Unlocking Success: Best Practices for HubSpot App Partners

I'm just gonna be walking through some of the best practices that we've seen used by our top performing partners. Again contacts myself I've worked with hundreds of apps in the HubSpot app marketplace. We've seen a lot of what does work and a lot of what doesn't work. So I just wanna call out some of the things that I think all app partners absolutely should be doing if you wanna be climbing up the ranks to becoming a top performing partner. So first I like to have partners ask themselves like why do I want to go to market with HubSpot through my integration? And then you have to pose the question what do I actually get out of the partnership with HubSpot partners often come, build and see big benefits for two kind of core reasons. There's tons of other secondary but I like to look at these two. So one is driving better usage, stickiness, retention, upsell opportunities and ultimately value for our shared customers. Second is partners can acquire new customers through the HubSpot ecosystem. Looking at a few partners who've done a remarkable job of this CallRail tons of data so I'm just going to walk through it pretty quickly. CallRail increasing deal size by 23% retention 99% conversion rate 42% these are all meaningful results for a business. And these are all on HubSpot customers in particular compared to other customers in their database QuotaPath tripling the win rate 120% retention and a 23% shorter onboarding. What this data is really telling us is that these companies are able to acquire HubSpot customers that are bigger, retain longer and buy faster than compared to other CRMs or other solutions. A couple more examples arrows coming as a startup when they first joined the marketplace 4x ing their revenue that's extremely significant. Growing their install 75% they actually became the number one onboarding app at our marketplace. Oftentimes there's that misconception the bigger companies are going to be the ones that drive the most success in the HubSpot ecosystem and that's just not true. Going to market is a very big piece of it. Customer demand and customer value and how you communicate that is really the biggest piece in my eyes. And roleworks here 200% increased deal size in their co marking results. Just want to call that out. That's not HubSpot sending emails on behalf like hey download roleworks which most partners think how we do co marketing but that's sponsoring inbound that's through their HubSpot partner content they're able to drive better results with their HubSpot content than they are with again, other CRM or other integration content and they're able to grow their install significantly. So this is really telling that story of you can drive better results for your business through better HubSpot customers compared to other CRMs and softwares. But the big piece of this is all these partners are actively tracking this data. That's how we actually have all these results about the speed of the deal size, how much it increased win rates, et cetera. If you're not tracking this type of data in your systems, it's very difficult to measure success. I often talk to partners who say I want to do more in the HubSpot ecosystem and why? Because I want to drive more leads. How many have we driven this year? It's again, it's really hard to see how much are we actually getting out of the partnership if we're not measuring any of these metrics. So I encourage every partner, if you're not doing that already, you absolutely should be. So next is the the funnel and the flywheel. The funnel in the traditional sense is how I'm going to be walking through the go to market here, but then you're going to see how that leads into the flywheel. So the funnel to the flywheel, the first and foremost, and I think this is just foundationally important, is the better together story. How do we actually communicate one plus one equals three or five with the two tools working together. Your solution in HubSpot, this is our app partner prep pack. It walks through a lot of one pager, one sheets on the different hubs so you can look at what features and functionality does my integration touch into and how can I align that to different hubs so I can speak to customers around that story better. So starting off with the top funnel, how do we drive awareness of the integration? You built an awesome integration. How do we make people aware of it? I always like to say it doesn't matter if you build the best integration to ever exist. If no one knows about it, no one's going to use it. So first and foremost, a partner page is always branded. You need to have something that talks about you have an integration with HubSpot. Customers should be able to come to your website immediately, be able to find that and understand that you have an integration and what does it actually do at a high level. Next is the educational content. This one I like to put an extra emphasis on because it's just so valuable and I want to clarify that it's not. Hey, here's my awesome solution. But here are the awesome things my Solution does with HubSpot and what is unlockable through the two tools working together. So YouTube videos, blogs, case studies, and again, RoleWorks. I like this example because it's an ABM tool and you can talk about a million different things about abm, but they talk about how specifically what it can do in HubSpot and the KPIs it's touching on for a HubSpot customer, like shortening