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 in a table — 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 from scratch. For a new account this list starts with just a couple of sample contacts, which is a fine place to click around before importing your real data.

Clicking into a contact opens their full record, split into a left column of key information and contact details, and a main panel with tabs for Catch-up, About, Activities, Revenue, and Intelligence. The Overview section under Catch-up is where HubSpot pulls everything together — contact insights, recent interactions, and quick actions like Note, Email, Call, Task, and Meeting sit right at the top so you're not hunting through menus to log an interaction.

Under Contact Insights, HubSpot auto-generates a plain-language summary of recent activity — in a working example this looked like: a meeting took place on a specific date where the contact expressed interest in something specific, with a suggested next action underneath it, like confirming details or following up for feedback. A similar Recent Interactions summary describes the pattern of contact over time, such as a steady follow-up cadence with a call and a scheduled meeting. These summaries are generated on demand, timestamped, and sit alongside an "Ask a question" prompt if you want to query the record directly rather than read the full activity log.

On the right side of the same 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 of HubSpot that actually earns the "CRM" label: the deal, the company, and the person are all cross-referenced from a single 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, which defaults to a few business days out at a set time. HubSpot even offers to sync your tasks to Google or Outlook calendar from a banner right above the task list, which is worth turning on early so follow-ups show up somewhere you'll actually see them.

Everything above — contacts, insights, companies, deals, tasks — lives under the CRM menu and is available regardless of which paid hubs you eventually add. Spending your first sessions here, logging a few 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 ultimately write back to and read from these same contact records.