How to Build a Commerce-Powered CRM with HubSpot

What's up everybody? This is ryan Gunn from Aptitude 8 and today I'm going to talk about how to make HubSpot a commerce powered CRM. So the first thing that you need to know obviously is what is a commerce powered CRM? So your customer relationship management platform is the go to data source for your marketing, your sales and your customer success team. But when you have back office commerce like accounting payments available in the CRM, those teams can actually act on that data and do their jobs better. That additional context can fuel their activities, drive revenue through customer retention, faster payments and even net new sales. So how do you actually get commerce data into your CRM? Depending on your business's maturity and existing commerce systems, there are three potential ways in which you can get payments and other back office data into HubSpot. If you're brand new to digital commerce, then HubSpot's payments feature is a great option for you. So HubSpot offers a secure payment processing solution that allows you to accept payments directly through your HubSpot account. That means you can embed payment links in website pages, emails, quotes, or pretty much any other HubSpot asset. And because it's native to the platform, there's no need to integrate HubSpot Payments. If you already use HubSpot CRM, HubSpot Payments is an excellent option for options that are just getting started with digital commerce and want a low friction way to accept payments online. But as your company gets deeper into commerce, you're probably going to want a more robust system that is more customizable, scalable and gives you additional features like inventory management, metered billing, payment schedules, entitlements, tax automation. If you already have a robust financial infrastructure, then you're probably looking at integrating an erp. An ERP is an enterprise resource planning system and it's a one stop shop for business operations including finance, accounting, inventory and more. So common examples of ERPs are NetSuite, Sage, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, and Epicore. Because these are dedicated systems outside of HubSpot, you'll need to integrate them into your CRM. Some ERPs are going to have a dedicated integration that's already built out, but some are not. And even the ones that do may or may not offer the level of functionality that you need from them. So you you're likely going to need some developer help in order to really get that integration customized and working the way that you need it to. If digital commerce is core to your business, then you probably already use Stripe. Stripe is the number one secure payment solution for companies that accept payments online. It's got a really well documented API and knowledge base and it requires very little work for you to integrate into your app or your website. Stripe does have a native HubSpot integration that will sync some data into your CRM, but there's an even more powerful integration that that's already in the HubSpot Marketplace and that's called Zebra. Zebra is an app developed by Happily that not only syncs over payments data, but also allows you to integrate that data seamlessly into reports and even trigger automations based on payment data. With HubSpot, Stripe and Zebra together you can manage your subscriptions, memberships, report on things like monthly recurring revenue, view payment information at the company level and more. And HubSpot allows you to provide a better customer experience than Stripe alone. So you're really getting the best of both worlds when you use Zebra to connect them. So what happens when you don't have commerce data already in your CRM? When marketing, sales and customer success don't have access to payments and other commerce data, then client facing members of your team are interacting with your customers with an incomplete picture of your relationship with them. This can result in totally avoidable situations like providing services to customers that are behind on payments or have expired payment methods, attempted upsells to customers who already have that service or product or otherwise are not eligible for that upsell, failing to treat big spender customers like VIPs and really foster that relationship so it can expand or marketing irrelevant services to your customers. Now I'm going to go over how your go to market teams can actually benefit from commerce data in your CRM with some real life use cases. Let's start with the marketing team. So while your marketing might not be the first department you'd think would benefit from payment data since they primarily operate before a payment is made, there are actually some interesting use cases for marketing. First is attribution. Marketing can use payment information to close the loop on sales activities that they have influenced by associating payments and subscriptions to contact records. Marketers can more easily report on what marketing activities led to revenue. A report such as monthly recurring revenue by original source can tell you what channels are actually driving monthly revenue. And you can even use custom source properties like the ones that we've mentioned in our Attribution videos. You can also look at monthly recurring revenue from affiliates or partners and look at what relationships you forged that are actually generating revenue and which one's a waste of your time. And then you can create reports to look at this information over time. So you can see how that relationship changes or how different channels are going up or down in terms of their effectiveness. So if you see here we've got monthly recurring revenue by original source over time and if we go to this organic search you can see there was kind of a drop off there. So what pages were ranking that have suddenly dropped out and were no longer getting revenue from those sources. Another excellent way that marketers can use commerce data is for list segmentation. Marketing teams are often segmenting their audience so they can more effectively target them with relevant messaging. And commerce data gives marketers even more