How to get the most out of your HubSpot investment

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So today's... I'm really hot in here. It is so hot. We should have got some beers for this. Can you not sit like that? It's really off-putting. So today we're going to talk about whether technology is seen as a silver bullet. Just to frame this a little bit, and I know this is more your specialist subject than mine, we do come across quite often organizations that have gone down the route of a platform like HubSpot. And they got no success, they got no return, and they switched it off. HubSpot shit, not interested in Yeah, so you bring up the HubSpot conversation, they go,

That's a bit smart. I think it's worked before. HubSpot don't, yeah, nah. We obviously know that that is largely down to how they've implemented it and how they've... Or the lack of implementation altogether. The lack of skills they've got in -house. Maybe the partner they use to implement it really didn't understand their business and he's working with lots of different types of businesses, B2C, B2B. So we do see...

This face, HubSpot's a very successful platform and its customer retention rate is very high. as I say, from time to time we do see organizations that have been frustrated with the technology. They would have been frustrated with Marketo, Eloqua. If they still went through the same process, poor implementation, probably didn't get the data right, no integration with their CRM, no skills in -house to make the most of the platform.

So how do we overcome that? What's your take on why you think this is such a problem? Well, there's a few things. think the first is perception. I think the first is very much that organizations will buy a tool like that, turn it all on and then expect things to happen. That's just a misperception. That's why they sit there, prod it with a stick and say, where are the leads basically?

Like any system, HubSpot isn't going to do that. It's an engine. Ultimately, you need to add the fuel to that engine to make it run and to get leads out the other side. So that's the first thing. think that misperception leads people to think that it's going to magically work on its own, which is obviously flawed. The other, as you alluded to then, is how they've been onboarded. So I'm not going to agency bash here, but...

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A lot of agencies, like you say, will be quite generalist, especially some of the big ones. So for them to get to that size, for them to be big HubSpot, elite partners, they're going to need to work cross industry, multiple sizes, working with hot tub companies, working with car dealers, working with B2B tech companies. Naturally, that means that they're not necessarily as well equipped to implement HubSpot in a way that's going to work for a B2B tech company.

And so oftentimes it doesn't go deep enough in the implementation to make it work. And what the client is left with is a system which has been turned on, but not optimized for their sales and marketing and service program or business. that's the second thing. The third thing is very much around the method of implementation. So often people will...

purchase HubSpot and then either go for the guided onboarding that HubSpot offer, which is very good, but still leaves a lot for the client to do themselves. Or they'll use an agency that, like I say, will switch it on. What we would propose is a much more thought through onboarding and implementation experience, which is based upon the objectives that you're looking to achieve. if everyone's buying HubSpot for a reason,

It might be that they want to consolidate their sales marketing and service teams. It might be that they want to automate their marketing program. It might be that they want to improve the efficiency of their sales function. There's a massive list of different things that someone might buy HubSpot for. And we find that implementations are successful when you focus on that end goal from the start and not just turn HubSpot on, but build the platform to achieve that aim.

That means that once the implementation is done, you don't just have a HubSpot system that works, you have a HubSpot system that automates your marketing program. You have a HubSpot system that's brought all of your sales marketing and service people together. They're trained, it's working and they're collaborating as you were promised to no doubt in the sales process. So implementation is really key. Getting it right at implementation stage is really critical.

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because otherwise you're left with a system that's turned on and working, but you don't always have the skills in house to really optimize it for you and your business. And if you don't have that, the biggest thing you're going to get wrong is not having it implemented properly in the first place, just having it turned on. So if you're an organization that's been down this path before, feel like you had your fingers burnt and it was a wasted investment in the technology.

you know, what should, if they're going to start to reevaluate HubSpot, what should they be doing this time round to ensure that they do get more out of the investment? You know, let's face it, HubSpot's probably moved on significantly in last 18 months and it might be a very different platform offering a very different experience than maybe they used, maybe they got from it last time.

