Follow these seven tips to get the most out of the platform and unlock the full potential of your HubSpot portal.
Maybe you’re not seeing the full value you feel that you were promised when you signed up to HubSpot.
Or maybe you’re very happy with how you and your team are using the platform, but you know you could be getting even more out of it.
Either way, there are several places you can look and features you can use that, if you’re not in there making use of them every day already, will help you to improve business-wide performance and see better results from your HubSpot portal.
Read on to find out what they are, where they are, and how you can use them to unlock the full value of your HubSpot portal.
To talk to us about a HubSpot Health Check or to book in a service, get in touch today.
How to get more out of your HubSpot portal
- Clean your data
- Use the email tools
- Create smart CTAs
- Leverage sales tools
- Integrate sales with marketing
- Unlock customer service tools
- Revisit portal setup
1. Clean your data
The power of HubSpot’s multi-hub solution hinges on the integrity of your data.
When your data’s clean, you’re going to be able to do so much with it, whether you’re on Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, or even just using the HubSpot CRM.
When your data’s dirty, the opposite is true. A tool is only as effective as the data feeding it, so make sure your contact records, your email addresses, even basic data housekeeping like nomenclature (your naming conventions) are in good, working order.
“If your data isn’t accurate, it isn’t useful. Data that isn’t routinely cleaned can actually have negative impacts.” Hannah Fisher, CRM Platform Consultant, ‘The 2 Core Foundations of an Effective Data Management Strategy’
From time to time, errors will creep into your data — it’s unavoidable — but good data management practices are about routinely reviewing and tidying your data to catch them quickly and early. You’ll get so much more out of your HubSpot portal afterwards.
Related read: How to Clean Your CRM Data in 7 Simple Steps
2. Use the email tools
Today, HubSpot is widely known as the number one CRM for growing businesses. But there was a time, not so long ago, when its marketing tools were front and centre. Chief among those is its email capabilities, which organisations worldwide have used, time and time again, to deliver email campaigns that perform.
As I explained in this dedicated article on HubSpot’s email tools, “HubSpot’s custom objects functionality meant we could neatly label each contact in the CRM with the information we needed to target them effectively and deliver emails that drove direct sales” when creating emails for one of our clients, VFE.
“Our HubSpot platform consultants leaned on their abilities as HubSpot-accredited experts with extensive technical experience to carry this out and enable the marketing strategy using HubSpot’s email tools.”
For another client, we use HubSpot’s email tools to promote helpful resources like guides that raise awareness for a focus subject — in this case, responsible waste management.
“Email is an important channel in this strategy, helping us to distribute content that grows Westminster Commercial Waste’s services by better informing and educating recipients,” explains Bridget Reid, our principal marketer. “For best results, this content is typically delivered as a series using HubSpot’s nurture sequence tool.”
See three ways we’ve used HubSpot’s email marketing tools to drive our clients’ campaigns.
3. Create smart CTAs
Smart content is all about providing the people who visit your website with personalised experiences based on their preferences and needs. This means adding a personal touch to marketing by creating tailored content based on who a visitor is and what they’re looking for.
Using smart calls to action (CTAs), you can display a custom button to your different visitors based on certain criteria on your HubSpot pages or on your external website pages.
“94% of businesses agree that a personalized experience is critical to the current and future success of their company.” HubSpot
Being able to deliver a personalised CTA to a reader is invaluable. It makes the CTA more relevant to them. It helps the CTA to stand out. And it will drive up conversion rates.
Over time, you can also analyse smart CTA performance to see which versions are the best performing and learn from them when creating future CTAs for different audiences.
You might also be interested in: Why Smart Content in HubSpot Could Help You Smash Your Conversion Rate Goals (And How to Create It)
4. Leverage sales tools
If you predominantly use HubSpot for its marketing features, branching out into its sales tools is going to improve the value you see from the platform overnight.
It’s one thing to be able to use the platform to generate leads and another to be able to qualify, nurture, and close those leads into new (revenue-generating) business.
The value you unlock from the platform will actually become quantifiable in ROI terms as you become able to attribute revenue back to marketing and the precise features, tactics, or channels leveraged in your HubSpot software that generated it.