options for how to segment lists of contacts and companies based on things like purchase history and spending patterns and even subscription status. So if we look here we've got this zebra subscription is equal to active and product is any of keg. So we have a list of contacts here that we know exactly what they've purchased and we can send them relevant information potentially for an upsell. The last way I'm going to talk about today for marketers to use commerce data is to trigger automations. Depending on how you have your commerce system integrated with HubSpot, you may be able to trigger workflows based on payments made or even missed, subscription status changes or time since their last purchase. Using these triggers, marketing teams can welcome new customers, remarket to churned customers, upsell to existing ones, or reward loyal customers. This workflow is an example of how to win back a customer that has churned. So we've got the subscription status is canceled. We're going to wait for 30 days and then check again. Make sure they haven't renewed their subscription. And if they haven't, if they're still an inactive customer then we're going to send them this win back email that's going to give them an offer or some sort of incentive to come back and renew their subscription. Next up, let's talk about sales. Sales teams need insight into their customer purchasing behaviors and patterns which can help them improve their sales strategies and close more deals. Here are some ways sales teams can leverage payments data inside their CRM. The first way we're going to look at is account based sales. By viewing payment data at the account level, such as with a report on MRR by company, sales teams can see penetration into their target accounts. So you can see that here we've got our list of target accounts and then we can see how much MRR is at each of those accounts. Account level data can also help sales teams strategize by using purchase history to inform Upsells or expansion in accounts, or by analyzing customer behavior, like seeing which products are most often purchased together. You can also use commerce data in your CRM to generate a little friendly competition among your sales reps. You can motivate your team by creating a leaderboard to show which reps have generated the most mrr. Or you can let reps see how much commission they've generated in real time. Without payment data in your CRM, commission reporting can only be based on the closed one site status of deals, which can inflate numbers due to customers that close, but never actually pay. The last and potentially most exciting way that sales teams can use commerce data is for forecasting in order to set new goals and create an effective sales strategy. Sales leaders not only need to know about what new revenue is coming in, but also when recurring revenue is churning. By looking at the contract end dates, you can see how future recurring revenue may drop off, and you can set quotas accordingly to fill that gap and achieve your company goals. The last team that we're going to be talking about is customer success. And this is where having payments data within your CRM really shines because it makes that handoff between sales and customer success way smoother. That is a huge friction point for a lot of companies, and it's way easier to automate that process if you have payment data in your CRM. So we're going to talk about how we can facilitate that onboarding process. That handoff between sales and CS is the first impression going to make on new clients. And you know, a lot of times it's handled pretty clumsily. With payment data integrated into your CRM, you can automate your onboarding process so that kicks off as soon as the first payment is made. So here we have a workflow to create an onboarding ticket as soon as the subscription is started. When that subscription status changes to active, we create a new ticket and assign it to a customer success rep. Another way that you can use commerce data is to celebrate relationship milestones. Customer success is all about ensuring that your clients have a positive experience with your company. And one way you can do that is to show appreciation when your customers reach certain milestones, such as expanding their engagement with you or sticking with you for over a year. With commerce data in your CRM, you can create automation that will send them a thank you for being a great customer. So I'm going to walk you through how we would create that workflow. If you go to your workflows, you can create a new one from scratch. In this case I'm going to use a Zebra powered trigger. But if you have an ERP integration or HubSpot payments, then there are other ways that you could potentially work around to create something similar. The trigger criteria is going to be based on the create date. Then we're going to delay for 365 days to celebrate one year. We're going to make sure that the subscription is still active. You're going to select the email that you want to send and then hit save. So this is what that ends up looking like. And then when customers reach that milestone with you, they get a nice thank you. The last way that customer success teams can use commerce data is to automate account health checks. So you can see here we've got past due subscriptions. Manually combing through accounts for missed payments is pretty tedious and it leads to unrealized revenue. If your payment due dates and completion data is in your CRM, you can create workflows that recognize when a payment is late and send an automated reminder. So here's an example of that. If we have a subscription status of past due, we can wait 14 days. If it's still past due, we will send a reminder email. Incorporating commerce data into your CRM is a vital step towards unlocking the full potential of your CRM platform. Whether you're using HubSpot payments, an ERP integration or Stripe and Zebra together, your go to market teams can make better informed decisions that can fuel their activities and drive revenue growth. By investing in commerce powered CRM, you are enhancing your customer experience and boosting your business's bottom line.