Beginner’s Guide to Navigating HubSpot

When you first log into HubSpot, the interface can feel like a lot, but once you understand how the navigation works, you’ll realize how intuitively it’s designed to organize everything you need for sales, marketing, service, and operations.

HubSpot’s navigation has two main bars that help you move through the platform:

• The top navigation bar (your internal tools and account settings)

• The left navigation bar (your core hubs and business activities)

Let’s break down both, step by step.

Top Navigation Bar: 

The top bar is where you manage your personal tools, account settings, and AI assistant features.

Here’s what each icon does:

• 🔍 Search Bar: The universal search in HubSpot. You can type anything, an email ID, a contact name, or even a keyword, and HubSpot will scan your entire portal and knowledge base for results.

• 📞 Calling Icon: If your team uses HubSpot for calls, this is where you’ll receive or initiate inbound and outbound calls directly from your browser.

• 🛍️ Marketplace: Represented by a little shop icon, the Marketplace lets you discover and integrate third-party tools and apps with HubSpot.

• ❓ Support: Clicking the question mark opens access to HubSpot’s help center and live support, perfect for quick troubleshooting or learning how to do something new.

• ⚙️ Settings: This is your command center for managing profile information, passwords, connected calendars, integrations, and user permissions. Basically, all your account-level tools live here.

• 🔔 Notifications: Any updates, completed background tasks, or new alerts will appear here.

• ✨ Assistant: HubSpot’s AI assistant, Breez AI, helps you navigate, summarize records, or answer questions about your account, all using natural language prompts.

Left Navigation Bar:

When you open HubSpot, the left-hand navigation bar is your command center, home to all of HubSpot’s core hubs. Each hub represents a different stage of the customer journey, from attracting leads to delighting loyal customers.

Once you understand what lives where, HubSpot transforms from a CRM into the central nervous system of your business, connecting every team, tool, and touchpoint.

1. CRM Hub

Your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the heart of your HubSpot portal.

It stores your contacts, companies, deals, and communications, everything your team needs to manage relationships in one place.

Your CRM uses real-time insights to make intelligent recommendations, helps you personalize engagement at scale, and serves as the unified database for all your marketing, sales, and service tools.

2. Marketing Hub

This hub powers your campaigns, emails, and outreach. It’s where you plan and manage how potential leads discover and engage with your brand. You can:

• Build and send email campaigns

• Create landing pages and ads

• Track how visitors move through your marketing journey

3. Content Hub

Everything that represents your brand, blogs, web pages, and other marketing assets, lives here.

The Content Hub is HubSpot’s AI-powered content marketing system that helps you create, publish, and manage blogs, web pages, and digital assets.

Whether you’re a marketer or developer, you can build personalized content journeys that engage customers and scale your content strategy efficiently.

4. Sales Hub

The Sales Hub is where your reps spend most of their day, managing pipelines, booking meetings, and closing deals faster.

Here’s what you can do:

• Manage deals and tasks

• Send follow-up emails

• Log calls and meetings

• Track pipeline performance with reports

Sales Hub is designed to make your sales process more human and less manual, boosting productivity while keeping things personal.

5. Commerce Hub

Commerce Hub manages your products, quotes, payments, and subscriptions.

It’s especially useful if you sell tiered services or recurring products, you can create, track, and manage transactions right inside HubSpot.

• Create and send quotes

• Manage products and billing

• Accept payments

• Track transactions directly inside HubSpot

6. Service Hub

After a deal closes, the Service Hub takes over to keep customers happy and engaged.

It handles tickets, customer communications, and knowledge base articles to help your clients get ongoing support.

Service Hub helps you deliver seamless post-sale experiences, creating customers who stay and refer others.

7. Data Management Hub

Data is only as valuable as its accuracy. The Data Management Hub helps you:

• Monitor data quality

• Build data models

• Enrich contact and company records using HubSpot’s built-in tools

8. Automation Hub

Automation is where your workflows live.

You can automate repetitive actions like assigning contacts, sending follow-up emails, or segmenting lists based on conditions.

Recently, HubSpot has even introduced AI-powered workflow creation, allowing you to generate automation logic faster than ever.

9. Reporting Hub

All your insights live here.

You can build reports and dashboards to track metrics across teams, like meetings booked by sales reps, campaign performance, or ticket resolution times.

Customize your dashboards to visualize exactly what matters most to your business.

10. Breez AI & Development

At the bottom of the left bar, you’ll see two icons:

• ⭐ Breez AI: HubSpot’s marketplace for AI-powered tools that can help with tasks like writing, summarizing, and forecasting.

• 💻 Development: Where developers can create and manage custom code, APIs, and extensions for your HubSpot portal.

✨ Why This Matters

Understanding HubSpot’s navigation helps you get the most out of every tool, from managing leads and automations to analyzing performance and supporting customers.

When you know where everything lives, you can focus on what really matters: building relationships, driving growth, and scaling smarter.

In short:

The top bar is for your internal tools and personal settings, while the left bar houses all your operational hubs, your marketing, sales, service, and automation engines.

Once you learn to navigate these like second nature, HubSpot becomes not just a CRM, but the central nervous system of your entire business.