Where before, there were tools for Marketing Operations, Sales Operations and Service Operations, now you can benefit from one integrated platform the whole Operations team can use to align their activity and deliver a seamless experience.
Most operations teams have enough on their plates keeping their own departments moving. But one team’s actions have an impact on the others. When those departments aren’t integrated with one another on a data-sharing level, friction quickly builds up — especially if you’re using each department’s data to inform workflows and other automations.
Look again at the example of a company whose marketing and sales teams aren’t integrated with their warehouse. When a product drops out of stock, the warehouse team’s automation may pick that up and take a re-supply action straight away.
But the marketing automation promoting those products — and the sales automation selling them — is continuing heedlessly. Aside from the internal friction this creates, it’s going to be an instant source of frustration for the customer when their order is subsequently delayed.
Operations Hub is HubSpot’s newest software solution to challenges like these. Operations Hub exists to align all an organisation’s operations teams, integrating systems, cleaning data and facilitating seamless operations so your customers’ experiences are second to none, every time.
In this article, we’ll take a look at which challenges Operations Hub solves, how it integrates your siloed departments, and three use-cases for the platform. By the end, you should have a pretty good idea whether or not Operations Hub is the right solution for you (and you’ll be in a great place to have an informed chat with one of our team.)
Prefer to jump into a free, no-obligation chat now? Book a meeting with Chris.
Contents [click to jump]
- The operations team’s needs
- Say ‘no’ to siloes with Operations Hub
- Operations Hub use cases
- Is Operations Hub right for me? [request a chat]
The operations team's needs
To work effectively, your operations teams need a platform capable of delivering the integrated technology solution they need, a process for automation and quality checks, and perspective — in this case, accurate business intelligence (BI) and data visualisation.
Platform
“How can we get every team the information they need to do their jobs?”
Most organisations depend on a range of tools and apps to automate their operations. The marketing team has their favourites, the sales team theirs, and the service team… The problem is that, while these solutions might be doing a great job serving each department individually, they’re not talking to each other. And if integrations are available, they’re time-consuming to set up and manage. Don’t forget the cost of investing in all these different apps and solutions (not that you would — it’ll be a significant outgoing every month.)
We already dove into the problems with siloed departments in our recent article, ‘Automate Tasks and Reduce Costs with HubSpot’s New Conversation Automation’. To briefly recap, when business functions are siloed, it means their operations are cut off from one another. Data. Automation. The customers’ experiences as they move along the buyer’s journey. It’s all disparate and that makes for a lot of friction as you try to scale and grow. (For a more detailed explanation, click the link above and dive into section 1.)
As a single, fully integrated platform, Operations Hub solves these issues.
Process
“Can we make that information consistent, efficient, and automated?”
With all the operations teams aligned, the next challenge they face is actually setting up automation that makes the most of this. Going back to the example we used earlier about the warehouse, this is where the operations teams set up their highly customised marketing and sales workflows that speak with the warehousing automation, so when that product goes out of stock, their marketing and sales workflows take note.
Operations Hub gives you these capabilities, so you really can create that custom automation and solve operational challenges that couldn’t be solved before now. With this level of functionality in your pocket, you’ll be able to remove stubborn sources of friction from across your flywheel, build key agility into all your operations, and — we can’t stress this enough — set the foundations for automation that scales with your business as you grow!
Perspective
“How can we better understand that information to drive business strategy?”
It’s one thing to be fully aligned with your CRM, and another thing to trust the data in it enough to set up effective workflows — particularly if you’re importing it from multiple systems. As your organisation grows and you get more and more data, staying on top of your CRM housekeeping can become a real sticking point (never mind a full-time job!).
Operations Hub doesn’t just make managing data quality easy; it makes it automatic. The Hub declutters date properties, cleans up geographic codes, synchronises phone number fields, and much more, building accuracy and consistency into your business intelligence so you can make informed decisions confident that the data you’re using is right.
As your business scales and data becomes more and more important, getting to grips with all this is fundamental. Stand-alone systems are part of the problem: what your operations teams really need is a solution that brings platform, process and perspective together.
Say ‘no’ to silos with Operations Hub
To solve these challenges, HubSpot’s Operations Hub supports three key functionalities in Data Sync, Data Quality Automation and Programmable Automation:
Align your teams and systems with Operations Hub’s data sync
With Operations Hub’s data sync, you can unlock all the power of custom-built integrations — bidirectional data flow, custom field mappings, historical syncing — in an elegant, code-free package, making it easier than ever to get your systems working together.
Adopt a better business process with data quality automation
With data quality automation, your teams can streamline business processes and manage their data better, with a clean and connected source of truth for customer data.
Help your teams adapt with programmable automation
With programmable automation, Operations Hub empowers you to adapt your business processes to the ever-changing needs of your customers. Custom code workflow actions gives you the power to code your own logic, allowing your teams to automate anything and set up business processes.
All of this is built on the HubSpot CRM, so by adding Operations Hub to your mix, you’re able to extend the power/flexibility of all other customer-facing Hubs in your arsenal. Let’s look at three different use cases for Operations Hub and how you can unlock its full potential.
Operations Hub use cases
1. Operations Hub use case: automating lead rotation
As your organisation grows, assigning leads manually doesn't scale. Operations Hub makes it possible for you to automate lead rotation through the use of customer parameters (to determine allocations or query another system, like availability). This saves your salespeople precious time and bandwidth, allowing your sales function to grow with the business and managers to stay focused on what really matters — their team's performance.
2. Operations use case: capacity planning/ticketing
On the service side of things, operations will also get busier as the organisation grows and new customers come on board. How can you ensure your customer service function will scale smoothly with the business and not become a blocker?
By breaking down your silos and bringing all your automation together, Operations Hub makes it simpler than ever for you to manage capacity planning and ticketing across the business. Your service team will still own ‘service’, but now your marketing and sales automation can be customised to reflect service interactions/conversations. You can also easily check agent activity, improving visibility and team management overnight.
3. Operations use case: integrated accounting
It isn’t just your customer-facing functions that will benefit from being aligned with the wider business. Use Operations Hub’s integration capabilities to bring your accounting automation into the fold so that from the moment a deal is won, a record is created in both your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and any accounting apps/systems you use.
This keeps all your billing/customer finance information accurate and synced with the deals themselves, opening up new doors for accounting workflows such as renewals, contract expirations, annual price reviews, and more.
Is Operations Hub right for me? [request a chat]
There are a number of ways to tell if Operations Hub is going to be right for you:
You might be reliant on a wide variety of different tools and systems across the business, none of which are speaking to one another, and you can see the benefit in syncing this data to enable company-wide operations and automation.
You might already be using multiple Hubs with lots of (20+) different workflows set up and you need more logic capabilities to reduce the manual work involved.
You might have especially large or complex data requirements, with data stored across multiple systems, and you need a better (faster and more efficient) way of cleaning or enhancing it.
If any of these scenarios sounds familiar, or you’re growing fast and can see them becoming a reality in the near future, Operations Hub could be for you. In either case, we’d encourage you to reach out to us. As an Elite HubSpot Solutions Partner with extensive experience helping B2B businesses unlock the full potential of the HubSpot platform, the team here at BabelQuest is on hand to help you align your your operations teams and systems, adopt better business processes and help all your teams adapt to a better way of working.
To find out more about conversation automation and how your business could benefit, click the image below and get in touch.
