Lessons Learned From A HubSpot Rollout | INBOUND 2023

If you're here, you're probably either getting started with HubSpot, maybe looking to implement it internally, or maybe you're already using HubSpot or a similar CRM and you're just looking to maximize the tool, see what you can bring back to your team. This session is perfect for you. Or maybe I just met you this week and I begged you to come to my session. So anyways, thank you so much for being here. My name is Diana Scott. My team affectionately calls me Diana Hubscott. I'm a HubSpot fanatic. I work at MNC Saatchi One as the marketing Operations specialist. So today we are going to be talking about our recent internal HubSpot implementation. So I'll give a little bit more background about who MNC Saatchi Group is, why we wanted to implement HubSpot. So the task at hand, these four components of success. So looking back at this rollout, what led to success? And then post rollout, how are we maintaining momentum? So a little bit about MNC Saatchi Group. We are a creative solutions company that connect specialized expertise to help clients navigate, create and lead meaningful change. So we are the world's largest network of independent agencies. We have offices across over 23 different countries. And for MNC Saatchi Group, each entity has its own area of expertise. So we might have one agency that's really strong in branding or media, while another agency is really strong in maybe advertising. So we often cross collaborate across agencies on client projects. So we work really closely with each other. I work for one of these entities called MNC Saatchi. One to one we focus on that one to one connection with the customer. We are a CRM agency that creates personal experiences for brands and customers. So our focus is all things martech. So CRM deployment, strategy, consultancy, that's our bread and butter. And we are also a HubSpot Solutions partner. So when it came time to implement HubSpot, MNC Saatchi Group knew to look internally for who would lead this rollout. And it just made perfect sense for my agency to lead this rollout. So the task why did we want to implement HubSpot? So the long story short is we saw huge opportunities with having a shared CRM. Our desire was to invest in a tool like HubSpot in order to drive efficiency and effectiveness across sales and marketing to practices so that growth opportunities were easier to spot, easier to manage, faster to convert and simpler to report on and clear to plan for. So collectively we were missing out on significant revenue opportunities across Our client landscape. So pre HubSpot, many of our entities weren't even on a CRM. Some of them were just on Excel spreadsheets, just very manual tracking leads, little to no marketing activities. We did have some entities that were on CRMs themselves, but it was very disjointed. So we recognized that having that shared tool would just lead to more opportunities across the client landscape. So a big piece of that is that commitment to transparency. Having everybody, all those different entities on one tool would help lead to those efficiencies. What it comes down to is we wanted to utilize HubSpot to maximize growth and minimize money left on the table through shared visibility and tech enabled efficiencies. So our approach. So we were able to. It's probably been about a year now since we first started this project, so it's been relatively recent. But looking back, this is what we can point to as our four components of success. Group wide input, effective onboarding, tailored branding solutions for diverse teams, and then shared visibility while complying with data protection laws. So starting off with group wide input, as I mentioned before, we're a very unique business structure. We're a global team, which means multiple currencies, different time zones. I was meeting with teams in Singapore and Malaysia. So with that comes a lot of different challenges, different languages. We also have different branding and domains. So many of our agencies have their own website, they have their own logos. So we needed all those different challenges under one HubSpot instance. So to help address this diversity in expertise and needs, we established what we call a steering committee composed of leaders from several different entities across the network. So we had one person from sales, somebody from marketing, somebody from legal, somebody from it. And we would meet twice a week leading up to kickoff. Kickoff meaning that initial onboarding and then gradually as the implementation progressed, that frequency went down to about once a month. So some of the things that we would talk about in those meetings were things like life cycle stages, deal stages, user permissions, everything that's up here, lead scoring, what makes a hot lead, what makes a cold lead. So we knew we wanted that group wide consensus. So that's why this steering committee made perfect sense. Us at MNC Sochi. One to one, ahead of that steering committee meeting, we would send out an agenda, say, okay, this, this meeting we're going to focus on deal stages. So come with your thoughts about deal stages, what that should look like, what the pipeline should look like. Should we have one shared pipeline? Should we have different? So we as experts would come to that meeting with Our suggestion based on best practices, what we already know about HubSpot, what we know about the business, and then we would chat through that, get their feedback and then make any changes that we needed to make and come back