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22 min read
Discover how to build out your PropTech onboarding process inside HubSpot. This step-by-step playbook provides clear, actionable steps to overcome common onboarding challenges and set your team—and your customers—up for success.
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Schedule a demoYou've just closed a deal with a major property management firm. They're excited about your software, but now comes the tricky part: getting them up and running. Sound familiar? You're not alone. Onboarding clients in real estate and property management is a unique challenge that many companies struggle to master.
The real estate industry is complex. From large commercial facilities to mom-and-pop construction firms, each client has distinct needs. Without a structured, efficient onboarding approach, you're in for trouble—low engagement, information bottlenecks, and painfully long time-to-value. Too often, onboarding either fails outright or drags on endlessly.
We could be working with smaller customers with 200 units, or someone much more complex with 5,000 units. Creating an onboarding process that's adaptable to both scenarios has been a real challenge.
Sarah Klegman
CHO & Head of Partnerships at Proper AI
We’ve worked closely with customers across the real estate tech space, learning firsthand what works and what doesn’t. Now, we're sharing those insights with you. This guide is packed with actionable strategies to streamline your client onboarding, shorten time-to-value, and keep your customers happy.
You’ll learn how to set up HubSpot's ticket pipelines for customer onboarding, automate sales-to-onboarding handoffs, create customer-facing action plans that actually drive engagement, and set up reports to measure and improve your process.
Ready to transform your onboarding process? Let’s dive in and build an experience your team—and your customers—will love.
Picture a busy real estate professional. They're always on the move, juggling property viewings, client meetings, and endless phone calls. When they finally sit down at their desk, the last thing they want is a complicated, time-consuming onboarding process for the new software they just purchased. Yet that's exactly what many are facing.
This disconnect between technical platforms and non-technical clients is a common issue.
Our platform is relatively technical, but many of our clients are not very technical at all. So if we want them to have success, we have to literally hold their hands in onboarding and almost do everything for them.
Tom Schrader
Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Fello
Many companies start out with good intentions:
→ Spreadsheets to track onboarding tasks
→ Project management tools to organize internal workflows
→ Email threads to communicate a list of next steps
These methods might work when you're just starting out, but they quickly fall apart as you grow. Here's why:
→ Spreadsheets become unwieldy, lacking automation and user-friendliness
→ Project management tools overwhelm non-tech-savvy clients (and let's face it, that's most of them)
→ Email threads turn into black holes where important information disappears
But here's the good news: By combining HubSpot's powerful CRM with specialized customer onboarding tools like Arrows, you can create an onboarding process that actually works for real estate professionals. One that scales with your business and keeps your customers engaged.
Great onboarding sets the stage for a long, successful customer relationship. Here's how it impacts your bottom line:
🚀 Keeps the sales momentum going: Don't let that excitement from the sales process fizzle out. A smooth onboarding experience keeps customers engaged and excited about your product.
⚡️ Accelerates the "aha!" moment: The quicker customers see value in your product, the less likely they are to churn. Effective onboarding fast-tracks them to those crucial early wins.
🔑 Turns customers into power users: A well-designed client onboarding process helps customers unlock your product's full potential. The more value they get during onboarding, the stickier your solution becomes.
💪 Empowers customers: Well-executed onboarding gives your customers the tools and confidence to drive their own success with your product.
Now that you understand why customer onboarding matters, let's dive into the tactical steps to set your brand new customers up for success.
Alright, it’s time to take action. In this section, we'll guide you through the tactical steps to configure your HubSpot environment specifically for real estate tech onboarding.
We'll focus on four key areas of your onboarding setup in HubSpot:
🛠️ Configuring your HubSpot environment for real estate tech onboarding
✅ Creating and managing customer-facing onboarding checklists
📊 Tracking your customer’s progress in real-time
🎯 Measuring and optimizing your onboarding process
HubSpot's ticket pipelines offer a flexible solution to manage complex, multi-step onboarding processes. By creating custom pipeline stages that reflect your unique process, you can easily track each client's progress and identify bottlenecks during onboarding.
Let’s get started with a basic pipeline setup:
Note: Most of what we're highlighting is using HubSpot’s Service Hub Professional package. If you don’t have access to Service Hub, you can set most of this up in HubSpot’s Sales Hub using deals instead of tickets.
