One of the most common requests I hear when briefing on a new HubSpot onboarding goes along these lines:
“Can we just set it up to do things as we’re doing them now?”
This is normally a precursor to doing things “properly” at some undefined point in the future. But as we move through the myriad of other priorities that life and work throws at us, this will continue to be pushed into the future until the apes have taken over, and your HubSpot planning is being led by a gorilla-like creature named Cornelius.
I get it. You’ve invested big in the technology that you will be using to scale-up your company. You want people using it and it has to justify your investment.
But what tends to happen is that when you start out on HubSpot by using your old or existing processes, you fail to unlock all of the features and benefits that convinced you to invest in the first place. Is that not just wasting your investment anyway?
Starting with Strategy and Process
There are three stages to the successful onboarding of any new business system:
1. STRATEGY |
2. PROCESS |
3. TECHNOLOGY |
Ideally, the strategy phase should be a determining factor in the technology that you ultimately end up using. What technology can support the growth and scalability that we need over the next 2 to 5 years?
Generally, we work with fast-growth companies in the tech sector, and their strategy will be focused on maintaining or accelerating their rate of growth. This is usually the catalyst for looking at upgrading or consolidating their CRM and automation systems, putting in place something that will scale as the company grows.
As a strategy, that’s fine. The problem comes when you jump to the final stage, technology, without considering the process.
What do we mean by process?
The process you should be evaluating is the journey your prospects take all the way through from lead to client, and how this journey is managed internally. You should consider:
What are my criteria for marketing leads, sales leads and opportunities?
What pipeline stages should we be using and what is the percentage chance of closing a deal from each of these stages?
What communications need to be sent to leads at what time?
What can be automated?
How are you reporting on your KPIs and do these KPIs differ between different layers of your organisation?
The process is, in many ways, the reason you have invested in HubSpot, and by omitting this stage you are denying yourself a ton of value that you could be putting into developing a scalable system upon which to hit your growth objectives.
To get more ideas on how you can use HubSpot to enable your growth strategy, click here to download our eGuide.
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