your sales cycle. So many partners have so many different examples of. Again, what are the KPIs that a HubSpot customer specifically could expect, reasonably expect, through using a tool like yours? Next. And this is my absolute favorite because customers rave about it. Customer success managers, account executives, sales reps. I've never seen a specific tactic get so highlighted by customers and HubSpotters compared to use case content. So Arrows does a remarkable job of this. Here they have what I like to call the obvious, which is we touched on before in integration. Here's what it does at a high level, but then the not so obvious. This is where it becomes so much more valuable to the customer and agency partners who are looking to utilize this solution. Here's how you actually implement this within HubSpot. So Aero is an onboarding tool, pretty straightforward. You close a deal, you create an onboarding plan. That's the obvious. But the not so obvious is how are you going to use lead scoring to create an onboarding plan after someone hit a certain threshold? Or how can you kick off a project when it's X percentage done or after a sales call? They're got probably a hundred different examples now and from an SEO standpoint, a hundred different pieces of content on the HubSpot integration talk about domain authority and starting to build on those keywords. But this use case content is very prescriptive in showing the customer key. Here's exactly how you can implement and all these different things. You can get value out of our integration by doing so. I highly encourage partners look at the prep pack. What tools and functionalities does your integration tie into and how can we enable customers to do more with the tool beyond the basic syncing of data and then the middle of the funnel. So this is a piece that kind of touched on, but there's a couple different ways you can go about this. So how do you actually find the leads, who you want to be talking to? Who are the HubSpot customers in your database? The first is inspecting the OAuth tokens so you can see who's installed your integration as who's actually gone through OAuth. That's a pretty warm lead because they've identified clearly that you have a solution that they are interested in enough where they've installed and gone through OAuth into your portal. At that point it's a great opportunity to nurture them. Or on the other side, which many other partners are doing as well, is using technographic tools like Clearbit, ZoomInfo, Apollo or HubSpot. If you're a HubSpot user to identify tech stack so you can see who uses HubSpot. They should have segmented messaging specific around the HubSpot integration and the value your tool provides there. So those are a couple different ways where you can identify who should I be reaching out to next is actually nurturing them. How do you do that? So, so one way, and this is my favorite way, is again just highlighting the value of the integration. What does it actually do and how are they going to benefit off of it. So here's a couple examples. Supercharging your quotes with HubSpot workflows, that's pretty exciting. That's something that catches my attention and is a clear example of how you set that up. Just to show how simple it really is or arrows how much more powerful you can do with this new feature, et cetera. Again, educating the customer or lead or prospect through that journey of continuing to show them why it's valuable and why you should be integrating your solution with HubSpot. The use case content. Again, coming back to that showing customers so many different ways they can get value out of your solution is another way to really lean into. We don't just do the basic that they may have come for, but we can do all these different things and this is all the different power you can harness of our solution. Again, this is really going to lead into the stickiness part. How can you tie it into the existing workflows? Maybe it's a sales solution, but a lot of that data can be leveraged by marketing customer success. Think about how others teams can use the data within HubSpot. Again, there's the obvious and I like to call this the not so obvious because a lot of us just may not be aware of it and customers may not be aware of it. So how do we make it more clear to them the value? So then now the bottom of the funnel. How do we actually convert these leads that we've got them or once they've installed, et cetera. So educating your customer facing teams is so Important if your customer facing teams can get on a call with a customer or have an email exchange and they're able to clearly articulate the value of the integration and all the awesome things you can do inside HubSpot with it, that's a great way to close the deal faster. When they're not so familiar with the integration and can't really speak to the value, it's a little bit harder. So I highly recommend including the sales process to include the HubSpot integration demos about it and walking through best practices and educating customer facing teams or customer success teams is a crucial part of that. And this is an offer and incentive that I think just works remarkably well for this partner Aircall, but is applicable for many other partners. So if you're not able to move the deal over the line and you want to offer a discount, which is what many businesses and E commerce do, it is very applicable here. So this is a very lightweight offer that you could lean into