For many in marketing and sales, HubSpot appears to offer a golden bullet for attribution, reporting and lead management. And used effectively, it can do just this. But for some, they just can’t get the data to do what they need it to. Lead and customer attribution is still a mystery, dashboards aren’t giving the reports that will keep the Board happy and processes are still manual where automation was promised.
So what has gone wrong?
The issues that people face can often be traced right back to the beginning with the initial set-up of HubSpot. While the technical set-up might all have been put in place (getting the domains pointing in the right direction, setting-up email and landing page templates, user admin and permission settings), the strategic set-up hasn’t been given the same level of attention.
So whether you’re brand new to HubSpot or you’re facing the same issues with attribution, reporting and automation, this is how you can set-up HubSpot in a strategic way that is aligned with your marketing and sales process.
Why HubSpot?
In order to understand the issues faced with set-up, it’s important to reflect on why people choose HubSpot in the first place.
From our experience, scale-up tech companies usually arrive at HubSpot for one of the following reasons:
1. They have multiple marketing and sales tools (Salesforce, Active Campaign, Pipedrive, landing page tools etc.) and they want to consolidate everything into one marketing and sales hub
2. They are spending a lot of money on paid advertising, but have no idea what spend is resulting in customers
3. They want to align their sales and marketing teams across shared, measurable objectives
These are often very strategically driven decisions. The desire for all marketing and sales tools to live underneath one roof is normally driven by a desire to consolidate reporting and attribution.
Understanding which paid channels and campaigns are driving not just leads, but customers, is a commercial decision which will allow marketing teams to prioritise their spend into the areas they know will convert.
Aligning their marketing and sales objectives and measuring this through one platform is based on a desire to understand the full buying journey and make marketing accountable for sales performance.
So with so many strategic motivations for purchasing HubSpot, why are these so frequently the challenges that are being experienced?
Getting Stuck in the Weeds
While the motivation behind purchasing HubSpot may be a strategic one, when you’re getting started it’s very easy to get stuck in the tactical tasks. The initial set-up process is seen very much as a technical one; you have to get your domains set-up, migrate your CRM across, create your email templates and landing pages, ensure that you are GDPR compliant and you’ve updated your privacy policies. Once all of this is in place, there is a lot of pressure to start using this expensive piece of kit that has often been unused for a month while all of this is being set-up. So what happens? You end up not putting in place the strategic set-up that is really going to drive the value.
So what should a strategic HubSpot set-up look like?
Steps for a Strategic Set-up
The main reason for not getting the strategic set-up in place at launch is usually time. You want to start using HubSpot as quickly as possible, so once the techy stuff is all in place, there are not perceived barriers to getting started. But because of the different disciplines that are required to get a HubSpot set-up in place, it’s perfectly possible to consider the strategic set-up at the same time and not delay your launch.
While your designers and developers are off playing with domains and templates, this is the time to plan and implement the strategic set-up that will get HubSpot performing as you desire. There are a number of steps and activities to consider. These include:
1. Alignment
· Map out your buyer journey and each of the different stages of your marketing and sales process
· If you haven’t already, agree on a clear marketing and sales strategy. Understand the metrics for both and the different stage involved in getting someone from website visitor through to sale. You will need to build this out through Lifecycle Stages and Deal Pipelines in HubSpot
· Consider your lead scoring and at what point your leads pass from marketing through to sales.
· Build out your sales pipeline and consider where automations can be used to push people through each stage
2. Integrations
· What other platforms are you keeping and how do they need to talk to each other? Salesforce is a very popular integration with HubSpot, make sure you have a plan for how data will be passed between the two
3. Reporting
· What information will need to be available to which departments? Board reports will differ from marketing performance reports, so plan out the metrics you need for each
· What fields will be required for this reporting? You may need to create some custom fields depending on the data that is going into HubSpot – consider this in your reporting as you’ll need to create custom reports for this
· What dashboards will I need? You’ll need them for each department, but depending on how big your sales and marketing teams are, you might need internal department dashboards so you can see metrics such as social media performance, performance of individual sales people etc.
Whether you’re new to HubSpot or you’ve been using it for a few years, it’s never too late to undertake a strategic set-up of your platform. In reality, you will be looking to change and amend this over time as your understanding of your customers and your own processes evolve, so if you’re still scratching your head at why you’re not getting the information you want from HubSpot, it’s definitely not too late to do something about it.