the next meeting. Everybody agree? Okay, this is what the pipeline should look like, this is what we should call the deal stages and then we can move on to the next decision. So that way we were able to make decisions pretty quickly and efficiently with getting everyone's buy in as well and of course keeping that paper trail so that a year later we can go back and say, okay, that's why we made that decision. So these are my top tips for group wide input with an effective state steering committee. So make sure to include the necessary stakeholders. I kind of already reviewed that one. Make sure you prepare and stay organized. We had an awesome project manager on our team who really drove that and made sure people were staying on track, sending an agenda ahead of time. So my tips to avoid, do not include non decision makers. You don't need to waste their time, they don't need to waste theirs. Just make sure you have the people who need to be there on the meeting and nobody extra. It's, it's not needed. Yielding unclear action items. So make sure people know exactly what's going to happen from that meeting. They know what the next steps are. And then also do not provide too many options that lead to decision fatigue. Giving too many options like let's stay focused on what we need to talk about, what we need to cover in this session. So my next big component of success is purposeful onboarding. Close to 50% of CRM implementations fail and one of the most common reasons for this failure is because low user adoption and lack of training and support. You need to make sure that that training piece is critical in that onboarding process. So we were actually able to onboard our teams in less than three weeks. For each team. We could have just recorded a webinar and sent that to everybody. But we wanted to make sure each team had that personalized onboarding experience and that the training sessions address their unique challenges. So depending on existing data and integrations, this would be a typical timeline. Day one we would have a kickoff call with and then just a reminder, this is all over zoom because like I said, we have many international teams, so it just made sense to do it all remotely. So we'd have that kickoff call, give an overview of what this onboarding process would look like, sometimes even give a review of what HubSpot could do, get them excited about the tool and then we would give them their first piece of homework. And so that was selecting their contact sheets. So like I mentioned before, many of these teams didn't have an existing CRM. So their customer and prospect details are stored in emails and random spreadsheets. Probably not the best, not the best solution there. So we asked them to put everything in this template and then we would do a contact upload session together. So about two weeks in we would jump on a zoom together. We would have them share their screen and we would actually talk them through the the import process in HubSpot. So they had access to HubSpot at that point. And the reason why we did that, there's two reasons. One, we wanted them to get hands on experience with the tool so that they could really do the import process themselves. And also just for privacy policy reasons, GDPR purposes, we didn't want them sending like Excel sheets with private contact details across email or without password protection. So that was our solution for that. And then a couple days later we would do the sales training and then a few days later we would do a marketing training session. So an hour focus just on the marketing tools. After that last session we would schedule a one month check in where we would review any features that we didn't have a chance to cover in the initial training, answer any questions, get their feedback on the tool. So it was really great to have that check in. And so my next piece of success with this onboarding and training process was what we call a HubSpot blueprint. So this document acts as a manual for all aspects of the training and HubSpot setup. So it's basically a big PDF that we put together that was custom to that team's unique challenges in our business. And our HubSpot instance, of course we told them where to look for HubSpot support. They that many of you already know the amazing knowledge base, they can chat with support online. But also they had this PDF that they could refer to with any questions and it was, it was a tangible document. I mean of course most people didn't print it out because it was lots of pages, but it was a tangible document that they could look back at any time. So my top tips for purposeful training and onboarding, create that HubSpot blueprint. We saw a lot of success with that. Make sure to record the training. This one might seem obvious, but I forgot to record the training once and it's just a really helpful thing to send in that follow up and you might think people are paying attention and they probably are, but there's just so much information that you're covering that they want to reference that training, making sure to prioritize that follow up and then my tips to avoid introducing an overwhelming amount of features up front. Make sure to train on what they need to know first. Like what's that first few weeks going to look like, what are they need to going to need to use HubSpot for? So focusing on that. HubSpot has a lot of sophisticated features that we could probably spend hours and hours talking about, but really focusing on what they need to know and then overestimating a team's CRM or technology. So