Yeah, so what should they be doing differently? How should they look at think there's two things. think first of all, you've got to reevaluate your objectives. If you're not starting with why are we buying HubSpot and what do we want to achieve by buying it and investing in it, then you're starting off on the wrong foot. Buying HubSpot and then just switching on everything that it does is not going to have the impact that you want. You need to have an objective in mind. The second thing is absolutely recognizing that HubSpot has moved on a lot to platform.

We wrote a blog on this recently, but way back when we started working with it nearly 10 years ago, it was very much a marketing automation system for small to medium businesses. These days it's much bigger than that. They're very clearly trying to take on the enterprise players, Salesforce predominantly, and they're doing so from a really strong position because essentially what they've done is built from the ground up a system which

covers the entire customer journey, all the way through from prospecting and marketing, all the way back to customer retention and everything else. So they've got the whole suite now covered and a lot of new functionality mixed into that, which if you've had your fingers burn in the past, you may not have had a chance to fully utilize. So I would say, A, look at your objectives. First of all, look at what you're trying to achieve and then build a

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HubSpot system to help you achieve them or get some help from a partner to do so. Second of all, have another look at HubSpot. See what more it can do these days that it couldn't then, especially around service and sales. Because as we all know, or certainly in this room we know, the power of HubSpot is really multiplied by the number of different functions that you run through it. And we were about to talk about rev ops earlier.

And the reason that RevOps is an attractive proposition is because it truly brings together sales, marketing and service. And it provides a more connected, seamless experience to customers. Maybe we save that conversation for the next podcast, but HubSpot twigged onto the same idea 10 years ago and have a system that truly combines sales, marketing and service. So... Right, does now. It didn't 10 years ago. It didn't do it as well 10 years ago, but it does now.

But in terms of the, you talk about objectives, or objective -based implementation. let's break down the five, six elements of, well, six elements, the six hubs of HubSpot.

when you think of it in those terms and you're evaluating the platform and you're thinking about the objectives that you want to achieve. Because we know maybe there are people out there that have purchased the platform, like you said earlier, thinking that they just switch it on and suddenly the leads are going to start pouring in. It's kind of nonsensical when you think about it, but people do look at it that way. We've got to the end of this negotiation process.

We look to the licenses. We've got, we've bought the platform. Great. Now, you know, we're nearly there. We just go switch it on. The leads are going to come. Yeah. Obviously that's just not going to happen. So, what are the main drivers for buying HubSpot? so that, you know, let's start with the marketing hub. What's that going to really give you? Well, automation is the big one, isn't it? You know, obviously back to HubSpot's roots, marketing automation is.

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is very much at the core of what PubSpot deliver. And there's a lot of the time when we speak to clients, automating their sales marketing and service processes is front of mind. So if your objectives are to improve the efficiency of marketing? Yeah, improve the scale, improve the reach, because of course, and this particularly comes into place from a sales perspective, it applies to marketing too, automation allows you to do more with less. That's the general.

principle of automation full stop. So if you're finding that you are stretched from a marketing perspective, that you've got a team that can't deliver anymore, or you've got a sales team that can't continue to follow up all the leads that you generated, then the use case for automation is a really obvious one. Well, let's come back to sales. Let's stick with marketing. we've got efficiency. Yeah. And that's not just in terms of automation because

Obviously there are some marketing operations or marketing teams that have got lots of different tools just for marketing. Yeah. That's incredibly... shit ones. All shit ones, incredibly inefficient. mean, without beating up Pardot, we know of companies that have got Pardot and, you know, let's face it. They just hire every time you mention it's name. Yeah. And they're so frustrating to work with. It takes us ages just to create a landing page. That landing page looks like shit. Not the great experience that you want to, you know, to...

build on when you're trying to interact and engage potential buyers. So I think it's a lot around efficiency. But what you're saying is efficiency doesn't just come from automation, it comes from ease of use. Ease of use, consolidating systems, having everything in one place, having all your data in one place. Well, that's the thing. think to look at those objectives as, our objective for marketing is this, our objective for sales is this, our objective for service is this, is the wrong way looking at it. I think, and we mentioned RevOps, just.

