Prime the pump
When you make an investment in HubSpot, things don’t change overnight –There are changes to be made to the way you work, or the way your team works. There’s an adjustment period when existing systems have to be moved to HubSpot. And the sooner that happens, the more you will gain long-term.
The first step is to figure out what teams are most comfortable with. Expect things to be a little fuzzy for about a quarter – 12 working weeks is a fair amount of time for getting familiar with the workflow and how internal teams are aligned. Some people on the teams may find it easier than the others – and the key is to get everyone on the same page when operating.
Let the ones who get it first take the lead – and take others along. This isn’t a competition to win. It’s a template for how your marketing and sales will get streamlined and keeps stress levels down because you get a firm grip on what is happening. Decision making will be easier as compared to working with systems where information is distributed across multiple reports and workflows.
Get customer data into HubSpot
You have a marketing process and a sales process. There are points at which they interact but they need to work together for getting the best results. That’s the starting point. You have a set of customers and efforts are focused on landing new ones. In most cases, there’s an internal call center trying to fix meetings for sales.
Marketing runs campaigns and leads could arrive through that process as well. But what typically happens is that they don’t work in tandem. There’s a duplication of effort and costs. The moment one ties into the other, the equations change. Tracking of both marketing and sales efforts becomes possible. There’s information captured on customer preferences. But we’ll get to that in time because we’re just getting started now. The data from both marketing and sales has to go into the HubSpot CRM – and that becomes the core around which all efforts are generated, tracked and reviewed.
The content part of the puzzle
Companies find it hard to move out of comfort zones – because they are made up of people who have grown used to doing things in a certain way. Implementing something new across the company is a daunting task. People have to learn new things, be persuaded to do things differently and there is resistance to change.
Content marketing is spoken about as the new big thing but it’s not very clear how it works. Then, there’s also video and podcasts to add to the mix, which complicate the picture. What all companies know for sure is that a new initiative takes time and effort to pull off and has to have a team driving it.
Again, the best way is to start small. Describe your company and your business in ways that customers can connect to and understand. If you’re used to doing brochures and leaflets and events, continue with them while building website content. There’s no need to make large scale changes immediately. Make changes at a pace where most of the people within can be taken along.
Short term and long term benefits of implementing HubSpot
The immediate benefit is that you get to see multiple patterns of the entire business once the CRM is implemented. You can see how long it takes to get customers to sign up from the time they are pitched. Over the next few months, you can compare how different pitches have worked and the ones that haven’t.
Then, marketing can setup and run campaigns through HubSpot across all digital properties – on social or paid media. As the workflows for each campaign are created, you’ll begin to see reports and impact in a single dashboard and over time, the campaigns that work and the ones that didn’t.
Before HubSpot, you may have experimented with one or two channels and landing pages. Now, you can begin to set up small experiments across several channels and compare results to see what seems to work better.
You’ll see lead generation improve steadily as you sharpen the marketing approach. The leads can then be transmitted to sales through HubSpot and you’ll see the ones that are converting. It’s like a relay race where each part of the company does its part and then hands over for the next one to work on.
And then, you can concentrate on the content part of the picture. The one that pays off best in the long term. A beginning has to be made and the early efforts may be difficult to manage. But persistence is key. As customers discover content that highlights benefits, they begin spending more time on the site. And as we all know now, attention is the hardest hurdle to cross.
But we’ll save that for another time and another post. If you have bought into HubSpot and are looking to get started, give us a call and our expert consultants will be happy to begin a conversation.
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