Discover how HubSpot can help organisations like yours to maximise the value held by their data and unlock new capabilities across the business.
On any given day, I get emails from brands that I love promoting products similar to those I have bought before. House bills go out from my account at regular, predetermined intervals, without any need for me to interact with anyone at all. And when I have a customer query or need support for a service I use, they know exactly who I am and why I recently got in touch.
At work, I’m able to offer my clients the same levels of automation, personalisation, and efficiency by helping them to leverage their customer data stored in the HubSpot CRM.
Why is that so valuable to businesses today and how is HubSpot able to help you unlock the full value of your customer data across the organisation? Read on to find out.
The value of customer data
Precise segmentation. Powerful automation. Individual customer record timelines, revealing click-by-click how each contact record moves around and engages with your website.
The above examples barely scrape the surface of what your organisation can do with data today — when it’s managed correctly. The sophisticated can be made to look simple — effortless, even, to the customers on the receiving end of your data management strategies. As a result, your data is up there as one of your most valuable assets.
Other use cases demonstrating the value of your data include:
- getting visibility over historic business trends and the ability to predict future trends, whether in marketing performance, revenue forecasting, service/support peaks etc.
- the ability to diagnose business problems and accurately identify the root cause
- reporting complex results using automated dashboards with real-time data
- delivering highly specific messaging to predetermined audience segments, for example industry-based email marketing sequences or solution-specific workflows
- chatbots and other complex conversational AI that effortlessly improves the buyer journey or helps Sales to better qualify its prospects
Don’t miss these five automation blueprints, available for you to download now.
FAQ: what customer data is most valuable?
One of the first questions I’m often asked off the back of conversations about the value of customer data is “what customer data is most valuable?”
I wish I could give you a straight answer, but what’s valuable to one organisation isn’t necessarily going to be valuable to another. Even within the same business, different departments will value customer data differently. And as strategies change, and tactics change with them, what was valuable yesterday might not be so important today.
That said, there are some general data fields you’ll want to make sure are populated in your CRM to give a solid foundation by which you can market to, communicate with, and engage your prospects and customers:
- Do you have each contact’s email address?
- Do you have their full name?
- Do you have the name of their company?
- Do you have details on how the prospect/customer heard about your company?
This might sound like basic information, but you’d be surprised at how many companies aren’t inputting this customer data correctly — or at least consistently. (You might consider setting up lead source and lead source details as two separate fields, for example, so one can offer pre-defined lead source categories and the other can hold the additional details.)
In particular, salespeople updating the CRM manually can sometimes overlook or misspell customer data, leading to all kinds of dirty data and other discrepancies as time goes on. After all, they have much more immediate concerns on their mind — like closing deals!
Related read:
Say hello to HubSpot data management
HubSpot’s reputation as the number-one CRM for growing businesses hasn’t come from nowhere. The platform’s strength is the native integrations between its various hubs (not to speak of all the third-party software with which it integrates), meaning its data-capture and data-sharing capabilities are, and always have been, built into the very foundation of the tools.
Its data sync ensures that your data is the same across all of HubSpot's software, and beyond, while the HubSpot CRM includes four standard objects: contacts, companies, deals, and tickets (with each object representing a different type of relationship or process).
The same data-sharing capabilities that bring its hubs together extend across all your customer-facing functions (and many back-office teams, too — hello again, Operations Hub). In other words, your whole business can unlock the value of your data.
As you can imagine, having read this far into the topic, for organisations moving onto the platform (or integrating it with their existing systems) this is truly transformative, creating new synergies, unlocking potential and maximising the value of everything your company does.
How exactly is the platform set up to simplify data management and help you get the most out of your data?
Would you like a clearer idea of what requirements your new CRM needs to deliver? Download our free CRM scoping template, available now.
How HubSpot simplifies effective data management
1. No more duplicate properties
If you work with or manage data, the chances are you’ve wrestled with duplicate properties before. You’ve added a contact, someone else has added the same contact, perhaps the contact has added themselves… Times that by a hundred contacts and the next thing you know, the CRM is a mess.
