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Whether you are several months or years into your investment in HubSpot and Inbound Marketing, just kicked off your HubSpot implementation or just beginning the journey, you want to make sure HubSpot is set up and working to meet the individual needs of your business to ensure you get the most out of HubSpot and inbound marketing.
Any piece of software that affects how several areas of an organisation works needs careful planning and review at the beginning of the implementation and as part of its ongoing operation. HubSpot has several moving parts and typically it affects marketing, sales, executive teams, internal web teams, IT, operations, relationships with existing external agencies, PR .... so how do you get it right from the start or stop yourselves plateauing .... here are a few pointers:
1. Have clear business goals
It takes time for any software to bed into an organisation and it takes time for processes to be worked out and refined. So setting clear business goals provides every part of the organisation with a focus. Carry out a financial impact assessment for inbound marketing, projecting out 24 months. It's a way of setting the bar for the implementation and ongoing operation.
2. Align the whole organisation
With so many moving parts it's really important to ensure everyone has bought into the changes and potential benefits. Assess the organisations readiness for change, and get input and collaboration by communicating the big picture to everyone who will be touched by HubSpot. Carrying out a sales and marketing alignment workshop, ideally at the start of the process but even if you are well down the track with HubSpot it's still a useful way of keeping all the stakeholders aligned with the vision and progress towards the business goals.
3. Set up HubSpot champions
You may well ask why have several champions? In our experience having one of the exec team as a champion ensures that there is accountability at the top level and cross functional disagreements can be dealt with swiftly. Having an operational champion gives the organisation a single point of reference for HubSpot. The operational champion needs an in depth understanding of the functions within HubSpot and the inbound marketing processes and as such be able to translate those into meeting the business objectives.
4. Document the processes
For creative marketers that doesn't sound like a great job, but it will serve you well for scaling up the marketing team or if your company is in acquisition. We have a detailed HubSpot implementation checklist that documents in detail all the things you need to do to get an implementation up and running quickly. It's constantly updated as new HubSpot functions are added, and it's overlaid with our real world experience of implementing software.
5. Plan to run regular diagnostics
Analysing the monthly results is a key part of the job, but taking a deeper dive on a regular basis into HubSpot and how it's performing can quickly uncover areas where the software and processes are not performing quite as well. For example workflows are often set up (sometimes incorrectly) and are left without any check and balance. Changes to marketing and sales processes can in many cases be helped or solved by different workflows, think about external workflow guidance and support. Lead scoring needs to be reviewed with sales to ensure the quality of leads is maintained, again don't fall into the set up and forget mentality.
6. Finally it's good to talk
Talking with other HubSpot users, industry and HubSpot experts will help you to assess how you are doing and where there are opportunities for improvement. Our HubSpot User roundtable masterclasses provide the ideal forum for open discussion and collaboration.