown you how to add contacts, companies, and deals, the last thing we need to do is add a team member. That way, we can fully realize the value of having your team share visibility into all of your CRM data. To get started, click settings in the menu bar at the top. I'll collapse the navigation pane here, and then I'll click users and teams. The free plan allows for two users. So if you're a soloreneur or you have a tiny team, that might be all you need. Otherwise, it should allow you to test the functionality before deciding to upgrade later. The user dashboard displays summary data about our users. And you can scroll horizontally in the table below to see more data about individual people. To create a new user, click here. If you want to go through all of the permissions before inviting somebody, click custom invite. But before you upgrade, it's more likely that you can use the quick invite. So, I'll click that. Then, enter your new user's email address and pay attention to this check box that says make super admin. Super admins can manage all users, tools, and settings. So, if you're inviting a partner or if you're testing for a manager, you might leave this checked. Otherwise, to start this teammate with basic permissions, uncheck this box and you can always increase their permissions later. After you send it, HubSpot also provides a unique invite link as well. If we close this user creation menu, we can see the pending invite and your teammate is ready to jump in. Now, your HubSpot CRM is officially set up and ready to go. If you haven't been following along, remember to click the link in the description to get started. Thanks for watching and let me know if you have any questions in the comments down below.