1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Settings > Objects > Tickets
2. Select the Pipelines tab and click "Create pipeline"
3. Name your pipeline (e.g., "🏢 Commercial Onboarding")
Pro tip: Use a different emoji for each of your pipelines. It makes it easier to spot when you're sifting through objects in HubSpot and adds a bit of fun!
4. Customize the pipeline stages to reflect your onboarding process
For companies in the real estate or construction tech space, your pipeline stages might look something like this:
🏁 Ready for Onboarding
📆 Kickoff Scheduled
🗂️ Data Collection
⚙️ Platform Configuration
🏗️ Site Visit
🧑🏫 Team Training
🎉 Go-Live
✅ Onboarding Complete
❌ Onboarding Failed
Remember to customize these stages based on your own process - this is just a starting point!
Now that your pipeline is set up, let's make sure you're capturing all the critical information from your sales team to kickstart the onboarding process.
In real estate tech, the details your team gathers during the sales process are gold. You don't want to lose any of that valuable information when transitioning from sales to onboarding. Here's how to ensure a smooth handoff:
Your sales team is likely doing extensive discovery during the sales process. They're learning the ins and outs of your customer's use case, understanding their existing tech stack, and noting any custom requirements. Let's make sure all that data makes it into your onboarding process.
1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Settings > Objects > Deals
2. Select the Pipelines tab and then select your Sales Pipeline from the drop-down list
3. Click on “Edit properties” to the right of your Closed Won deal stage
4. Select all the HubSpot properties that should be required to have filled out before onboarding begins. Make sure you mark each of these properties “required” as well. This way, a deal cannot progress to the closed-won stage in your sales pipeline without them being filled out.
Note: Keep this process simple for your sales reps. Only add required properties that are truly necessary. Less is more here.
Now, let's automate the creation of onboarding records every time you get a new customer. We'll make sure the key information collected during sales discovery moves over to the onboarding ticket automatically.
1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Automations > Workflows
2. Click on Create workflow > From scratch
3. Select the Deal-based workflow option and click Next
4. Set up your enrollment triggers
5. Click the + button to add a new action
6. Select CRM, and then select “Create record”
7. In the “Type of record to create” dropdown, select Ticket
8. Fill out the ticket owner information (for a basic setup, you can assign the ticket to a specific user)
9. For your Ticket name, use [Deal Name] - Onboarding
10. Set the Ticket status and pipeline to the first stage in your onboarding pipeline
11. Click on the Add more properties button to copy critical deal properties from sales over to your new ticket properties
Here’s an example of what that full setup might look like:
By configuring your HubSpot environment this way, your team will have all the information they need at their fingertips. This allows them to provide personalized support from day one, whether they're helping a construction company set up project timelines or guiding a property manager through automated rent collection setup.
In the next section, we'll explore how to take your onboarding process to the next level by integrating customer-facing checklists with your new HubSpot onboarding pipeline, ensuring your clients stay engaged and on track throughout their onboarding journey.
A smooth onboarding process can mean the difference between a happy, successful customer and dreaded early churn. By connecting Arrows onboarding checklists with your HubSpot pipeline, you can enable your customers to actually complete their onboarding tasks.
Your sales team gathers crucial information during the sales process - details about property portfolios, existing software systems, and specific pain points. Arrows allows you to transform this valuable data into a structured, easy-to-follow onboarding plan.
Let's set up a workflow to automatically create and attach an Arrows onboarding plan to your onboarding ticket:
1. In your HubSpot account, go to Automations > Workflows
2. Click on Create workflow > From scratch
3. Select the Ticket-based workflow option and click Next
4. Set up your enrollment trigger:
5. Click the + button to add a new action
6. Set up a branch to create different onboarding plans based on customer type:
7. For each branch:
8. Repeat for each branch
9. Review, publish, and ensure re-enrollment is turned OFF
Now, each new onboarding ticket will automatically have a tailored onboarding plan attached.
Next, let's take it a step further and customize these plans even more!
The real estate industry is far from one-size-fits-all. A commercial real estate firm has very different needs from a residential property management company.
Our onboarding process can range from 15 to 50 steps, depending on the client's complexity. We're dealing with intricate details like how they reference each apartment on a check, etc. Each client's unique accounting practices add layers to our onboarding.
Mark Rojas
CEO and Co-Founder at Proper AI
Let’s walk through an example where we customize the onboarding tasks based on the customer’s existing property management system.
