How to set up a free HubSpot CRM for a small business

8 min read · Garner Desk

HubSpot’s free CRM is one of the best deals in small-business software. It’s also easy to set up badly. This guide covers the setup we’d do for a small service business with no sales team: enough to be genuinely useful, and nothing that makes it harder to use.

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Before you start: clean your list

The single biggest predictor of whether you’ll keep using a CRM is whether the data in it is clean on day one. Import a messy list and you’ll spend your first week fixing duplicates, then give up.

So first, get your leads into one spreadsheet with clear columns: First name, Last name, Email, Company, Status and Notes. Our guides to organising scattered leads and removing duplicates walk through it.

Step 1: Create your account

Sign up at hubspot.com with your business email address, not a personal Gmail. Add your company name, website and time zone when asked. The time zone matters: it controls when reminders and booking slots appear.

Step 2: Import your contacts

1. Go to Contacts and choose Import.
2. Upload your spreadsheet as a CSV or Excel file.
3. Match each column to a HubSpot property: First name, Last name, Email, Company name.
4. For your Status column, create a simple dropdown property (Hot, Warm, Past client, Cold) rather than leaving it as free text, so you can filter by it.
5. Put your Notes column into a single text property.

Tip: import a test file of 10 rows first. Check those 10 records look right before importing the rest.

Step 3: Build a simple deal pipeline

A contact is a person. A deal is a piece of work you might win. Your pipeline is the list of stages a deal moves through.

Find the pipeline settings (Settings, then Objects, then Deals, then Pipelines) and rename the default stages to match how you actually sell. For most service businesses, five stages is plenty:

Resist adding more. Every extra stage is another decision you have to make every time you update a deal. Read more in our plain-English guide to pipelines.

Step 4: Connect your inbox

In Settings, look for the Email section under General and connect your personal email. Then install HubSpot’s extension for Gmail or Outlook. Now, when you email a contact, you can log the email to their record and see whether it was opened.

This is the feature that makes the CRM worth it: when someone replies after three months, the whole history is right there.

Step 5: Create your booking link

Use HubSpot’s Meetings tool to create a booking page. Set your available hours, a short buffer between calls, and a clear title like “20-minute intro call”. Put the link in your email signature. Anyone who books is added to your CRM automatically.

Step 6: Set up your Monday view

The CRM only works if you look at it. Create a saved view of deals that haven’t been updated in 14 days, and a task list of follow-ups due this week. Block 20 minutes every Monday to go through both.

The five mistakes we see most

1. Too many stages. Twelve stages means nothing ever gets updated.
2. Too many custom fields. If you won’t filter by it, you don’t need it.
3. Importing junk. Newsletter senders, no-reply addresses and old suppliers clutter everything.
4. No owner for each deal. Even if it’s just you, set it, so reminders go somewhere.
5. No weekly habit. The software doesn’t follow up. You do.