Popular sales tools you might not have used yet include:
- The sales pipeline — track your customers’ lifecycles and forecast revenue
- Sales automation — improve efficiencies and consistency across sales
- Tasks and the ‘Today’ view — help your reps to work smarter
- Email templates — so the most effective emails are used again and again
- Sales playbooks — map out structured calls for your team to follow
Read more: 11 Reasons HubSpot Sales Hub Is the Best Sales Enablement Software [+ Demo Videos]
5. Integrate sales with marketing
The benefits of sales and marketing alignment are well documented. Historic research by HubSpot suggests that salespeople with service level agreements (SLAs) specify their company's marketing as their top lead source.
HubSpot’s one of the best platforms out there today for sales and marketing alignment. But the door swings both ways — because its various hubs work best when used together, using both Sales and Marketing Hub will help you to get more value out of the platform itself.
In HubSpot’s own words, “Combine the power of Sales Hub and Marketing Hub to give teams a mutually beneficial toolset that eases internal friction and improves customer satisfaction across the board.”
Using Sales and Marketing Hub together, you and your teams can:
- unlock the potential of your data, from better customer experiences to more powerful reporting
- message with greater consistency, wherever a prospect is in their buyer’s journey
- automate outreach from your buyers’ first site visits to deals closing
- align your sales and marketing teams behind a single source of truth
- measure the ROI of every sales and marketing activity
Read more about the importance of sales and marketing alignment.
6. Unlock customer service tools
"HubSpot's service tools allow you variety, meaning you can create a multi-channel customer service presence to reach your customers,” explains Bridget Reid again.
“You'll be able to answer more problems quicker, more efficiently and via your customers’ preferred channels. These include WhatsApp, live chat, Facebook, and traditional forms. From a behind-the-scenes POV, your team will have the ability to see exactly what your customer needs, as soon as possible, all in one place so you can maximise customer satisfaction whilst making the day-to-day of your team easier."
If you’re not using these tools already, doing so will help you to unlock so much more value from your HubSpot portal by helping you to help the people your business needs to grow.
7. Revisit portal setup
How was your portal set up and does it reflect the way your business operates today?
Organisations evolve all the time. Processes change. The demands you place on your systems of choice adapt with the market and the way you do business. The HubSpot setup you had when you implemented it two years ago might no longer be the right one for you.
When this happens, it’s important to check-in with those systems and make sure they’re still set up effectively.
- Logins, authentication, and portal access — is this still secure? Can the people who need to access your portal do so? Are the right permissions in place?
- Ticket filters and access — are the right filters in place or do you need to create new custom filters?
- Default inbox — is the inbox you selected to be your default still the best one?
- Ticket templates and branding — are your ticket templates still best in class? Do you need to customise new templates? Does your branding need updating?
These are just some of the ways you can adapt your portal setup to reflect the way your business has changed — or plans to change — to keep your portal optimised.
How healthy is your HubSpot portal?
If you’ve made it this far, it’s likely that you think your HubSpot portal could be improved in some way. Perhaps you’ve recognised how to do that from reading this article. If not, or if you’d sleep easier knowing that a dedicated HubSpot expert is reviewing your portal for you, we can help.
Our HubSpot Health Check is designed specifically to help businesses get more out of their HubSpot portal. There might be existing features you could be getting more value out of, or supporting hubs that would significantly increase the value you get out of HubSpot.
We might spot small changes to the way your portal is set up that, once implemented, will make it much easier, quicker, and more effective for your team to use.
If you’re:
- not seeing the ROI you expected from HubSpot
- you’re trying to manage your portal alone and finding it a challenge
- worried your data is letting your business down
- not able to use all the tools or functionality you want
Then it’s likely our HubSpot Health Check could really help you to unlock the full potential of your HubSport portal.
The new year is traditionally a time for looking back as well as forwards. Kick this one off the right way with a health check of your organisation’s core systems and go into the new year confident that your portal and your business is set up to succeed.
To talk to us about a HubSpot Health Check or to book in a service, get in touch today.