In HubSpot, our sales team has already uncovered that our new customer is using Yardi as their property management system. Let’s say we have an integration with Yardi, so we want to surface a couple of tasks in our onboarding plan that walk this customer through the steps to set up the integration.
Here are the steps to set that up in Arrows:
1. Make sure you’ve got a HubSpot property set up on the onboarding ticket where you’ve noted what their property management system is.
2. In Arrows, create a new task or phase for each property management tool you integrate with. In this example, I’ve created phases for both Yardi and AppFolio
3. This customer uses Yardi for their property management system, so we only want to show them the Yardi integration tasks. To do that, we’ll select the ‘Dynamic branch’ icon in the top right of the phase:
4. Inside the dynamic branch settings, we’ll choose to only include this task in the onboarding plan when their existing technology property on the HubSpot ticket says ‘Yardi’
5. Do the same for any other integration phases you have, and then each of your customers will have custom setup instructions in their onboarding plan based on their own unique needs
This approach eliminates manual updates and provides a tailored experience for each customer. No more overwhelming them with irrelevant information!
One common challenge in real estate and PropTech onboarding is collecting critical information from clients to kickstart the process. Instead of relying on endless email attachments and notes, Arrows simplifies this with in-plan forms and file uploads.
Here's how to set up a file upload task for your customers:
1. Create a new task in your Arrows plan
2. Add a file upload action to the task
3. Customize the task description to clearly explain what file you need and why
As soon as the customer uploads the file, your team can access it directly in the HubSpot onboarding ticket. You'll see the file in your notes and as an attachment, accessible right from HubSpot.
As your customer completes tasks in their onboarding plan, you want that progress reflected in your HubSpot pipeline.
With pipeline automations in Arrows, you can set up triggers to automatically move onboarding tickets between stages based on customer actions.
Here's an example setup:
In this case, the onboarding ticket would automatically move to the "📆 Kickoff Scheduled" stage as soon as the customer completes the "Schedule your kickoff call" task in their Arrows plan.
This automation provides your entire team with real-time updates on client progress, eliminating the need for manual data entry and ensuring everyone stays in the loop.
By leveraging Arrows with your HubSpot pipeline, you create an onboarding system that's as dynamic and adaptable as the real estate industry itself. This not only streamlines the process for your team but also provides a clear, actionable path for your clients to quickly realize value from your software.
You've set up your pipelines, workflows, and onboarding plans. Now it's time to ensure your entire team can easily track customer progress. Whether you're helping a property management firm set up their portfolio or guiding a construction company through implementing your project management software, real-time visibility into the onboarding process is crucial.
Before we work through these next steps, you’ll want to set up the Arrows <> HubSpot data sync. This powerful integration brings over 40+ onboarding data points directly into HubSpot, including upcoming task names, completion percentages, and overdue tasks. With this sync, you'll have a real-time, comprehensive view of your customer's progress right inside HubSpot.
Your HubSpot onboarding pipeline should be your team's source of truth for all onboarding-related data. Let's set up the ticket cards in your pipeline to display the most critical onboarding information at a glance:
1. In HubSpot, go to Settings > Objects > Tickets > Pipelines
2. Select your Onboarding pipeline and then click ‘Customize ticket cards’
3. Add relevant properties to display, such as:
Here's what those properties will look like in action in your ticket pipeline:
Sometimes customers fall behind or get stuck. You need quick visibility into these situations so you can jump in and help. Here's how to set up ticket tags to flag which customers need attention:
1. In your HubSpot account, go to Settings > Objects > Tickets
2. Select your onboarding pipeline, click 'Ticket Tags', then 'Add tag’
3. Set up a tag for stuck customers:
4. Set the filters:
Now your pipeline will automatically show a 🚨 Stuck Customer tag for any customer stuck on a task for more than 5 days:
We seriously love using deal and ticket tags in HubSpot. If you’re looking for more inspiration, you can also set up ticket tags for customers with overdue tasks or for customers with upcoming target dates!
When you need to dig deeper into a specific customer's onboarding journey, the individual ticket record provides even more details.
Real-time updates in the right sidebar:
You can even open and manage the entire Arrows plan right inside HubSpot, allowing your team to stay within their familiar CRM environment.
