To maximise HubSpot adoption across your business, follow our six-step UNLOCK framework structured to help you — and your users — succeed with your new software.
A lot of people don’t really like change. And if you go into your HubSpot onboarding talking about “encouraging desired behaviour,” “habitual implementation,” and all the other jargony phrases you tend to read about when researching IT adoption, they never will.
Instead, we’ve proposed a better way of maximising HubSpot adoption. A way of showing your people what HubSpot can do and how they’ll benefit so that “a different way” of working seems more attractive. A way for you to make sure everyone is happy, even excited, to use HubSpot, whichever hubs you’re on, because that’s how you’ll ensure it’s being used best.
Read on to learn about our six-step UNLOCK framework for ensuring HubSpot adoption. This easy-to-follow guide works for any organisation, regardless of which hub you’re onboarding, how many users you have, or the size of your budget for your implementation
This article is a summary of our definitive guide to HubSpot CRM adoption. For more advice about maximising adoption, click to download your copy of the guide, available now.
1. Understanding the barriers
Everyone’s barriers to adopting your new software will be different. Understanding what form these barriers take has to be the first step to breaking them down, which is essential if you want your team to look at your new HubSpot platform with an open mind.
I won’t go into all the barriers here as we’ve recently written an article exploring just that. If you’re interested in learning more about what barriers your team might be facing and how to overcome them, you can check it out here.
2. Needs assessment
There’s a reason you’re switching to HubSpot. In fact, there are probably a few reasons. What are they? In other words, what about your current platform isn’t working?
The only way to really answer this question is to get user feedback. Gathering this data is the only way of understanding how it meets your users’ needs — and how it doesn’t. This is what we mean by a needs assessment and carrying it out will go a long way towards helping your people — whatever their personality types and platform involvement — to see for themselves why you need to make the move to HubSpot now.
You can read more about the two stages of a successful needs assessment and how to carry one out in ‘The Definitive Guide to HubSpot Adoption’.
3. Listen
You’ve gathered feedback. But what are your users saying? The feedback you’ve gathered on what your users like and dislike about the current platform, and how they feel about the prospect of a new platform, is only as useful as the time you put into understanding it.
To look at it another way, you have the data on how your customers feel. To turn that into meaningful insights that you can use to make better decisions, you need to analyse it.
- Collate survey feedback.
- Involve users in the scoping process.
- Understand your people better.
4. Outcome
The work you’ve carried out to understand your users’ barriers, assess their needs, and collate the feedback will form the outline of your new platform’s scope.
If you’re already in the process of configuring the new system and are just now addressing the subject of adoption, don’t worry — it’s not too late to bring your people into the loop.
If you’re planning ahead, then the scoping and build phase is another opportunity to advance your adoption strategy and reinforce to your team the benefits of the new platform.
Solve for the users, not just the board. Yes, your senior leadership team will need reporting and analytics, and you’ll want to make sure your dashboards are set up accordingly. But they’ll rarely see a contact record, much less use one, so configure your features and functionality for the people who’ll use them every day and watch adoption soar.
Download the guide and discover how to unlock quick wins at the Outcome stage.
5. Create
This is the build phase of the project where you’re creating the platform that will work for your users and the business.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that by this stage it’s too late to address adoption. When the most effective adoption frameworks revolve around involving your people at each stage of the implementation process, failing to address it until the go-live point is a risky strategy.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to remove outstanding barriers and bring your users face to face with all the great functionality that HubSpot has to offer.
In fact, there are certain processes — key to successful adoption — that you wouldn’t want to roll out until your HubSpot is configured and ready to go live. What are they?
6. Knowledge
Proper training and onboarding gives your team the technical skills they need to use the platform effectively.
It supports them, establishing your team/workplace/business as a place where they have opportunities and the structure/resources they need to learn and grow.
And it can motivate them, building their self-confidence, their curiosity, their anticipation for change, which is incredible when you think back to how uncertain they were of the new system previously.
All this is to say that adoption is an ongoing process that extends well beyond the onboarding phase. As the software updates (and the team around it changes), a healthy, consistently high adoption rate needs to be nurtured by routine training sessions.
You might also be interested in:
- HubSpot Onboarding: A Detailed Guide
- How Could You Benefit From Buying HubSpot Through a Partner Agency?
- How We Helped VFE Generate a £1m+ Pipeline in 3 Months Using HubSpot
For the full framework, download your copy of the guide today
These six points are really just the skeleton on which our UNLOCK framework sits. We go into much more detail in the guide itself, so if anything you’ve read here has been of interest to you and you’d like more information, a copy is available for you to download now.
It’s possible that prefer to just speak to somebody — about your challenges, IT environment, or HubSpot adoption more generally. Whatever’s on your mind, pick up the phone or drop us a message and we’ll be in touch to find out more about what’s going on in your business.
With some of the best HubSpot consultants in the world on our team, we’re confident that we can help you to maximise adoption, whatever your circumstances, so you unlock the most value out of your people and your platform.
This article is a summary of our definitive guide to HubSpot CRM adoption. For more advice about maximising adoption, click to download your copy of the guide, available now.
