Companies that invest in a HubSpot subscription often expect it will somehow magically help them attract, convert, and retain customers right out of the box. It won’t. Does it sound heretical for the Senior Solution Architect at a Platinum HubSpot Partner to say that?
Let me explain.
When your organization subscribed to HubSpot, your team was led through an onboarding process. This process is meant to create the minimum viable configuration of HubSpot so that your business can begin using the platform immediately. Unfortunately, a lot of companies stop there and never go to the next step, which is to fully optimize HubSpot and their business processes for their organizational goals. Did you?
Optimizing HubSpot
I spend pretty much every single day working with HubSpot on behalf of our clients. In partnership with my teammates here at 1 Bold Step, we get to know our clients' businesses and goals and then look for ways to optimize their marketing, sales, and customer success procedures by leveraging HubSpot.
To do this work, and get it right, you need someone that is an expert in HubSpot and an expert in business strategy and operations. That’s what I do, along with Tom Rau who is our Director of Revenue Operations.
Together, we work iteratively to co-create with our clients the improved suite of processes that will position their organization for the best result. We think holistically about your businesses so that all your teams using HubSpot can work in concert to seamlessly escort your prospects through their buying journey.
Let me give you an example.
I work with a client who is a large venture funded startup selling a subscription based service to other businesses. Their investors expect substantial returns and revenue growth. I worked with their team to identify leaks in their sales funnel and then plug those leaks with improved processes built on HubSpot’s growing capabilities.
The biggest leak we found in their sales funnel was that the customer success team was doing too much manual work in HubSpot handling renewal deals. For this business, renewals aren’t automatic for a large number of their customers. Instead, those deals require a Customer Success Manager (CSM) on the account to get a written agreement for the following year’s subscription.
The CSMs were spending so much time manually creating renewal deals in HubSpot, tracking down contract specifics from the last contact, trying to identify who had authority to renew the contract this year, and a variety of other administrative tasks, that they often fell behind in processing renewals and had to rush them through. A less than optimal experience for their customers
Here’s what we did:
- We created some processes in the sales department that required certain data to be input into HubSpot before a deal could be moved to “closed won.” Let’s agree that sales people generally prefer to be selling versus data entry work and will not enter data into the system unless there is a very good reason. You know what a good reason is? When they can’t move their deals to closed-won to hit their quota otherwise.
- Now that we had more reliable data being added to HubSpot, we designed automation that would create the renewal deals in the renewal pipeline based on the subscription end date of the previous contract.
- We automated an early notification reminding CSMs that a subscription was coming to an end.
- We also built an automated sales sequence that pulled relevant past contract information into a set of emails that were sent to the renewing customer asking them to schedule their renewal meeting with the CSM. When the renewal meeting got scheduled (also automated through a calendar link), a Slack message was sent from HubSpot to the customer success channel so that the whole team had visibility to the renewal process.
- Finally, we automatically moved the renewal deal from the “Expected” stage to the “Working” stage in the sales pipeline when the CSM had the renewal meeting scheduled.
We did some other good work on that account, creating efficiencies and optimizing their new business and renewal processes. We spent a lot of time improving how the sales team uses Hubspot so that they felt that using the platform was simple and made their sales work easier.
I’m planning to write up a complete case study on that client, but for the purposes of this article, here’s the point I’m driving at: We freed up the customer success team from a lot of tedious manual work and enabled them to spend more time nurturing the relationship with the customer during the renewal process.
Can you guess what happened?
If you guessed the percentage of contacts that got renewed went up, you’d be right. But you know what else happened? The sales team and the customer success team are now meeting on a regular basis to see what other process improvements can be made using HubSpot. They’re beginning to increase the close rate on new business deals and further increase the percentage of renewing customers.
HubSpot is constantly coming out with both small tweaks and huge functionality enhancements that your team should be using to optimize the platform for your unique needs. Below is a short list of the top seven new features I think you and your team should look into ASAP.
1. New Pipeline Functionality
Over the last 18 months, HubSpot has added some really helpful features to working with deals and pipelines. Here are some of the great updates to the pipeline functionality:
- Deal Creation & Movement - You can do three things that work really well together: force deals to be created in a certain stage, require that deals move to the next adjacent stage, and keep deals from moving backward in the pipeline. Each piece is a separate switch and can be turned on or off, but the benefit of turning all three on is that the background data that tracks conversation from one stage to the next will now actually be meaningful. You can now see how deals convert from one stage to the next, so that if the majority of deals are falling off in a specific stage, your team can put attention on finding out why and fixing that issue.