But I think people still buy in the hubs though, don't they? I think over time it will come to the point where you're buying the whole suite, but I think people will be switching on hubs as they... I think there's very few organizations that will jump straight in enterprise customer platform. No, not at the minute, but I think that will happen. will change, absolutely. And the objective may be that they want to bring those teams together. And there's still some work to do with HubSpot and its brand perception to convince people that it is more...

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than just a marketing platform. There's still some way to go with that. And I think they'd be the first to admit it, they're making great progress with it. But I I still think there is that perception of a tool like HubSpot for companies that haven't really used it or used something like it before, is it's gonna generate them leads. And I think it will help that process by being more efficient,

campaigns more quickly in a more effective way. But just by turning it on, it's not going to start churning all this stuff out. It's not going to churn leads out for you. we touched on marketing. Sales, if you're a sales manager, a sales leader, what's HubSpot going to give you? It's a similar story. Ultimately, what HubSpot sales is going to do is speed up processes through things like sequences, which again,

our automation, it's going to structure your data in the right way, allow your teams to work through that data more efficiently, importantly, allow you to collaborate with marketing if you're in the same system, which is the point I'm earlier on everyone being in one place that helps you understand when marketing qualified leads are coming through. What we call a marketing qualified lead we covered earlier, but you know,

The main things from a sales perspective, again, are automation, improving the efficiency, doing what you do. Yeah. Yeah. So it's sequences. It's, it's yeah. Trying to make sure that you've got automation in place to follow up your specific opportunities. obviously now LinkedIn as well. which is LinkedIn sales navigator is, is the tool of choice for a lot of salespeople. There's a lot more integration now with, HubSpot. And that brings all of your

LinkedIn sales nav leads into HubSpot. So again, that's efficiency, isn't it? Ultimately, it's making life easier for the people that are doing these jobs. Yeah. And it's such an elegant, easy to use tool. It's a pleasure to work in. better than some of the other. What we haven't covered is the benefit to the customer at the end of the day. What we're also trying to achieve is a more seamless, elegant customer experience. And so if, for example,

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We're documents, we're using quotes, we're invoices even in commerce up now to create a really quick seamless experience through that sales journey that is also beneficial to the customer. it's also going to benefit the likelihood of that sale going across. But again, if we look at sales and marketing for a second and look at the transition between those two things, what HubSpot and to be fair, systems like it will allow you to do.

is have a more seamless handover between sales and marketing because you're in the same system. There's no clunky integration with Salesforce. There's no disparate teams that are doing things that no one understands. know, the amount of times I speak to clients and they say, well, that's in Salesforce. We don't know what goes on in there. It's like a hidden black box system and the leads go in and we'd have no idea what happens to them. Well, that's not productive to an efficient or effective sales and marketing function because

What we want to be able to have is true collaboration and that often comes through centralization, but it also comes through visibility through reporting. So if marketing can see that they've generated a hundred MQLs this month, that's created 10 new tasks for the SDR team that are operating at HubSpot. And they can see that 80 % of those have been followed up and 10 % of those have resulted in new

opportunities or appointments being booked. And then with the same platform, the sales leader can see how many calls the BDR has made, how many connects and what the connect ratio is in terms of number of calls versus actual conversations. You can see where those conversations have gone in terms of that's a qualified opportunity. That's one to be nurtured. That can easily be rooted back to marketing. to join the dots and just to recap a little bit on what we talked about, it really is about you're on a platform

because you want to generate leads, you want to grow the business, you want to develop your pipeline. But you've got to join the dots. It's too simplistic to say a platform is going to do that for you. But what it is doing is enabling your sales and marketing teams to be far more efficient and effective. And collaborating. And collaborate better, which is obviously going to generate more And have more intelligence and insight as we finished on that. So it gives you the leading indicators, it gives you the lagging indicators.

