HubSpot Sales cheat sheet

Sales Hub is tiered (Starter, Professional, Enterprise); each tier gates features such as sequences (Starter+), custom reporting and playbooks (Professional+), and predictive lead scoring, recurring revenue tracking, and custom objects (Enterprise).

Object model: contacts, companies, deals, and tickets are standard objects; activities (calls, emails, meetings, notes, tasks) attach to records and roll up on the timeline. Custom objects are Enterprise-only.

Sequences automate 1:1 email and task cadence for a single contact; they pause automatically when the contact replies, books a meeting, or is enrolled in another sequence (per settings). Workflows are broader automation across any object.

Email templates and snippets are reusable content; snippets are inserted inline with a shortcut and support personalization tokens such as {{contact.firstname}}. Tokens resolve at send time from the associated record.

Meetings tool links connect to a connected calendar, expose bookable slots by availability, and can route to round-robin or specific owners; booking creates a meeting activity and can trigger workflow enrollment.

The calling tool requires a connected phone number and logs call outcomes/dispositions; call recording and voicemail drop depend on the plan and region. Logged calls count as engagements on the record timeline.

Documents tracked in Sales Hub report per-recipient view counts and time-on-page, and can be shared as links inside templates or sequences; access can require email capture.

Forecasts (Professional+) let reps submit deal-level forecasts by period and compare against quota and target amounts; forecast categories are configurable and roll up to managers.

A pipeline is an ordered set of deal stages; each stage has a probability percentage used to weight deal amounts in forecasts. Multiple pipelines can exist per object (e.g., New Business vs. Renewal).

Deal amount is the primary value field; weighted amount = deal amount x stage probability. Forecast amount uses the stage probability unless overridden.

Stage properties can be made required before a deal can advance, and stage-entry/exit rules can block skipping or require a property value (Professional+).

Close date drives period reporting; a deal is counted in the period of its close date, so moving close dates changes pipeline and forecast totals.

Deal pipelines report conversion by stage; the deal stage funnel shows counts and amounts entering each stage, and stage-to-stage conversion rate = deals entering next stage / deals entering prior stage.

Closed Won and Closed Lost are terminal stages; reopening requires moving the deal back to an open stage, which affects historical reporting.

Rotting deals are flagged when a deal sits in a stage longer than the configured threshold (days in stage), surfacing stalled pipeline in the board view.

Deal splitting lets multiple owners share credit for one deal with defined percentages; the sum of split percentages must equal 100%.

Association labels (e.g., Decision Maker, Champion) describe the role of a contact on a deal and enable role-based reporting and workflow targeting.

Sequence enrollment is per contact; a contact can be in only one sequence at a time by default, and enrollment can be manual, via workflow, or via a shared inbox action.

Sequence steps are ordered: automated email, manual email task, call task, LinkedIn task, and task; delays are set in business days and respect the connected sending schedule.

Unenrollment triggers include reply, meeting booked, deal created, or manual removal; unenrollment reasons are recorded for reporting.

Sending limits and throttling protect deliverability; daily send caps apply per user and emails send only during configured windows (e.g., weekdays, business hours).

Workflow enrollment criteria use AND/OR filter groups; re-enrollment must be explicitly enabled or contacts will not re-enter after completing the workflow.

Lead scoring (predictive, Enterprise) ranks contacts by likelihood to close using historical data; manual score properties can be set by workflows and used in lists.

Saved lists/segments are static or active; active lists recalculate as contact properties change and can trigger workflows or sequence enrollment.

A/B testing of sequence or marketing emails compares variants by open/click/reply rate; statistical significance requires sufficient sample size before declaring a winner.

Outreach personalization tokens fall back to a default value when the property is empty; missing fallbacks are a common cause of broken merge fields.

The Smart CRM is a shared record store: contacts, companies, deals, tickets, and custom objects, with associations linking them (contact to company, deal to contacts, ticket to contact).

Deduplication: contacts are matched on email (primary unique identifier); companies on domain/name. Merging keeps one primary record and re-associates activities and deals to it.

Property types include single-line text, number, date, enumeration (dropdown), checkbox, and calculation; property history records value changes over time for audit and reporting.

Lifecycle stage is a single-select property tracking a contact's journey (Subscriber, Lead, MQL, SQL, Opportunity, Customer, Evangelist); it is separate from lead status.

Lead status captures sales qualification state (New, Open, In Progress, Unqualified, Connected) and is typically updated by reps; lifecycle stage is often updated by automation.

Calculated properties derive values from other properties or associated records (e.g., count of associated deals) and recalculate on record change; they are read-only.

Consent and subscription types govern email eligibility; a contact's legal basis and opt-out state can block sequence and marketing sends regardless of list membership.

Data sync and imports: imports match on a unique property to update existing records rather than create duplicates; association columns in a file link records during import.

GDPR/data privacy features include consent tracking, permanent delete, and data processing records; deletion is irreversible and removes the record from reports.