- Pipeline & Deal Visibility - Both whole pipelines and individual deal records can be hidden if need be. This might be used in situations where sales reps are very competitive and want to keep the data on the deals they own private to their team.
- Control Deal Editing Access - This feature lets you control who can further change a deal once it reaches a certain stage. As an example, this could be used to ensure that only the legal team moves a deal out of “Negotiating Contract” to “Contract Signed.”
2. New Association Functionality
Until recently, associating records and assigning association labels was all manual. Two new betas, one that allows you to require association labels when manually creating records, and one that enables new workflow actions to associate, disassociate, and label associations, are making the association functionality so much more helpful.
For example, now you could have two companies associated with a single deal. One company could have the label “Primary Company” which identifies the customer and a separate label could be “VAR” which identifies the value added reseller that participated in the deal. Using associations and labels to track key relationships can help you generate reports identifying your best VARs or creating a list of the key decision makers at all your existing customers.
As these two betas move into production in the near future, a bit of creativity on your part will make the record relationships in HubSpot more meaningful and helpful. Your teams will be able to identify which relationships are driving the most revenue.
3. New Collaboration Functionality
This one has actually been out for a while, but it makes my list because it is new to many of my clients.
The collaboration functionality enables all users who are involved on a deal to be identified on the deal record as collaborators. Would you like to see which of your sales engineers are associated with the most revenue? Would you like to know which BDRs set the most meetings? Would you like to know which CSM will be responsible for renewing this deal prior to the current contract ending? By using the collaboration functionality in conjunction with a team member’s role on the project, leadership can see who is contributing to revenue beyond just the deal owner.
4. New Record Layout Functionality
I was thrilled when the ability to customize the record layout became available. HubSpot has done an excellent job of making this interface easy to use and the functionality tremendously useful.
One of the questions I hear from over half my clients is if it is possible to limit what properties certain teams see on the record views. For example, the marketing team may want to see key marketing properties like Lead Source, and Date Became a Marketing Qualified Lead, and Engagement Score, while the sales team might not want to see any of that and instead see the city and state of the HQ, revenue of the organization, and which territory the company falls into.
Using team based views along with conditional cards, the contact, company, deal, and other records can be customized to limit what record data is visible on a per-user basis. This will help your teams quickly force the data they need so they can spend more time interacting with customers and closing deals.
5. New Lead Object Functionality
Almost every customer I have has said to me this year something like, “I see HubSpot now has a lead object just like Salesforce.” Why HubSpot named their new object a “lead” completely baffles me for this reason. HubSpot’s lead object is completely different from a Salesforce lead object. They have nothing relevant in common.
HubSpot’s new object should have been called a “prospect.” Because it is meant to be used for tracking the work of pursuing a person before an opportunity is identified, and a deal is created in the first stage of the appropriate sales funnel…but enough of my grousing.
The new lead object provides a much more intuitive and visual way of prospecting. It is an integral part of the new prospecting workspace and gives sales development reps a great tool for working prospects and trying to get that first meeting on the calendar.
There is so much to say about the new lead object, I’m going to have to write a separate article on it. For now, know that if you have a team of SDRs this tool is going to be immensely helpful in having them set more meetings faster.
6. New Custom Marketing Event Functionality
If you exhibit at a lot of trade shows or present at conferences, you need to dig into the custom marketing events.
In the past, loading trade show and conference leads into HubSpot was done by just importing a list of contacts. While that is a very basic way of creating a prospecting list for sales reps or SDRs to work, it did let you track which events a customer has attended and more importantly help generate the return on event data you need to easily tell if trade shows and conferences are making you money, and if so, which ones are and which ones aren’t.
Custom marketing events work with HubSpot’s campaign functionality to track all marketing related to an event and easily let you see if your efforts around the event are also supporting new opportunities and influencing revenue.
I should say here that while custom marketing events are helpful for a very specific thing, the functionality is fairly basic. I expect HubSpot will be beefing it up in the months to come to make it even more powerful.
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That’s just six of the hundreds of functionality updates and additions HubSpot has made to their platform in the last 18 months. If you haven’t reviewed your revenue operations processes and HubSpot usage lately, you could be missing a big chance to make important improvements that would support scaling and revenue growth.
Your HubSpot instance is like a luxury sports car. If you want to maintain its value, you have to take good care of it. That means having an expert, like 1 Bold Step, take a look under the hood every year or two and give it a good tune up.
I’m happy to talk with you personally about what’s new with HubSpot and how 1 Bold Step can help your team unleash the real power of the platform to make more money. Just click this link, and you will have access to my calendar so you can pick a time for us to meet.
