Hi there, im looking for some guidance or inspiration on how best to use Hubspot for managing existing client relationships. I currently feel we aren’t able to use Hubspot to track existing relationships.
Some background:
Work at a medium size SaaS company
We use Hubspot to track the sales process, but also for tracking onboarded and existing clients.
The number of clients we have is growing and now have a Client Management team internally who are in charge of servicing, relationship building and cross-selling.
We have multiple different products that clients use, and often we have clients onboarding for products under multiple different entities. (e.g one relationship may be onboarded with us under anywhere from 2-5 different legal entities).
Questions:
Is there best practices for tracking existing relationships?
How do you handle client’s who have multiple different products? (would it be one company with multiple deals assigned?)
Where do you record ongoing client meetings? e.g I have a quarterly catch-up with a client. Where is best to record that information? Let’s say the client has multiple products, multiple entities. Do I record it in a specific deal? or company object?
Similar question, a manager wants to discuss with a relationship manager their book of clients, where should the manager go to get an overview of the client’s specific activities? (call notes, notes, what products they have, etc)
Hey @PincoPalino great questions! They are quite strategy and broad however so it can be difficult to answer effectively on a forum and without any real insight into your business.
One thing I would definitely advise is taking a step away from the HubSpot side of things and the solutions and mapping out the overall customer journey map through your systems. Mapping out how a visitor converts all the down down to a customer in the current business process along with custom retention, onboarding and renewals (if applicable), map out each step clearly then it makes it a lot easier to begin seeing how the HubSpot tools can fit in to solve for each step.
On your specific questions:
One of the most important things to do is ensure your assignment rules are clear and set. So the account manager is assigned as the owner and anyone else appropriate has visibility on the record. You also want to make sure your team is logging all acticity to the contact/company record. You want any communication to and from the customer to be logged on the contact record for total visbility over any updates.
You can also set up score properties to automate the value/status of a customer based on interactions. This could help you easily qualify if a customer is happy, disengaged, at risk etc.
For different products, if your team are selling them or upselling with them then yes deals would be the best object to go for. If you might be selling multiple products in one transaction (IE a deal) you might want to consider something like creating one deal for that transaction and using line items to indicate the product selections for that transaciont.
You can actually manually log any meetings on the record itself. Where again depends on the business. If there’s really only one POC who brings others into just meetings the contact record might be the best place, if you are constantly consulting with multiple POC during the process I’d go with companies. I’d avoid deals, deals are generally more transactional, you really don’t want a deal to be constantly around, it should be moving between stages with the aim of getting it to “closed won” at some stage. Contact and company records should be around and growing constantly with your CRM.
Contacts or companies really, again depending on your business. If your really working on an account level then the company records would be your universal source of truth and should be where you’re logging activity, if you work on a more 1:1 with a POC basis contacts would suit this. However they should be associated with each other, making it easy to just click between either when needed. So your manager could say “I have a meeting with Tom from XYZ tomorrow”, take a look into the “XYZ.com” company record and see all associated contacts, along with the activies related to all associated deals and contacts on the company record.
I track all client comms in one place so nothing falls through the cracks. I also set up alerts for follow-ups and use tags to sort by deal stage or priority. For deeper visibility into the customer journey and better planning, I’ve been using Acumatica Cloud ERP Customer Management | AcuPower it helps me keep everything connected across teams and stay one step ahead.