Operations Hub & RevOps FAQs

[jbogaert]

Hi everyone!

Based on the many questions we received during and after the Operations Hub Webinar on May 12, the guests and I decided to put together a list of frequently asked questions regarding RevOps with HubSpot, and Operations Hub and its core features. 

We’ve also decided to organize an additional Operations Hub Ask Me Anything (AMA) to answer any outstanding questions you may still have about Operations Hub and RevOps. Don’t miss out! Follow this post if you want to be notified.

RevOps & Operations Hub

Below are some of the most upvoted questions during the Webinar about Operations Hub and RevOps.

How does one inspire organizational change and create buy-in for Revenue Operations?

It will of course depend from company to company. The way to approach it will differ when you’re still in a smaller growing business as opposed to a larger organization that’s looking to scale. What we’ve found is that, regardless of size, most companies already have someone in charge of operations that already has that RevOps mindset, but who is simply not empowered or enabled in the right ways. Whether that is the person who is setting up the IT systems, or a salesperson pulling reports, or a marketing ops person who is already in charge of the data in the CRM, the automation, and the integrations. 

That person will know the business and its processes (internally) and your buyer's journey (externally) too, which is fundamentally what RevOps is about. It then comes down to channeling that credibility by developing a critical point of view and actively looking for scalable solutions in terms of alignment, processes, systems, integrations across the entire flywheel that could remove friction for both your teams and your customer. 

The hardest part will be convincing your executives though, so you'll need to ask them the right questions to make sure that they understand the value of RevOps. Academy professor Kyle Jepson wrote an interesting blog post on this topic: Selling RevOps To The C-Suite

What are the biggest challenges in building RevOps at your company?

How you pace yourself. Your Ops teams, your systems, your data, that is the glue to your business. So when you start thinking about implementing RevOps at your business, you need to be thoughtful about how you evolve your ops and your systems to make sure you don’t break things that might harm the current operations. 

For instance, one of the first real tasks will be to map out how all of your processes and systems are connected, with the intention to then turn that into a single cohesive strategy. RevOps is often introduced too late and by that time systems and processes have often become a cobweb that needs to be untangled. Once those processes have been mapped, a strategy needs to be implemented that transparently connects everything.

If you go in and unplugging systems and rebuilding them from scratch without properly taking into consideration the effect it may have on the business, the teams involved, then chances are likely things will break, which could have big repercussions. So take things slow, pace yourself and think ahead, that’s what RevOps is ultimately all about. 

How does HubSpot think about the evolution of Operations Hub?

The theme across Operations Hub is enabling companies to consolidate their operations and to automate mundane and reactive jobs so they can focus more on strategy and innovation. When we think of what Ops folks bring to the table, we’ve brought it down to three P’s: Platform, Process, Perspective. 

The first one, platform, is all about maintaining and connecting the tools that are being used. For that, we have released Data Sync, a native way of connecting the world’s business apps. The second one, process, is all about setting up the systems that run the back-end of the business. To help with that, we’ve built data quality automation to make sure data is clean and dependable and we also released programmable automation to add more flexibility into automated workflows so that any business process can be easily automated. Lastly, we have perspective, which we haven’t really addressed yet. With Perspective we mean things like reporting and analytics, because ops people don’t just pull the reports, they also are the ones enabling the executives with insights about the company. 

That’s the framework that we use internally to align our Operations Hub efforts to meet the needs of operators everywhere, so you can expect to see more updates and improvements in those two directions.

What are some of the best, clearest use cases where the Operations Hub would be relevant?

We’ve discussed some use cases per feature in greater detail in this blog post: The Ultimate Guide To Operations Hub and you can find some others here: 3 Ways to use Custom Coded Workflow Actions With Operations Hub

As an existing customer, which of these features will we have access to, and which do we need to purchase?

Any customer (paying or not) will have access to all of the Data Sync by HubSpot integrations because they are part of the Free tier. However, you will have to purchase the Starter tier at $50/mo if you want to customize your field mappings. If you also want to use the new Data Quality Automations and Programmable Automations, you will have to Purchase the Pro tier at $800/mo.

Data Sync by HubSpot

Here are the most upvoted questions about Data Sync by HubSpot asked during the Operations Hub webinar. The community has also held an Ask me Anything on Data Sync. You can find the recording and summary of that event here: A Recap of Last Week’s Data Sync by HubSpot AMA.

Will we be able to build our own Data Sync integrations in the future?

In time, we indeed intend to open up the data sync integration engine to HubSpot App partners. So that they can use the power and flexibility of the tool to build their own custom integrations and make them more natively connected with HubSpot.

Can Data Sync help us manage duplicates of contacts and companies?

Managing duplicates is not strictly a Data Sync or Operations hub play. There's already a CRM tool we've built for this. Looking at it from a Data Sync angle though, we have baked in many mechanisms to avoid duplication of your data, by for instance matching on email address and not syncing duplicate records that we detected in either HubSpot or your connected app.

Does Data Sync only map fields, or will it be able to push actions?
That is not the plan. In order to carry out an action, Data Sync would require some kind of trigger. That is not something Data Sync has or needs because its goal is about making sure that data stays the same in all your apps, regardless of anything else happening, and it doing that through automatic routine checks to ensure that everything stays up to date.

If you want certain data to be populated on the basis of events taking place, like trigger-based actions, then that's something to set up in HubSpot’s Workflows tool. 

Will we be able to create if-then sync rules in Data Sync as we did in PieSync?

Similar to the question above, that is not the plan. The if-then statements in PieSync aren’t actually conditional statements. They are mappings in disguise. They were a design choice made to overcome some of the mapping limitations in PieSync. They essentially offered the ability to create a mapping for a segment. We found that it led to a poor user experience as it forced some users to set up multiple rules for a use case that could have been solved with a simple field mapping.

We want to fix that in Data Sync and make it more logical: the first page of data sync is where you ‘filter’ the sync and decide which contacts should be kept in sync. On the second page, you set up your mappings and you decide which data should flow between the two systems.

Programmable Automation

Where can we find a library of code samples for programmable automation?

There is currently not one dedicated space for this, but I’m happy to list some of the places where you can go to look for these. Firstly, developer.hubspot.com is where you can not only find the API documentation, but also the developer documentation for custom code actions, which you can find here. There’s also the Developer Blog where you can find posts like 3 Ways to use Custom Coded Workflow Actions With Operations Hub that include code samples for certain use cases. The author of that post also has a GitHub. Here is another GitHub with example custom code snippets. Additionally, code is also being shared in the Developer Community or in the Operations Hub topic board. 

Is it possible to create timestamps for workflow enrolment? Looking for more than a date stamp converted to a timestamp.

Yes, you can do this by creating a DateTime property manually via the API, and then set it with the custom code action.

Data Quality Automation

Can you automate de-duplication?

Technically yes, this could be made possible, but with a custom code action where you'd run code that checks the Contacts API for similar fields and then use the Merge Contacts API to merge those same contacts based on the results from the first part of the code. But you can actually do that right in the CRM.

Will it clean all data used for imports? Such as misspelled states?

It's possible to clean up this data with either Custom code actions or the Format data action, depending on the use case. You will just need to create enrollment triggers based on newly imported contacts.

How does the data format action handle more complex names like McDonald, O'Connor, Mary-Ann?

These names might not be a great fit for our Format data action today and may require more complex logic & regex built into Custom code actions.