“This simple mistake [duplicate properties] can throw off segmentation strategies, send out incorrect email messaging, assign leads to the wrong sales owners, and throw off reporting, just to name a few outcomes of this mistake.” HubSpot
Using HubSpot, you can create an ‘import template’ for use by your employees. With such a template in place, any CSV imported in HubSpot must adhere to its formatting conventions, with the column header corresponding to a property within HubSpot.
“As an admin, you can create and distribute a CSV template for your employees to use when importing information into HubSpot,” HubSpot writes. “With this solution, the column headers of the template will already match with existing properties in your portal, and your employees should never feel the need to create new properties in your HubSpot portal.”
If you think this would help, check out an example from HubSpot of an import sheet.
2. Minimise missing contact record information
Missing contact information or incomplete contact records are one of the most common data management challenges faced by organisations today. HubSpot helps you to nip this in the bud straight away by making it possible for admins to set up the fields that are seen when creating a record.
“Once those settings are saved, anyone who clicks Contacts > Create Contact will see those fields in their screen. The stars next to each field will indicate which fields are required in order to successfully create the contact,” HubSpot explains.
This is a great way of managing your data, especially as the company scales and the number of users creating forms increases. Data management loves consistency.
Learn more about creating a data hygiene dashboard in HubSpot
3. Keep deal records up to date
By their very nature, deal records move. (At least, you want them to!) But tracking that progression often relies on the salespeople involved going in and updating the record manually. This can be a lot to ask of an already busy team with quotas to hit. Our head of revenue, Eric Murphy, once described salespeople as being gripped by the ‘tyranny of the immediate’. They live in the moment. As such, little tasks like this slip through the radar.
HubSpot solves this by making it possible for admins to change pipeline settings in their portals. “By customizing the deal stage properties in their pipeline(s), anyone who tries to move a record to a different deal stage will be greeted by a pop-up asking them to update a deal property before they can successfully move the deal,” HubSpot explains.
This helps you to keep your deal records (as well as your revenue forecasting) up to date.
4. Control how many users (and which) can make changes
Back to Hannah, one our HubSpot CRM platform consultants, for this one, because she says it best:
“You might know this feeling all too well: your HubSpot portal has been around for a while, and while it was organised and functional when you first set it up, over time it’s started to become an unwieldy mess. You’ve had team members come and go, functionality has changed, and your portal is no longer fit for purpose.”
Too many cooks spoil the broth, as they say, and one wrong change in the back end can often have repercussions spanning the length of your portal.
HubSpot’s solution is to define user permissions for employees who work in the portal.
Some permissions you may consider changing for certain users:
- Import access
- Export access
- Workflows
- Assign View, Edit, or Publish Access to Marketing Tools
- Deals
“HubSpot’s solutions can help prevent messy portal issues from happening in the first place. They’re relatively straightforward to set up, and if you’d like some extra support, our Expert Practices team can help get you started today.”
Read more about the key to successful HubSpot admin (hint — it doesn’t involve spreadsheets!)
Could HubSpot help your organisation to better manage its data?
One of the best things about HubSpot is how user-friendly it is. Even so, large organisations, newly set-up teams, or businesses with especially complex data requirements can find it beneficial to enlist specialist service providers to help them unlock the full value of the platform.
HubSpot solutions partners like us come in a multitude of flavours, so it pays to do your research and find the right partner for your needs. Make the right choice, and your new partner will bring a whole host of specialist data management skills to your organisation — in fact, that’s where me and my team come in. BabelQuest’s Advanced Implementation Certification (AIC) speaks volumes to our technical capabilities, never mind all the great feedback we get from our clients when helping them with data management projects like this.
A solutions partner won’t be for everyone, but if you’re thinking about getting HubSpot for the first time or adding to your existing range of hubs, it’s definitely food for thought. All that data is just waiting to be unlocked and turned to your organisation’s benefit. Why wait?
To find out more about HubSpot data management and how we could help you use HubSpot to unlock your organisation’s data, get in touch today.
