HubSpot is an excellent platform packed with powerful hubs – marketing, sales, customer service, operations, and CMS tools – that a business can leverage to build and grow its operations. As an all-in-one solution, the software wields immense potential for an entity seeking to maximise its technology and achieve efficiency. From building an SEO-optimised website to marketing automation, accessing comprehensive reports, creating superior customer experiences, and so forth, investing in HubSpot opens a business to a world of enormous growth opportunities.

If you have a HubSpot account, you must have been thrilled when you acquired it, right? Really, having all the powerful tools the software avails at your disposal is a dream come true for any marketer or business seeking to slay their strategies. 

Perhaps, going through the onboarding must have felt empowering. Probably, you hit the ground running from the get-go and got your teams set up on the platform for implementation, and the results soon started materialising. 

But that's as far as it goes. After a while, you might have realised that you're barely utilising all the platform's capabilities. Right now, you could be feeling like you are caught up on a forever plateau.

Actually, you're not alone on this. It happens to many others out there. A study found that more than 40% of small businesses do not maximise technology. Almost one-third of the business owners surveyed admitted that their lack of technology optimisation is due to knowledge gaps. As a result, they forgo opportunities to improve their productivity and achieve efficiency.

But how can one leverage HubSpot? 

Indeed, HubSpot is a very comprehensive platform. And with the updates taking place regularly, getting acquainted with every feature can feel like an uphill task. 

We already know you feel overwhelmed, so we won't overburden you with much information. Instead, we will just focus on six things you need to do to see success with your HubSpot. 

Here we go.......

Understand How the CRM Works

Customer relationship management (CRM) is the core of HubSpot. Understanding its components and how it works is crucial to optimising it. Ideally, with CRM, you should be able to offer a better customer experience, foster collaboration, achieve higher productivity, and derive excellent insights.

As you interact with the CRM, you should have come across these key properties – contacts, deals, companies, and tickets. Of course, it's paramount that you understand them, so what are they?

• Contact – Captures details of individual leads. The contact property contains different fields such as name, email address, company name, job title, etc.
• Deal – Represents a potential sale. Usually, you should link contacts and companies to deals for tracking as they move along the sales process.
• Company – Property helps group contacts and deals belonging to a single company together
• Ticket – Allow you to track customer and user requests from various channels (live chat, phone, email, etc.), thereby enhancing your customer experience

Using CRM

Once you have understood the key properties of CRM, you need to set it up to start maximising its capabilities. Ideally, the CRM provides the tools you need to grow your business as a team. 

After your marketing, sales, and service teams start using the platform, there's better collaboration, especially in contact management, thanks to the unified database. This also allows easy contact activity monitoring and communication tracking, not forgetting the generation of comprehensive reports.

Popular CRM features that you should be using include;

• Email tracking and engagement notifications
• Live chat tool
• Sales email templates
• Sales email automation
• Contact deal and task management
• Marketing automation
• Sales pipeline management 
• Meeting scheduler
• Landing pages
• Ads tool
• Social media tools
• Marketing analytics
• Online form builder, etc.

To start you off, you can follow this HubSpot 5-day CRM setup guide to get started.

• Day 1: Email integration
• Day 2: Create properties and import contacts
• Day 3: Define your deal stages
• Day 4: Create a lead ad and website integration
• Day 5: Invite your team

Understand Your Team's Needs 

The good thing with HubSpot is that it gives you the flexibility of adopting the different tools available at your pace. If you have your inbound marketing all set up and are ready to reap the benefits of an integrated all-in-all solution, you can go ahead and acquire the full service. I.e., marketing, service, sales, CMS, and operations hubs. Besides, doing so allows you to leverage the platform's powerful capabilities at a discounted service fee.

But even if you get started with the free package and then upgrade one hub at a time, your teams stand to gain immensely from the different features available. However, you need to have a solid understanding of your teams' needs and goals to leverage the available solutions. 

For instance;

• Marketing – Main goal is to generate qualified leads. This requires utilising the various tools available on the platform to create and publish strategic and high-quality content to capture and nurture leads to conversion.
• Sales – Has a sales-oriented goal that focuses on converting leads into customers. The platform offers a host of tools sales teams can utilise to engage prospects and convert them.
• Service – Primary goal is to provide superior customer experiences to turn the customers into promoters. HubSpot is rich with customer service tools that enable teams to provide efficient service and enhance the overall experience.
• Operations – Goal is to provide seamless integration, ensuring systems work together better. The operations tools should help your teams to connect apps, automate processes, and unify data.

Once you establish the different team needs and identify the tools available to execute their goals, it becomes easy to get a buy-in from them and ultimately leverage the platform's benefits.

Conduct Thorough Onboarding

Onboarding is crucial for your success with HubSpot. Your team needs to understand the platform's benefits, the different tools available, and how to utilise those tools to optimise their activities. 

Ideally, there are different onboarding options that you can explore. Either you can choose direct HubSpot's onboarding service or hire a HubSpot partner agency to get you through the process.

