So, you've decided to use the world's leading all-in-one marketing, sales and service software for your business. Great move! HubSpot is more than just a tool, it's an integral part of how you implement and measure your inbound marketing strategy, helping your sales and marketing teams to align and your business to grow.
The platform is used by over 30,000 companies around the world – and with good reason. HubSpot offers the reassurance of a dedicated development team that's continuously improving the software's features, a wide range of easy platform integrations, and a user experience (UX) that allows businesses to hit the ground running almost immediately after installation.
To get the most out of your investment, however, onboarding and training your teams is an essential step when introducing this tool into your organisation. Encouraging early adoption and dynamic use of the software will help team members to start collaborating and seeing results much faster.
From a resource planning perspective, you'll need a good idea of how many individuals need training and onboarding so you can allocate a sufficient budget to the project. Each business will have its own requirements that determine how many people need training. Much depends on your company's structure and the goals you hope to achieve by using HubSpot.
Each of these goals affects different departments within your organisation, namely marketing, sales, and customer service. To reach the desired outcomes, you may need to onboard the entire department, or, in some cases, only specific individuals.
A primary user, or super admin, will be the individual that oversees your HubSpot strategy and application of the software throughout the business. This person will have a deep understanding of all the automation and reporting tools within HubSpot, and they'll be able to offer support to other users when adding accounts, creating campaigns or building content within the platform. This person will need a considerable amount of time to participate in all the training and gain the necessary confidence to apply their skills and help colleagues during their learning process.
For many companies, equipping their marketing team with HubSpot is a primary step. Since the platform is an essential tool for creating, publishing and measuring the effectiveness of marketing content, you'll want to onboard this department first.
Every member of your marketing team should be able to navigate the HubSpot platform and leverage its tools to some degree. Not every marketing employee will need super admin status, but it's essential to have several specialists who can tackle the key functions of the software. For example, content creators, chatbot builders and lead scoring experts.
Since there isn't a per-user charge for Marketing Hub, the more people you train, the better. This will give each individual on your team the chance to upskill on their inbound marketing knowledge and make valuable contributions to your initiatives.
The Sales Hub provides an excellent opportunity for you to tackle the age-old antagonism between sales and marketing. When your sales team is committed to using HubSpot, you can gain deeper insights into how leads are generated, how quickly they are converted, and what the return on investment of your marketing efforts is.
Teaching each member of the sales team to log and document their activity will help the marketing team to create more effective campaigns and enrol leads in the most appropriate workflows and nurtures relative to their position in the buyer's journey. This combined effort will minimise the time it takes for a conversion to occur, freeing up your sales team to reach out to more leads and reduce friction in your sales funnels.
Your customer service team plays a huge role in building an effective feedback loop between all of your departments. There's plenty of knowledge to be gained from the interactions that your customer service agents have with customers.
Inbound marketing teaches us that the buyer's journey goes way beyond the conversion stage. Retaining customers is key to growing profits through upsells and upgrades. Your customer service department can also help the marketing team access excellent social proof and generate useful content ideas.
HubSpot can be used to build comprehensive customer profiles that log the full contact history, empowering agents with all the information they need to quickly and efficiently resolve escalations or offer suitable alternatives to the customer. Information extracted from these interactions can be used by both sales and marketing to build more targeted campaigns, develop even more competitive products and services and extend the customer's lifetime value (CLV).
The Service Hub is the natural choice for businesses already utilising the rest of the HubSpot suite. There are different pricing packages based on the features and number of users you require. The package you select will be dependent upon the size of your company and the outcomes you hope to achieve. It’s best to speak to a trusted HubSpot partner who can assess the needs of your business and guide you towards the right plan.
Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to HubSpot onboarding. Some businesses prefer to ease into their HubSpot integration, training one team at a time and building their confidence, others take the leap into a large scale, company-wide software and process upgrade.
Leaning on the expertise of a HubSpot partner can help you to formulate the right strategy for your business. As HubSpot experts, the team at BEE can evaluate your organisation's needs and come up with a plan that fits your budget and your goals. We’ll help you select the right HubSpot bundle or price plan for your business and launch an engaging training programme that will help to bring all stakeholders on board. For experienced and reliable support, get in touch with us today.