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when you look at those and you break them down, it enables you to optimize your sales and marketing process. that's how can see from a marketing perspective, those activities which have resulted in the most opportunities being booked. every marketer wants to see that because then they crank that dial up a little bit. Yeah, particular source of leads is more effective. Of course, to crank it up. I know it doesn't sound that complicated, it's a place which most...

sales, marketing and service teams haven't reached. We know for most B2B tech companies of a certain size, referrals are probably their best source of opportunity. many organizations do have a fairly reactive, opportunistic approach. They don't have to harness that. It's not intentional. It's just if a referral comes in, great. We know that's going to be good because it's come from a trusted source as long as it's a good fit in terms of the...

the prospects and the ideal customer profile, great opportunity. Every salesperson is going to get excited about a referral. But there is still this belief that it can't be optimized, it can't be improved or enabled by technology. absolutely we've done it. There are so many different aspects of a referral program, a formal proactive referral program that can be made more effective and more efficient through automation and through a tool like HubSpot.

And going back to the levers that you're pulling, if you can ramp up your referral program and you can use technology to do that, that's also another really strong part of the business case to implement the tool like that. And I think these kind of use cases in B2B tech are really important for people to think about if they're going to invest in a tool like that. That's what you should be thinking about implementing, not just setting up the tool and switching on social links and email.

everything else. It's right. We're going to use HubSpot to create a very formalized referral program. should start with what you want to achieve. you want to to market strategy. Is it more account based focus? therefore, is there a use case within HubSpot that you can choose a tool then which allows you and enables you to do that? Absolutely. And then when you implement that tool, you do so based upon the strategy that you already outlined. And that's the wrong oftentimes to go back to the start of this conversation where people go wrong.

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is that they don't do that. They say, we need a platform. Okay, well, we want HubSpot, Market Leader, et cetera, and this, this, and this. And then they get it and think, okay, well, what do we do with it? Don't have the skills in -house, don't really know what they're gonna do with it. Start in the wrong way around. It's arse about face, basically. And then you speak to them and they've had it for six months and it's like, not really sure what to do with it. know, reporting's a problem.

integration isn't great CRM, it's only going one way. It's a familiar story sometimes with some organizations that have been down that route, which is a shame because we know it can be really powerful in the right hands. And we talked about sales, we talked about marketing, we didn't talk about service and that's really key. So give us some objectives for why someone might go with service hub. Again, similar story. Hub sort of

easy to use platform, there's lots of automation involved. But the big thing is when you've got those three systems or those three functions in one system, you multiply the effectiveness, you multiply the efficiency of all of them because the data is transferred between all of those three different hubs seamlessly. all of those hubs and the data within them and the teams that operate them can all learn from what's come before.

So if a customer service team, for example, gets a new ticket created by a new customer of a SaaS platform, they can look back through the history of that record, all the way back through to sales, and even through back to the marketing material they've engaged with, and try and understand what might be important to them. So it may be that they've inquired initially, and they said, we want to buy HubSpot, for example, as a SaaS platform, to enable our marketing automation.

Now, if you have some of that insight, then you're much more able to effectively service them from a customer service perspective. But you can also see upsell, cross -sell opportunities if you're an account manager. yeah. mean, even just that linkage between service and sales. know, we know that there's companies out there that will be notified by service that a company hasn't or customer hasn't logged into their platform for two months. So that alerts the salespeople or the renewal team to make sure they're finding out what's going on.

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and try and save that potential churn before it happens. So you don't get that when you've got siloed systems. Same with it. Maybe not a SaaS company. Think about from a service company perspective. Obviously, that's largely who we deal with. But onboarding then can be much quicker as well. So we know that the worst thing that can happen when a client signs up to a new contract is it then takes two weeks to get the ball rolling, project plans in place and the client sitting there having signed some

then you might have been really responsive in the sales process and then sign the deal in radio silence for two weeks. If you have an integrated team and automation to help make the handover more seamless, you can do that onboarding almost instantly. like the one client that we worked with when we gave them a series of, helped them create a series of what, onboarding videos that took them through the process. They're received on an incremental basis through that onboarding.