like I touched on before even just going back to what is a CRM, what is HubSpot? So just starting at the basics really lays that foundation for people, people and then giving ambiguous next steps to be very clear on what's going to happen after this last training session or that last check in call being super clear. So next up is this tailored branding solutions for diverse teams. So as I mentioned before, we're a large global team with unique needs, different challenges. So how are we going to fit all those different needs under one roof? Under one HubSpot instance, our solution to this was business units. So this is a relatively new HubSpot feature. It allows you to manage contacts, assets and settings across multiple brands. But in one HubSpot instance. So for us this meant teams were always on brand. So each business unit, each team had its own brand kit. So we had hex codes in there, their logo, their assets, and it was individual to that business unit. It also allowed us to manage subscriptions on a large scale. So if we have one business unit that's sending marketing emails and that contact wants to opt out of those emails, they can opt out of those emails without opting out of the whole entire group's marketing emails, if that's what they want. So it gives kind of like that individual consumer preferences on a large scale helps you declutter assets within your HubSpot Hub and then also work globally across multiple markets and international markets. HubSpot has a great page all about when you should use business units, when you should have separate HubSpot accounts, when everything can be in one instance without a business unit. But these are just some highlights, some top tips that I have. So adopting business units when prospects or services may overlap across brands. As I mentioned before, we often cross collaborate. Different agencies might work on the same client, might work on the same project. So business units made perfect sense for us for that using business Units when the desire is to connect multiple domains. So as I mentioned before, we have different websites. So connecting those domains means that we can have the HubSpot tracking code on each of those websites and have individual analytic page for each of those websites. So do not apply business units when you need separate billing though if you need separate invoices for whatever reason, if it truly is like two different companies, probably business units won't work for you. And then do not rely on business units to partition assets. This is really where like HubSpot teams and user permissions come in. So shared visibility while complying with data protection laws. So this is something that's been coming up a lot recently. Things like gdpr, ccpa, different privacy laws that we have to comply with and being a global agency, we have to make sure we're compliant with all this fun stuff. But at the same time we want that, that culture of transparency. So how do we do this? This really comes down to permission sets. So how much data is visible into whom. So this is an example company record. Many of you are familiar with this interface looks like. So we configured permissions for our HubSpot account so that all company data is visible to all users. So if it's a company that's being prospected or an existing customer, no matter who owns that relationship, anyone can see that data. And it's similar to what you would see in LinkedIn, it's headquarter information, their website. But only the owning team can edit or delete that company. So that just makes sure that people aren't just going out on a whim, just deleting or editing companies that they don't have the relationship, relationship with. And then on the other side of the company record is the contacts that work at that company. So you can see here that you can see the, the name, the title of that person and then who owns that relationship. You can't click into it so it's not highlighted in blue. So everybody can see those high level details, but they can't click into it. So they can't see private information like email address, phone number. Only the agency that owns that relationship can see those details. And then similar to deal data, everybody can see that a deal exists, knows that that's a current client, but you can't click into it so you can't see like revenue information unless you own that deal, unless you're the one managing that deal. So my top tips for the shared visibility while still complying with these data protection laws. Survey your team leads early to build these Permission sets. Make sure you get their input on what sales users are going to need, what marketing users are going to need, different teams. You can do this in just a literal survey that you can send out if you want to get that feedback. Make sure to outline those visibility expectations up front with your users as you're training them. And then lastly, make sure to make GDPR CCPA decisions early and involve your legal and IT teams. Because at the end of the day most of us are just we're marketing people, we're HubSpot admins, we're not legal advice. So make sure you consult experts on your on your company for those type of questions. My tips to avoid Avoid passing contact sheets across email without password protection or just passing them at all. We touched on this one earlier with the the onboarding and training. Do not be unreceptive to permission set feedback for your early users. You're probably going to have some tweaks to what the permission set should look like, so be receptive to that