HubSpot has quickly risen to become a top-tier choice for companies seeking robust sales, marketing, or customer service tools to power their entire Revenue Operations all built on an industry-leading CRM. This has led hundreds of thousands of customers to adopt the tools into their everyday operations, often migrating from older outdated systems.

As a HubSpot Platinum Solutions Partner, we’re often called in to support clients at the onboarding stage, helping them set up, configure, and migrate data and processes to suit their unique business needs. But more and more these days, we’re getting involved with clients who are already using HubSpot and questioning the value they’re receiving, or if they’re even using the tools effectively. So how do you know?

Our process typically starts with an audit. Kind of like a mechanic performing a 129-point inspection on your car, we follow a similar process to look ‘under the hood’ to see what’s working and what isn’t. What we often come across are under-utilized features, incorrect product configuration and lack of user adoption. All of this makes sense if businesses aren’t feeling like they’re getting a solid return on their investment.

So how do you maximize the value of your HubSpot investment? Here’s a rundown of some of the most important HubSpot features that you should be taking advantage of in the CRM, Marketing Hub, and Sales Hub.

HubSpot CRM tips

The HubSpot CRM is the underlying technology for the entire solution. It’s the essential repository of contact records, company records, sales transactions (deals), and customer communications.

Like any CRM, maintaining data integrity and quality is the key to success. To ensure your CRM is set up to succeed, you should evaluate the following:

Data hygiene

Are the CRM records correctly formatted? Are contact and company names complete? Do they have the correct case formatting? When teams ‘bomb’ records into the CRM, are they paying attention to the details? These records are typically used in automation and customer communications, and it pays to enforce some data standards. This is where the saying ‘garbage in, garbage out’ comes from.

Data associations

Are records correctly associated with each other or are they disconnected and disparate? Ensure that each record is attached to its related records. For example, a company record should be associated with all the contacts that work at that company. Or if you work with large companies that have lots of branch offices or locations, parent-child relationships should exist between associated companies.

Duplicates

HubSpot has some methods and tools to suppress too many duplicates in the system, but it’s a persistent issue for some companies, especially those with large databases of contacts and companies. Duplicates can wreak havoc on well-intentioned sales or marketing activities, not to mention internal confusion.

Integrations

HubSpot works best when it’s integrated properly with other business systems like ERP solutions, invoicing software, Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) solutions, or the thousands of other sales and marketing software that HubSpot integrates with.

How to solve for this

Depending on the size of the dataset you’re managing, there are a couple of options to get on top of this.

HubSpot Operations Hub Professional

This is a home-cooked solution from HubSpot directly that will provide you with a toolset to manage data formatting, integrations, and overall data management. To get the full solution, you’ll be looking at a heavier investment with HubSpot, but the automation tools can be a major timesaver and pay for themselves.

Insycle

We love Insycle for its ability to plug right into your HubSpot CRM and process large volumes of data. You can use it for automated de-duplication, record association management, data imports, data hygiene audits, and much more. We also love that it’s a fraction of the price of HubSpot Operations Hub Professional, although it takes a little training and orientation to know how to use the tools.

Intern or summer student

For those who have smaller databases, hiring a summer student or intern to tackle data quality can be a great solution. Give them clear guidance and HubSpot CRM training first, and they’ll be off to the races.

HubSpot Marketing Hub tips

Marketing Hub Professional is the OG HubSpot solution and is packed with powerful features. It’s more common for us to see underutilized tools with this Hub than any other, primarily because there are just so many tools. If you’ve purchased Marketing Hub Pro, here are the primary value drivers that you want to ensure you’re taking advantage of.

Workflow automation

The headline feature of Marketing Hub Pro is the powerful workflow’s tool. This tool can be used for countless different applications, sometimes it just takes a little creativity to decide how to use it. Here are a few ideas if you’re not leveraging the tool to the max:

1. Data processing – Use workflows to manage CRM records. Within the data processing set is the ability to add records, update records, and generally automate your data. An example of this would be to set up lead scoring automation, and when a contact reaches a score threshold, update their lifecycle stage to Sales Qualified, put them into a segmented marketing list, and alert a sales rep who could complete outreach.
2. Contact Nurturing – Use triggers to determine when a website visitor has performed a buying intent action (like viewing a pricing page or filling in a specific form to download some content) and then enroll them into an automated series of emails that will keep your brand top of mind.
3. Renewal alerts – Have customers that have a purchase anniversary coming up? Use a date-based workflow to send out friendly reminders to your customer (and your team) to encourage renewal and reduce your company’s churn.