and Air Call tailor it to your business. But Aircall, if you're a HubSpot user and not a customer of Aircall, 100% lead generation from the HubSpot ecosystem, you're able to get this incentive. I believe it's a couple free months and an hour of consultation. If you sign a year long contract, that's a pretty big commitment from a customer, but you're able to give them some type of incentive to get them to convert again. A great tactic leveraged by Air Call, which I would recommend considering for your business further down the funnel. And this is the part where I think it's the most important, which so many partners are overlooking, which I really want to call out. This is the big gap. So you want to avoid the drops after someone's installed the integration. What does months one through three look like? This is a chart I see more often than I'd like to for our app partners is the paid in stock activation rate. So we see month one, 100% API activity, month zero and then month one we see that drop to 50%. Month two 25% by month 10 you're maybe keeping 10, 15% of the leads you've driven. I call this a very big leaky bucket and a big problem for app partners. What does that look like in terms of new installs and active installs? So active installs we're defining as making at least one API call every rolling 30 days. So we here see on this left hand chart, looking over the last three months, this partner who is not doing most of the things that we talked about and we're working on a remediation plan of showing them they should be doing these things. So in this case for the last three months they've driven 11 new installs. But we look on the right hand side, over the last three months we've actually netted negative two active installs. Clearly there's a retention issue here. If you're needing to drive so many customers and only retaining 10% of them or negative, it's going to be very hard to drive success as an app partner. So again the retention and post install experience is so important. Here's a partner who's doing a lot of the best practices we talked about and they're a remarkable example on the go to market side and on the retention side. So here you could see all the way up to month eight after you'll see this area. There's some remediation that did happen, but eight months down retaining 77% of the installs. That is extremely significant for that partner. And what does this look like in terms of new installs and active installs? Or they'll a year ago were driving 64 70amonth. Now they're driving well over 100, close to 150. And the Active installs is just continuing to increase. We're see they're retaining about 70% of them. That in the charts. Looking at this chart of partner who's doing all of these best practices remarkably well compared to one who's not taking advantage of these best practices. It's night and day. The post install experience. How do we do a great job of this? Again, this use case content, it's remarkable collateral that can be touched on several different parts of the customer journey. So including it as soon as they've installed the integration. If you're more of a scaled approach and it's fully automated, it could be like arrows where you've got a monthly newsletter arrow every single month showing you how to use it within HubSpot. Again, so many different examples. This newsletter is always going to have fresh content but then they also have that sequence as soon as you've installed the first one to three months you're getting those emails. The best practices maybe you're that hybrid approach where you're half automated and also doing scalable webinars and events where you invite a lot of attendees to events. Sorry. Happily does a great job of this. As soon as you install the integration you get an email. Here's how to create your first workflow and there's about three different emails showing you the first step to create and then you can track API activity to see how you've actually done that. So here really focusing on here's the first step get this quick time to value here's how you get set up the first thing you should be doing many partner many customers may not know exactly how to set it up the first thing they could be doing if you don't have the sequence again you're leaving them in the dark to figure that out on their own which I don't recommend. So again here they've got like a webinar so if you've installed the integration you likely want to know how to use it better. So here's an here's a webinar showing you how to do that Sign up, ask your questions and see how other people are using it and driving great results. Or if you're more sales led motion like PandaDoc sending emails to your customers that are more personalized directly from a rep asking them to get on a call showing them case studies of hearers. The remarkable results are customers able to drive and you can even tailor it if you're getting more sophisticated by software category, industry or vertical but at the high level just reaching out educating them Again, here's case studies, here's best practices. Here's how you use it. That's how you get great retention of your integration. I've talked a lot there is so many other best practices and so many more examples in our HubSpot app marketplace go to market best practices deck A lot of what we talked about is what I like to highlight as some of the most impactful what moves the needle the most but again there's tons of great examples in here for you to consider. Bye bye.