HubSpot Tutorial for Beginners, How to use Hubspot in 2026

The CRM menu in the left sidebar opens into Contacts, where every person in your database shows up as a row: name, email, phone number, lead status, and any custom properties you've set up, like Favorite Content Topics or Preferred Channels. Tabs across the top let you save different filtered views, such as Newsletter Subscribers or All Customers, and a Create New View option lets you build your own. A new account starts with just a couple of sample contacts, a fine place to click around before importing real data.

Clicking into a contact opens their full record, split into a left column of key details and a main panel with tabs across the top, commonly About, Activities, Catch-up, Revenue, and Intelligence. Quick actions sit right at the top of the record, Note, Email, Call, Task, and Meeting, so logging an interaction doesn't mean hunting through menus.

The Catch-up tab is where HubSpot's AI assistant, Breeze, pulls together what's happened on a record without making you read the full activity log. It's organized into three sections: an Overview with a plain-language rundown of recent interactions, a Health section scoring sentiment from the contact's activity, and a Data quality section flagging what's missing from the record.

In a working example, the Overview summary read like a short recap, a meeting on a specific date where the contact expressed interest in something specific, with a suggested next step underneath, confirming details or following up for feedback. These summaries are generated on demand and timestamped, and an "Ask a question" prompt sits alongside them if you'd rather query the record directly.

On the right side of the record, Companies, Deals, and Campaigns each get their own collapsible panel. A linked company shows its domain and phone number with a shortcut to view all associated companies, and an open deal shows its amount, close date, and current stage, Appointment Scheduled, for instance, right in the sidebar without opening a separate page. This is the part that earns the CRM label: the deal, the company, and the person are cross-referenced from one screen instead of living in disconnected spreadsheets.

Clicking Task from the quick actions bar, or the Tasks item under CRM, opens a Create Task panel with fields for Task Title, Task Type, Priority, and an Associate With Records dropdown that links the task back to the contact you're working from. You also set who it's Assigned To, whether it belongs to a Queue, and a Due Date, defaulting to a few business days out. HubSpot offers to sync tasks to Google or Outlook calendar from a banner above the task list, worth turning on early so follow-ups show up somewhere you'll see them.

Everything above, contacts, insights, companies, deals, tasks, lives under the CRM menu and is available regardless of which paid hubs you add later. The Intelligence tab is the one exception worth knowing about early: on a contact it shows basic data enrichment and associated company details on any plan, but its fuller website-visit and buyer-intent insights need a Professional or Enterprise subscription. Spending your first sessions logging real notes and tasks against real contacts builds the habit that makes the rest of HubSpot worth using; the Marketing and Sales Hub tools you'll explore later all write back to and read from these same contact records.