Best Practices on Communicating the Value of Hubspot

[SSulcer]

Hi Everyone - 

I'm NEW to the Hubspot community and couldn't be more excited to get started. Just wondering - how do you all get your leadership excited about Hubspot? How do you get your sales leadership engaged? 

Thank you and be sure to say hello - especially if you're in the Chicago area! 

Stephanie 

[LAcosta]

Welcome to the HubSpot Community! I recently crossed this bridge myself. I brought the partnership program up to our leadership team as well. Hubspot has some great slide decks that you can leverage.

When I started the discussion, I focused on aligning our team all on one platform - we're remote all over the country and experiencing some major growth with new team members. Yay for increased efficiency and skill development along the way.

Then show how we can track our ROI across the board through all stages of our customer journey. 

We also managed to replace quite a few of our tools - both used and unused - with one tool and one bill which helped our accounting department. 

The courses allowed us to also strategically allow our team's skills to grow and set up benchmarks for new hires as well. 

[Jaycee_Lewis]

Great tips, @LAcosta! Thank you for sharing 🙌

Best,

Jaycee

[danmoyle]

So many great replies with insights! I've been fortunate in my HubSpot journey, @SSulcer. From day 1 with my first employer, leadership has been excited. And now I work with a partner, so... yeah. 😁

However like others have said, when I'm working with a client who needs to get buy-in, we typically look at reports on increasing revenue (or at the very least, ↗️ leads) and increasing efficiency (thereby decreasing costs). The dashboards and reports are great for that. 

Welcome to the community and Hublandia! 

[Jaycee_Lewis]

Thanks, @danmoyle 🧡

[Anton]

Hi @SSulcer, 

welcome to the world of HubSpot 🎉

The question is: do you want to "excite" your leadership or the leadership of your clients?

As somebody who works for a diamond partner - I don't have to excite my leadership about HubSpot 😁 They know it. What I do is trying to get them excited about new features and the benefits for our clients since they might miss an update(unlikely but possible)

For folks who are in the consideration phase you should definetely point out the specific benefit(s) of HubSpot. 
An Example:

If the person I'm talking to tells me that they're not satisfied with their CMS, I'm trying to understand what's the reason for that. Insufficient page speed may have as a cause things like

- bloated file system

- bad hoster/webspace

- no CDN

- badoptimizations

and a lot of other things. After (or sometimes during) the call/meeting I'm running some page speed tests on gtmetrix/google pagespeed. And I can identify some of the causes from technical side. After I've identified the cause I'm talking to the person about it and I'm doing some side-to-side comparision CMS X vs. HubSpot. Something like "you're server response times are pretty low(everything above 500ms is high) - this could be the result of the lack of your webspace or you don't have a CDN. If you switch to HubSpot you don't need to worry about. It's a SaaS, which is hosted on one of the biggest (if not the biggest) hosting services on earth(I won't mention any names in the community for security reasons but you can find some informations online)..."

Also a demonstration of a free Hub is great - but you should always mention that HubSpot is only as powerfull as it get's configured. So the prospect/lead/customer doesn't blame HubSpot if something isn't working. If it's not configured - how can a tool work properly? Like "Yeah - I've placed an engine in my car. It got 4 possible pistons but I've inserted just two for now, since I don't need more power" You wouldn't do that, right? 🙂 

best, 

Anton

[Jaycee_Lewis]

Woah,  thank you, @Anton 🧡 

[Jaycee_Lewis]

Hey, @SSulcer 👋 Welcome to the community 🧡 Thanks for asking a fantastic question! I look forward to seeing what the community has to say.

Best,

Jaycee

[Jnix284]

Hi @SSulcer , welcome to the community, happy you're here!

When I first implemented HubSpot back in 2016, I had a really tough time getting buy-in from the sales team. I didn't have as much of an issue with leadership, as they saw the numbers from the reports and could see the impact pretty early on.

To help with the sales team, I took on the challenge of learning the ins and outs of Sales Hub - starting with getting Inbound Sales certified, then tackling HubSpot Sales Software. With these two certifications, I had a solid foundation for how I could help them and I focused on small wins, how could I help one team member do one thing better, faster, stronger...Once I had buy-in from the reps, it was easier to get the sales leadership more engaged in using the software.

It was a little backwards, but it helped gain momentum that we needed to get everyone aligned.

Since then, I have also found that finding who your power user is, for each team, is critically important. Find that tech-savvy go getter to also get certified, build a team dashboard and the competition to improve their stats will spread like wildfire.

Hope this helps, looking forward to seeing what some of the others recommend! 🙂

[kvlschaefer]

Wow, these are great tips! Thanks for sharing, @Jnix284!

[ericajfinley]

@SSulcer Hi, Stephanie! I'm a community manager here at HubSpot, and we're so glad you're here (Chicago is so lovely, btw)! 😄 I'll let other folks weigh in on your question, but I did want to welcome you to the party. 🎉

[kvlschaefer]

Hi @SSulcer,

This is a great question! 

I would like to add some of our experts to this conversation to see if they have any advice as well. 

Hi @danmoyle, @Jnix284, @Mike_Eastwood, @Anton, @BukunmiOdetayo - Do you have any best practices you would like to share with @SSulcer?

Thank you!

Best,

Kristen

[ashleyidesign]

Hey there, welcome to HubSpot!

I've worked with clients in the marketing departments who had to get a lot of buy in from leadership and sales. Generally, leadership wants to see either increasing revenue or decreasing expenses. Sales is going to want to see the number of SQLs increase, or a decreased churn rate if you're also using the Service hub.

IMO, look at the gaps in your inbound strategy so far, and the potential benefits filling those gaps using HubSpot will have. If you've never done drip campaigns before, and only sent one off emails to everyone, you can expect a reasonable increase in open/click if you start sending emails that are segmented instead.

Happy to chat more about this!

- Ashley

ashleyidesign.com

[kvlschaefer]

These are great tips, @ashleyidesign! Thanks for sharing 🙂