Ads

For any company that is currently investing in paid ads with Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn, make sure your ad accounts are connected to your HubSpot portal. You don’t need to use HubSpot to manage the ads, but there are several benefits to integrating ads with HubSpot.

1. Revenue Attribution – If you’re tracking and managing deal revenue in HubSpot for your contacts, this is a huge win. When fully integrated, HubSpot will attribute an ad click to the actual revenue realized, and it’s fully automated. Now you have a powerful decision-making system that will tell you exactly what your cost per customer and ROI are from your advertising program.
2. Audience matching – You can connect your CRM data directly to Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn for the purpose of re-marketing using 1st party data instead of anonymous data. This takes some setup on both ends, but the most valuable data your business has is the 1st party data that’s already in your CRM. You might as well use it!
3. Event Sync – Google Ads becomes a much smarter platform when it knows what success looks like. When you sync lifecycle stage changes between HubSpot and Google, Google will learn to maximize success and deliver ads with much better targeting. In some cases, we’ve seen over 100% improvement in ad conversion in just a few months, not to mention reduced ad costs in some cases.

Campaign management

HubSpot features a solid campaign management tool that lets you label all your various marketing assets (ads, landing pages, emails, CTA’s, blogs, social posts, etc.) to a singular campaign focus for measurement. This tool is ideal for companies that run seasonal campaigns or have multiple targeting objectives each year. This is one of the most underutilized tools we see.

Analytics & reporting

The reporting suite is often the reason why marketers gravitate to HubSpot as a marketing solution, yet we often see only surface-level marketing reporting. Ideally, reporting empowers everyone on the team to make better decisions around optimization but it’s important to surface the most relevant and specific data to suit your strategic needs. Lean into the custom reports tool to get granular on reporting across segments, channels, or even content. Much like workflows, this tool requires some expertise and clarity to use correctly, but the sky’s the limit on the way you can report on your progress.

HubSpot Sales Hub Professional tips

In the last few years, we have onboarded more companies to Sales Hub than any other tool. It’s a powerful tool for sales teams when implemented correctly and can greatly help your business have more meaningful sales interactions, get more meetings, close more deals, and forecast results. To see it all come together and maximize results, there are a few stand-out tools to review:

Sales sequences

This tool is the headline feature of the Pro Hub and gives reps the ability to enroll their leads into multi-step, automated outreach campaigns so that they can make connections at scale. It leverages personalization tokens to make that outreach more personal, so it’s critical to ensure your data hygiene is intact (see above). Additionally, you can take measurements of success at each step of every sequence so you can continually tweak and optimize to improve results over time. As a pro-tip, Sequences can also be used for customer onboarding steps, renewal outreach, or qualified lead outreach.

Leads

This recent addition to HubSpot is a game changer. With the new leads tool, reps can convert contacts into ‘Leads’ (still the same contact) and manage the stage they’re at with the lead BEFORE there is a deal or opportunity. If you have thousands of contacts in the CRM, odds are good that only a handful are actual leads, and this tool helps to manage them. With Leads, you can manage the stage of outreach that you’re at with each lead. Typically, these stages are: New, Attempting, Connected, Qualified, and Disqualified but they can be customized to suit the unique sales process of your team or company.

Prospecting workspace

A newer feature to Sales Hub Professional, we’ve seen a few cases where legacy clients don’t even know this tool exists. At its core, the prospecting workspace becomes the Rep’s home base for managing all their leads in one place. They can manage the lead status, associated tasks, their personal calendar, and deal flow to make sure they’re prioritizing their sales motions every day, and not getting lost in a sea of tools and data.

Outlook / Gmail integration

HubSpot extends most of its functionality directly into the native apps that Reps already use like Outlook or Gmail. It also ensures that email communications are tracked properly so Reps can see who’s opening their emails or viewing their documents. It’s a relatively simple integration, but vital to extending the value of HubSpot into the tools they’re already used to using.

Wow, that was a lot.

In addition to the CRM, Marketing Hub, and Sales Hub, there are even more tools at play like Content Hub, Service Hub, and Commerce Hub. We’ll be sure to share more content on how to maximize these Hubs in a future post. Please be sure to subscribe for updates!

Ultimately, this is just scratching the surface of the possibilities and capabilities of these tools, there is much more in the platform and understandably it can be a little overwhelming. But when the platform is truly optimized for your business, it can be a real game changer.

If you’re looking for expert help to audit or tune up your HubSpot portal, we’re here to help! Or if you’re still HubSpot curious, we’re happy to connect and explore together.

Happy HubSpotting!