After one year, companies using the HubSpot platform acquire more leads, attract more traffic to their websites, win more deals, and resolve more customer tickets. It’s an incredibly powerful tool, but many businesses just aren’t making the most of it, due to various factors. These include a lack of buy-in, poor data integrity and a siloed approach to sales, marketing and CS.
Even long-term users of HubSpot may not be realising all its benefits, which can result in significant amounts of wasted spend. Research conducted by Gartner in 2022 found that marketers alone are using just 42% of their MarTech stack’s capabilities.
However, there are a few key steps you can take to start making the most out of your HubSpot investment; using it to delight customers, increase your teams’ productivity and drive revenue:
#1 Ensure your data is accurate, segmented and relevant
Your organisation’s ability to attract, engage and delight customers begins and ends with a bedrock of accurate, organised and complete data. With a reliable data set, your customer-facing teams can automate repetitive tasks, reach out to customers and prospects in cadences and report on all their activities across the whole customer lifecycle.
Accurate data makes it easier to track attribution and identify key touchpoints and upselling opportunities, so allocating budgets is no longer a guessing game.
The costs of bad data are real – another study by Gartner found that on average, bad data quality costs organisations $12.9m a year. It’s easy to understand why – inaccurate data can frustrate customers, make data analysis more difficult, and lead to false conclusions.
It’s impossible to make good business decisions based on bad data.
So how do you get started cleaning the company’s database? For starters, consider filtering contacts that aren’t engaging or haven’t engaged for a long time, which can be a drain on your resources.
To avoid the problems that disorganised data can create going forward, establish a standard for how information will be collected by anyone using the CRM. Decide exactly what data is needed from the customer whenever a new contact is made, standardise categories such as industry, and create formatting standards everyone should follow.
This final principle for good data management also illustrates the importance of getting each of your revenue-driving teams – sales, marketing and customer services – on the same page.
#2 Align sales, marketing and customer service into one revenue-driving team
In an organisation, although the sales, marketing and customer service (CS) teams have the same ultimate goal, in practice these teams are often siloed – kept apart by different team goals, ways of speaking, and now, physical distance.
This distance can only be bad for the business – marketing teams working without sales’ understanding of which prospects convert to customers might miss the mark with messaging, while insights identified by customer services teams on the front line that could inform part of a sales strategy will remain unexplored. This leads to friction and missed revenue.
Aligning these revenue-driving teams ensures that these insights are shared and actioned. BD is more likely to target sales-ready customers, boosting conversion rates. Marketing is more likely to produce content that helps prospects convert, and CS is more likely to receive well-informed customers who will become company advocates.
It’s clear that communication is key – and this is where HubSpot comes into its own. Using HubSpot as the backbone of a Revenue Operations (RevOps) strategy, sales, marketing and CS can work together towards a shared revenue goal, with each function’s activities focused around this. Together they identify and market to the ideal customer profile, agree what constitutes a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) and put service level agreements (SLAs) in place to ensure smooth marketing-to-sales and sales-to-service handoffs. This improves customer experience and leads to, you guessed it, more revenue opportunities.
#3 Set up automation to improve productivity and nurture leads
With HubSpot, you can automate routine business processes in sequences and workflows, as well as standardise company documents by creating templates. This removes a great deal of friction: sales teams are freed from time-consuming data entry, and lead-nurturing email campaigns virtually take care of themselves.
Not to mention, data capture is more accurate. For example, when a prospect sends a form, or clicks a specific link in an email, their details – first-party data, which is critical for retaining a competitive edge – is automatically captured and added to the database. Leads are kept warm in the background as automated sequences send personalised emails with engaging, useful content.
Automation works well beyond the sale, too, with Service Hub checking in on customer satisfaction at each major journey point. This enhances customer experience and helps to turn your customers into your best salespeople.
Taking any one of these steps better leverages the myriad capabilities of the HubSpot platform.
To find out if your HubSpot platform is working for you, we’re offering a free 10-point audit, identifying where you can streamline tools, increase productivity and revenue. No strings attached.