Onboarding activity in the HubSpot timeline:
See all onboarding-related actions alongside other customer interactions:
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By leveraging the combined power of Arrows and HubSpot, you gain unprecedented visibility into your onboarding process. This not only helps you provide better support to your real estate tech clients but also allows you to continuously refine and improve your onboarding strategies, ensuring faster time-to-value and higher client satisfaction.
Remember, your onboarding process isn't set in stone. By consistently measuring and refining your approach, you'll ensure each new client gets the best possible start with your solution.
HubSpot's reporting tools coupled with Arrows onboarding data offer powerful insights into your onboarding process. Let's explore some key reports that can help you monitor and improve your team's performance.
For many onboarding teams in real estate tech, reducing time-to-value is a top priority. If you're planning to scale your customer base without expanding your onboarding team, improving efficiency is crucial. One effective strategy is to reduce the average time it takes to complete onboarding.
Let's set up a HubSpot report to track the average number of days to onboarding plan completion over time:
In order to set up this report, we’ll first need to create a simple calculated property:
1. In HubSpot, go to Settings > Properties > Ticket properties
2. Create a new ticket property:
Now let’s create the report:
1. In HubSpot, go to Reporting > Reports > Create Report
2. Select the Custom Report Builder and choose 'Tickets' as your primary data source
3. Apply these filters:
4. Select the “Combination” chart type
5. Configure your report properties:
This report will show you how your average onboarding time is trending month-over-month, helping you spot improvements or areas that need attention.
Let's say your team is working to reduce average onboarding time from 45 days to 20 days. You need a way to track progress toward this goal in real-time.
Here's a report that can help:
Here’s a quick report that you can set up to gauge where your team is at over the quarter:
1. In HubSpot, go to Reporting > Reports > Create Report
2. Use the Custom Report Builder and select 'Tickets' as your data source
3. Apply these filters:
4. Select the “Gauge” chart type
5. Configure your report:
6. Click on Chart Settings to set up the visuals. You can customize the gauge ranges to align with your team's specific goals.
This visual representation makes it easy for everyone to see how you're progressing toward your target onboarding time.
Staying on top of customer health during onboarding is critical. This report helps you quickly identify which customers need extra support and which are sailing smoothly through the process.
First, let's set up a new property in HubSpot to track our onboarding health score:
1. In HubSpot, go to Settings > Properties > Ticket properties
2. Create a new ticket property:
Now, let's create a workflow to automatically update this health score based on Arrows onboarding data:
1. In HubSpot, go to Automations > Workflows
2. Click on Create workflow > From scratch
3. Select the Ticket-based workflow option and click Next
4. Set up your enrollment trigger:
5. Click the + button to add a new action
6. Set up a branch for each onboarding health status:
7. Within each branch, click the + button and choose the ‘Set property value’ action
Finally, let's create a report to visualize health across onboarding stages:
1. In HubSpot, go to Reporting > Reports > Create Report
2. Use the Custom Report Builder with 'Tickets' as your data source
3. Apply these filters:
4. Select the “Vertical bar” chart type
5. Configure your report:
This report gives you a clear view of how customers are progressing through each stage of onboarding. Use it to spot trends, identify common sticking points, and proactively reach out to customers who might need a helping hand.
Remember, while efficient onboarding is important and something to aim for, the ultimate goal is to set your customers up for long-term success. Regular reviews of these metrics will help you fine-tune your process and deliver an exceptional onboarding experience.
Looking for more ways to leverage HubSpot for onboarding? Check out The Vault for over 50+ HubSpot reports, workflows, and best practices tailored for customer onboarding teams.
Alright, we've covered a lot of ground in this guide! You now have a robust set of tools and strategies to level up your client onboarding process. By combining HubSpot's CRM capabilities with Arrows' mutual action plans, you're well-equipped to tackle the specific challenges of onboarding clients in real estate and property management.
Effective onboarding lays the groundwork for long-term customer success. As you implement these strategies, keep your focus on delivering real value to your clients. Your goal is clear: guide each customer to their "aha!" moment efficiently and smoothly.
Keep in mind that your onboarding process should evolve as you go. Make it a habit to review your metrics, gather feedback from your team and customers, and refine your approach. Each improvement you make enhances the experience for every new customer that comes on board.
We're excited to see how you'll use these strategies to elevate your onboarding and create more happy, successful customers!
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