When you go with HubSpot, their implementation specialist designs an onboarding plan based on your goals, size and structure of your organisation, products purchased, and your current technology stack.

• Marketing onboarding – They guide you through the process of setting up and using the Marketing Hub to achieve your marketing goals.
• Sales onboarding – Focuses on setting the Sales Hub for efficient deal closing.
• Service onboarding – Provides guidance on implementing the service hub to serve your customers better.
• CMS onboarding – Involves integrating your website with the HubSpot CMS to enable you to optimise and improve your content strategy.

The direct HubSpot onboarding package entails;

• An implementation specialist
• Discovery call session
• 90 days of onboarding
• HubSpot setup guidance
• Advice on integrations
• Ongoing support through the platform's general support system

Conversely, you may opt to involve a HubSpot partner agency to conduct your onboarding. Essentially, the agencies are part of the HubSpot solutions partner program and have the necessary training to help businesses set up and make the most of their HubSpot investment.

Unlike the direct HubSpot onboarding service, hiring a partner firm gives you the privilege of continuous custom support. This is essential, mainly due to the fact that HubSpot is continually evolving. So having an ongoing HubSpot expert on your side is beneficial as they keep you up to date with new features and their functionality.

Some of the services available with a partner agency include;

• Technical setup
• Contact import
• CRM customisation
• Customised training
• Sales enablement services
• Strategic development and consulting

Ongoing Training Plan

With the ever-evolving HubSpot software, keeping up to date with the regular changes is essential. You and your teams should commit to learning continuously. 

Luckily, there are many learning opportunities available that you could take advantage of, including;

• Joining the HubSpot academy
• Watching HubSpot's YouTube channel
• Listening to HubSpot Skill Up podcast
• Subscribing to HubSpot blog posts
• Joining the HubSpot ideas forum and so forth

Alternatively, you can hire a HubSpot partner agency to help you with your continuous training needs. Not only is this convenient for your teams, but it ensures that you don't miss important product information as a partner agency is always up to date with new developments. 

Review & Refine

If you haven't instituted an evaluation strategy for your HubSpot solution implementation, it's vital you do so. Essentially, you need to build a review process whereby your teams can exchange ideas on what worked and didn't work with each tool and strategy. 

The good thing with HubSpot is that it has the tools to measure performance. So you can see clearly the outcome of your activities. But your team should set goals and expectations first and define clear timelines for achieving those goals. This way, you have a systematic framework in place for evaluating your performance to learn where your strategies succeed or fail.

Then you should create a road map of the areas that need to improve and when you need to start implementing the changes. With a time-sensitive cycle of review & refine, it becomes easy to leverage the platform's potential and maximise your ROI.

Create an Internal Learning Centre

HubSpot's knowledge base has everything your teams need to succeed with the platform. However, combing through all the resources whenever you require specific information can be overwhelming for your teams. 

The alternative is creating your knowledge base or internal learning centre customised for your business needs. Not only does this make the resources more accessible for your teams, but onboarding and training new team members become much more convenient.

Essentially, to create the knowledge base, you need to set up a team to help with the implementation and assign their roles. You should also draft a plan and establish a user-friendly content hierarchy to guide you when you upload the content from HubSpot. But the most crucial thing is to ensure you keep the content fresh through regular review and updates.

Besides uploading relevant content from HubSpot, you can also create how-to videos and cheat sheets based on your teams' knowledge needs. Also, you can create awesome resources by recording onboarding training. This way, you don't have to conduct live training every time you have a new team member. Instead, they can use the recorded content to get acquainted with the platform quickly.

Conclusion

HubSpot is a powerful tool. But it requires putting the work upfront to see the results at the end. First, you need to understand CRM and how to use it to leverage its benefits. On the same note, you must understand your team's needs and identify the tools they need to realise their goals. This becomes easier to explain the importance of the platform and get them to buy-in. But above all, you need to onboard the team members to help them get fully acquainted with the platform. As HubSpot is constantly improving, you should also have an ongoing training strategy to keep your teams updated with new features. This should be accompanied by a review & refine strategy to allow the team to evaluate their performance regularly and optimise their activities. Lastly, you should create an internal knowledge base whereby your team can access HubSpot resources customised for your business.  

Quite a lot of work, right? But it's all necessary to help you get the most out of your HubSpot account. Remember, as much as your team needs to own the implementation process, you can always count on a HubSpot partner agency to guide you through the process. Though that means an added cost, it pays off in the long run as you can count on them to help you leverage the platform. Ideally, getting them on board ensures you don't miss on opportunities to maximise your ROI. The truth is, it's possible to get a negative ROI on your HubSpot investment, especially if you lack the knowledge to optimise the strategy. But with a partner agency guiding you, you can have confidence that you have the necessary expertise to get you the most out of your investment.

Ready to make a difference? Book a call to discuss our continuous improvement program and make the most out of your HubSpot solution.