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How To Use HubSpot for RevOps Documentation | A Deep Dive, Part 4

In the first part of this blog series, I discussed what documentation is and how it is a secret weapon for RevOps. Secret being the operative word...there is not a lot about documentation that is ...documented… or spoken about in most RevOps content or events. It is not as exciting to talk about as all the shiny tools and data to play in!

 

In the second part of this blog series, I discussed how documentation is a key factor for helping a company scale. For example, training new employees is not very scalable if you’re only passing information to people verbally during real-time meetings, which does not train and enforce consistent, efficient processes. Another example is that knowing what experiments you ran in the past, the results, and what and why changes were made, will allow you to keep improving faster and not make the same mistakes twice. 

 

In part three, I discussed a few documentation best practices, including a brief mention of this blog’s topic: Not just creating the documentation, but putting that documentation where everyone can easily refer to it and update it.

 

Since this is a HubSpot blog, I bet it is no surprise that I recommend using a tool inside of HubSpot: the Knowledge Base!

 

Using HubSpot for documenting, well, everything...

The best tool to use is the one the majority of your team is already using, at least to start creating a culture of documentation within your company on the path of least resistance. 

 

A general RevOps goal of making the tech stack more efficient can often mean using less tools but better tools, tools that many teams can share and don’t require 3rd party integrations to keep the data flowing accurately throughout the company.

 

And since you’re reading this blog, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that you’re using HubSpot in this true RevOps fashion to optimize your tech stack for efficiency to deliver the best, consistent customer experience using data shared across all revenue-related teams   🙂 

 

So all of the teams your RevOps department works with will have access to HubSpot and already use it daily, which will reduce the friction of trying to introduce a new tool for documentation that requires more training and adoption of new behaviors and habits.

 

HubSpot does have a few tools related to documentation, such as Playbooks and even the CRM itself could be considered a documentation tool, where every customer interaction is documented in real time and accessible by all teams.

But where do you explain how to use the Playbooks or the CRM, and explain why it is used, when it is used, who’s in charge of what…

 

Knowledge Base to the rescue

The Knowledge Base is traditionally thought of as a public-facing customer service tool, to help customers self-service answer their questions and ease the burden on your team. This tool is available for Service Pro Hubs and above.

 

At Remotish, we primarily use the Knowledge Base for storing internal documentation about everything we do as a company, inside a tool we use daily for many other purposes. We call the Knowledge Base our wiki, so you’ll know what I am referring to later on in the article 🙂 

 

For the technical info about how to set up the Knowledge Base, see this Remotish blog and this HubSpot knowledge base article about Knowledge Bases.

 

Tips for using HubSpot’s Knowledge Base for your internal company documentation:

  • Use the Control Audience Access area of the article settings page to give teams access to articles based on Lists. 
    • Ideally, as much information as possible is shared with all teams so they can see how your processes fit with their processes and investigate why something may be happening upstream or downstream. You can set up smaller, exclusive lists for any sensitive articles. 
  • If you train people to use the front end of the Knowledge Base, which you can access through a URL such as yourdomain.com.wiki, you don’t have to give every person on the team access to the Service Hub. You can choose to grant access to people on each team who will be editing and creating the articles in the back end inside HubSpot.
  • Create categories for each department, and relevant subcategories, so navigation is easy and people don’t need to depend on the search bar. 
    • For example, if you sell several products, there may be subcategories for each product, such as a subcategory of Product XYZ in the Sales category.
  • This is very meta: Create a Knowledge Base article about creating a Knowledge Base article. 
    • Explain the naming conventions and formatting rules, so the titles and sections are standardized, easy to find, and easy to digest. 
    • Having instructions makes it easier for team members to create articles without fear of doing it wrong.
  • Use the Callout box feature to add a standard table of contents to every article, using anchor links that scroll you down the article to the relevant section you are looking for.
    • Find this feature in the Insert menu. There are 4 options for colors. Choose one.
  • Assign owners of each article or category of articles. 
    • Create an article in the Knowledge Base with a list of who owns what articles or categories, so everyone knows who to reach out to with questions or updates.
    • Give the article owners a recurring task in your project management system, to check through all their articles at least every 3 months to make any updates they missed. 
    • Sadly, HubSpot doesn’t have a way to create a report on article owners or about how long it has been since an article was updated… yet… but you can upvote my community post and this idea if you’d like to help make that happen!
  • Start creating articles using whatever format is easiest for you. Just start. 
    • Don’t let a fear of writing or fear of creating videos stop you. 
    • Writing is easiest for me, and more searchable than video content, so I started our wikis using a written format. We will be adding video content and more tutorials/gifs of step-by-step instructions soon. 
    • You can record a video and have it transcribed, if that is easiest for you!
  • In meetings, Slack, internal newsletters, and other company communication, reinforce the use of the Knowledge Base and the updating of the Knowledge Base. 
    • Any new articles written or updated should be communicated to the team in multiple ways. 
    • You may also have a “wiki of the week” featured, or highlight the person making the most articles and updates, to reward good behavior.

 

I hope these were helpful tips. 

 

The next blog in this documentation series will be about how documentation using the Knowledge Base led to our agency’s rise to Diamond Partner in its first 2 years and allows our team 30-hour workweeks.

 

In the meantime, I’d love to hear your best uses of the knowledge base and questions! 

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