And as soon as that contract was signed, was done so in HubSpot, the deal was moved to closed one, and the client was receiving those onboarding videos straight away to help them make the most of the platform. as an end user of a platform, then that's what you want. And so again, it all draws back to the integration between the teams. Now, ultimately it draws back to a fundamental problem, which is the lack of integration between functional teams within organizations, particularly sales, marketing and service.

and HubSpot is a part of the solution to that. The other part, and I think it's probably a good place to end because it can lead on to what we're going to discuss next time, is not just having a system that can bring those teams together, but also having a model for running those teams, i .e. rev ops, that officially brings them together and breaks down the silos from a management leadership perspective between them. So I think that's probably a good place to end.

wanted to talk about another gem within the suite, is content hub. Yeah. Formally CMS. Formally CMS. And again, I think the perception of that platform now or HubSpot as a website platform has changed dramatically. There's still people that maybe think WordPress is the go -to website platform. We know all the challenges with WordPress. Do we have time on this one? Well, yeah. I mean, it's a bigger topic, but I mean,

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CMS content hub needs to have serious consideration because if you've got all those other aspects of HubSpot working and then you've got a website as well, let's face it, so pivotal to the customer experience now. often the starting point. Yeah. There's so much more you can do when you're starting to leverage all that data on your customers and prospects and you're harnessing your website to use that data to create a more personalized experience.

I think there's an old perception that maybe you can't create a really elegant website with the HubSpot platform. Maybe that was true when they first launched it. It's come so far now. Some of the sites that we've created, we're obviously really proud of and are right at the forefront of what we consider good UX, good design. It's a very malleable platform, modular -based,

You know, so much can be done with it. So much can be changed by the marketeers themselves that are managing the platform or managing the website. Whereas we know with WordPress, typically any major changes or even minor changes sometimes have to go through developer. Yeah. And then you end up getting hacked and read the blog if you want to know what happened. Last time we had any direct connection with the WordPress website.

Well, it's an open source platform. Security is not maybe as it can be if you've got lots of money to spend on ongoing maintenance. you know, obviously the big benefit with HubSpot CMS or Content Hub is everything is included in that SaaS package for everything you need for a website. have to worry about plugins. You don't have to worry about them going out of date. You don't have to worry about getting hacked by dildo merchants. You don't have to worry about, et cetera.

So I've never read, I can't get my head around the WordPress versus HubSpot debate. think it's, we would say this obviously as a HubSpot partner, but. But that's because we've seen what can be done with it. Yeah. And we've seen how people have migrated from WordPress to HubSpot. And that's because we're marketers by trade and we don't want to have to be for the mercy of a developer. all sorts of shit to make something work. Techies may want to, you know, they may want the flexibility that comes with being able to do that.

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But from a marketeers perspective, who are the buyers of HubSpot? Let's face it. Primarily. Primarily. And who are the users of HubSpot primarily? They don't want to have to be dicking about with code and asking a developer to update this and update that when they don't need to. And so from a marketeers perspective, the debate around WordPress versus HubSpot is a really... And again, it goes back to efficiency, effectiveness. can create a fantastic website through HubSpot just like you can with WordPress.

but you haven't got all the headaches of maintenance and security that come with it. And also you've got stuff there that's already built into the platform that can help you leverage your data, create more personalized experiences for customers, which again is going to help you be more effective when it comes to lead generation and just general growth with your existing accounts. So probably a good place to end.

in the past, maybe you've used it and you've moved on from it. Might be time to have a look at it again. I think so. Might be time for us to get out of this sweltering hot room as well. that would be nice.