and make those changes as needed. And then of course, failure to consult your legal team. Make sure you talk to your legal team about all this stuff. So we were able to build the MVP onboard our teams in less than six months. So it was a pretty fast and efficient rollout. But now that everybody's onboarded, it's been several months now, how do we maintain this momentum post rollout? So this is where we're getting into all those fun sales hub features, the marketing features, and really making sure that the platform is sticky and our users are coming back to the tool. As I mentioned before, our main goal with HubSpot was to accelerate this revenue growth. So we do this using deal pipelines, the shared visibility across dashboards and sales reports that help make spotting these opportunities opportunities a lot easier. So here's an example Pipeline. It's just the first few stages of our pipeline. This is all dummy data, but as you can see, we have one pipeline, custom deal names that suit all the entities. We do have a few people in senior leadership who have visibility into everybody's pipelines and everybody's deal data. Pre HubSpot, a lot of that reporting was all manual through Excel spreadsheets. It was very time consuming. But now leadership can jump into HubSpot. They see what's going on at the team level, see what deals are stagnant, what might need some extra help, and they have that, that full visibility. And then just a couple other things I wanted to point out that we really like this view for is you can quickly see how long a deal has been stagnant, like for example, that that particular deal has no activity for nine months. Hopefully that's never the case, but that gives our sales team an opportunity to jump in there, maybe reach out to the client, see what's going on, try to move that deal along. And then I'll also just point out at the bottom, because I mentioned before, we have so many different currencies in HubSpot, we can quickly change the global currency displayed on the board at the user level, so they can just go in and change that. And every month we get the exchange rates from finance, so those are updated to reflect the most up to date exchange rates. So the other thing I'll touch on is how we can prospect smarter so how our sales teams are more efficient. HubSpot has a ton of sales tools that make prospecting smarter and more effective. These are just a few that I'll call out that our sales team really loves. Contact, deal and task management, having that all in HubSpot, having that visibility, email tracking and integration, document sharing, meeting scheduling and sales sequences. So I'll call out sequences here and I have an example, an example sequence that one of our teams did. This was promoting a white paper about an an AI white paper. But this was an example sequence. It kind of lets you set that sequence and forget it. So our prospects are able to send out a personalized email at scale to their prospects. It still feels like it's coming from that sales member. It's personalized, but at the same time all the automation is in place for the follow ups. This is an example cadence we have and in this particular sequence we had close to a 70% open rate and a 20% click through rate. So that was really awesome to see. We were super excited about that. So my top tips for maintaining momentum Post rollout. So gradually roll out reports based on feedback. So that pipeline screenshot I showed earlier, that's not even a report, that's actually just the pipeline that's already built out. If your teams are using deals properly, you don't need to throw everything out there at first, get their feedback and then understand what the business needs and then roll out reports based on that prioritizing integration. So the sequence tool that I showed you, you need to integrate your email inbox with HubSpot to be able to send sequences. So even something as simple as an email integration just makes the platform more sticky and keeps your users coming back to it. And then lastly, sharing wins. So when one of our teams has success with the HubSpot tool. We make sure to share that with everyone either through a monthly newsletter or a quarterly webinar. Just sharing those wins to get people excited about all the different features that HubSpot has. And do not avoid data collection cleanup even after your initial implementation. Once you've imported all your data into HubSpot, make sure you have either a HubSpot admin or a HubSpot agency. Somebody who has that high level view of your instance, who is looking after things like data, hygiene and best practices, things like that. Do not ignore automation opportunities like sequences workflows. There's a ton of stuff there to make your sales and marketing teams lives a lot easier. And then don't overlook feature updates and product launches. So I'll finish on this slide. Feel free to take a photo of it. This has all the do's and don'ts from our HubSpot implementation. And then lastly I'll land on this quote so in learning from others we enrich our own experiences and pave the way for greater success. So I hope you learned something from this session. Learn from our mistakes, learn from our wins. And I also put together a work that book that goes along with this session. Feel free to download the QR code, but of course if you ever need any expertise help I have to give a shameless plug for NC Saatchi 1to1 or HubSpot agency. We're happy to help with with whatever HubSpot needs you have. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. Thank.