HubSpot for Product management- switching from Monday.com

[Sarah_g]

Hello, our team currently uses Monday.com to keep track of things like billing, shipping, installation, onboarding and design work. We would like to shift this over to HubSpot and get rid of Monday altogether (we use custom fields and based on what I've read about the Monday integration it won't be able to do what we need). I'm looking for advice on the best way to organize this information to make it the most accessible for everyone so we can build automation and reports. Ticket pipelines? Projects tool? Deal properties? Let's discuss it!

[danmoyle]

Hi @Sarah_g and welcome to the Community! 

As you can see, it's full of amazing folks like @jolle and @TomM2 ready to help and offer insights. I don't have much to add that's different. They both gave such great answers. 

Here's how I start all of my onboarding engagements, and new client trainings: Data management. Which is exactly what you're asking about. 

Data in HubSpot is organizaed first by Objects (or object types). Typically they are: 

• Contacts (the humans) 
• Companies (their businesses)
• Deals (the revenue opportunities sales is working with a Company and Contact(s))
• Tickets (customer support, new customer onboarding, etc.)

In those objects, you'll have properties, or the data points. There's demographic data (name, email, phone number, location, and custom properties you want to create). There's also behavioral data like their original source, most recent conversion point, that kind of thing. 

Plus there's a property called lifecycle stage, that helps you track their journey with you from lead to customer, so you aren't creating separate contact records as they move through the buyer's journey. 

These properties, while not magic, are very powerful. That's where you can create views of your database for access to segments of your audience, lists to trigger workflows or send bulk emails, and reports for full transparency. 

There's a whole lot more to unpack, which can honestly take years to master. I've been using HubSpot since 2010, and teaching it as a trainer for a couple years now. 

But the bottom line to me is this: Moving from another system to HubSpot will help because it's a powerful, but user-friendly, system that's intuitive and collaborative. 

A couple of resources I'd suggest as you're exploring, or even making the switch, would a few HubSpot Academy courses. The Marketing Software, Sales Software, and Service Software certification courses are all great. Then each team or department can also look at Inbound Sales and Inbound Marketing as well. 

All the best on the journey. And please know you have folks here who can officially help, but also friends who can brainstorm with you. 

[jolle · Accepted solution]

Hey @Sarah_g, thanks for reaching out! And thank you for the mention, @kvlschaefer!

These are great questions! I don't know your exact requirements and process, but I'm happy to share some thoughts to help get you started.

It sounds like you'll need to track the status of different projects and assign tasks through HubSpot. I'll be honest — HubSpot can typically handle simple project management processes, but it's not the most robust project management tool. And if you're looking for any sort of inventory management (i.e., tracking how many products you have in-hand and updating them when sales occur), you'll almost assuredly need to integrate with a separate inventory management tool.

Otherwise, I feel like tickets and tasks will be your best bet (or can at least get you close to your ideal state):

Tickets

If you want to track the status of an order across different departments, you could use a ticket pipeline (or multiple ticket pipelines) to do so.

For a process with multiple steps (like onboarding), you could have a dedicated ticket pipeline with stages for core steps in your onboarding process. You can then build supporting workflows for each step to assign the respective tasks at each step, send out automated emails, and/or send out internal notifications.

For a process with just one or two steps (like billing and shipping, total assumption), you may not need an entire ticket pipeline. Maybe you could create an "Order Fulfillment" ticket pipeline that would run through billing, shipping, and installation in a linear fashion. 

It all depends on how heavily involved each process is and when tasks/sub-tasks/internal notifications/external notifications need to be triggered.

As for reporting, you could easily track:

• Open tickets across your pipeline
• Tickets that have been open for longer than XX days
• Tickets that have been sitting in the same stage for longer than XX days
• Average time to close tickets
• Number of tickets escalated

Here is the ticketing HubSpot product page, and here is the Knowledge Base article on creating tickets.

Tasks

While the ticket pipeline will show you the overall status/stage of a project, tasks will lay out the needed action items, due dates, and assigned team members. You may be able to translate some of your Monday setup into HubSpot through tasks and set them to be automatically created once the ticket reaches a certain stage, like:

• Creating a task to send an invoice and coordinate shipping once a deal enters closed/won
• Creating a task to confirm delivery once the item has shipped
• Creating a task to schedule the installation once the item has been received

You can then report on:

• Overdue tasks
• Tasks due soon
• Number of tasks completed by user
• Tasks due by user

Here is the Knowledge Base article on creating tasks.

Hope this helps!!

[TomM2]

Hey @Sarah_g ! Honestly this is a bit of a "how long is a piece of string" type question. It's very hard to give a single answer as how HubSpot works for you generally takes some time and consulting to establish. 

HubSpot does allow for custom objects in enterprise, so this makes it easy to store things like "billing" "shipping" "oboarding" etc in their own objects, but there's also lots of default objects which could be used for these. 
For example "billing" might equate to a HubSpot Line-item/quote
Onboarding might equate to tasks
By default shipping information might be a mix of contact properties and tasks too! 

It really is down to your team's current processes, there's no "one size fits all" in any CRM. What I usually advise is to take a step back from the systems you're using (or are planning to use) and map out the journey of a lead, client or account from start to finish. What are the processes involved from first contact to last enagement, what is each step that can be automated and what information do users need. From there it's a lot easier to see where each tool in a new platform (such as HubSpot) can fit in or be customised to fit your needs, but without a clear scope and insight into how your team uses each object, what reports they need, what automation they need, it's very difficult to give any definitive answer as to what the best approach would be for your team! 

[kvlschaefer]

Hi @Sarah_g,

Thanks for reaching out to the Community! 

This is a great conversation prompt 🙂 

Let's invite our subject matter experts to this conversation.

Hi @jolle, @danmoyle, @TomM2 - Do you have any advice for @Sarah_g on organizing data in HubSpot for for billing, shipping, installation, onboarding and design work processes? How would you organize it so it can be accessed by an entire team and used for automation and reporting purposes? 

Thank you! 

Best,

Kristen