The immortal wisdom of Alec Baldwin’s snappy, "Always be Closing” is practically the Holy Grail of sales mantras. But with the curveball that is business, this adage needs a makeover.
Perhaps closing isn’t as straightforward as it used to be – enter: RevOps.
RevOps is a triptych [(\TRIP-tik\ • noun: something composed or presented in three parts or sections)].
To put it simply, it is a strategic alignment across sales, marketing, and customer success teams – all to enable revenue growth.
But, RevOps (Revenue Operations for the uninitiated) is not just a buzzword; it is pivotal to enhance revenue in a labyrinth of processes, platforms, and people. It’s the system you need to align the dots at the junction of “Demand”, and conjoin at “Closed Won”; all in perfect harmony.
In this series, we explore the RevOps ecosystem from the lens of HubSpot, and today, we pick the first of the trio – Sales.
Rolling the carpet with HubSpot’s Sales Hub
The dichotomy with data is that you want to see everything in place, and keep everything where they belong – silos but not, too? So you need a system.
And the system you need is a CRM, complimenting your opportunity management efforts, and giving you visibility of all things data you need to close that deal – and our bet is on HubSpot Sales Hub.
So, why Sales Hub?
What HubSpot Sales Hub is, is an orchestration tool. It automates your sales processes, integrates with HubSpot’s CRM, helps you manage opportunities, leads, and deals – in one place.
It’s there for you to track, notify, analyze, and report on what your sales is doing, what it should do, and how it should do it.
The edge is the ability to gain insight into your people and processes through a platform at your behest.
Sales Hub for the RevOps Approach
So, where does RevOps fit into the picture? The objective of RevOps is to enhance operational efficiency, improve revenue predictability, and ensure alignment across sales, marketing, and customer success teams.
The challenges?
- Data silos: Difficulty in integrating data across departments which hinders flow of information, collaboration and decision-making.
- Cultural differences: Each department has its own goals, metrics, and strategies, leading to conflicting priorities and reduced cooperation.
Essentially, HubSpot Sales Hub is designed to optimize RevOps by improving deal velocity and fixing the revenue funnel, enabling a unified view of customer interactions across the entire lifecycle. What you can do with it:
- Automate workflows, reduce manual tasks, identify redundancies;
- Share data and metrics to foster a unified approach to customer engagement;
- Extract real-time analytics to make data-driven decisions; and
- Customize Sales Hub to fit into the broader framework, aligning sales, marketing, and customer success strategies to common goals.
And voila, the concoction for RevOps!
HubSpot Sales Hub Implementation: What does it take?
To start off, implementation is not onboarding. When we say implementation, we mean tailoring the platform to your needs – aligning it with what you want to achieve, and how you want to achieve it.
And for an implementation that works as magic sauce for your company, you need to ensure that employee KRAs and KPIs are fixed, and tracked through HubSpot – at all levels in the organization. Here’s what we’re talking about:
- Identifying areas for improvement by analyzing existing sales processes. And then integrating HubSpot into them to improve lead management, automate tasks and boost sales productivity.
- Helping sales leaders make more accurate revenue forecasts and strategic decisions. And giving real-time visibility into the sales pipeline, including key metrics, deal stage reporting, and revenue projections.
- Optimizing lead qualification criteria and lead data to help with better leads… and setting up a feedback loop with the marketing team.
- Customizing deal and contact dashboards with analytics on interactions and tickets to help ascertain NPS and fish upsell opportunities.
So, there’s a lot that needs to happen. But how do you bring all of it into motion?
An ideal journey you should take while setting up your engine on HubSpot should look something like this:
- Discovery and audit
Look at your existing processes, detail the gaps in your current setup, and audit your entire system to plug loopholes while finding opportunities (there will always be plenty). - Design and blueprinting
The schematics of your sales engine are a must before you set out to implement. Understand your team’s needs, map your customer journey, and draft a blueprint of how you want your customers to move from “Opportunity” to “Closed Won”. This means processes, flows, SOPs, and more. - Implement and integrate
Implement the processes into your Sales Hub to see your sales engine come to life, integrating with the tools that compliment your ecosystem, and connecting your CRM to the right data points. - Educate and training
Most importantly, make your teams familiar with what you’ve built out for them – to make them adopt the system the way you intended. - Optimize on loop
Once the ordeal is complete, it's time to go back to the drawing board and optimize for eternity; to keep competition at bay and competitiveness at the brow.
Need a hand? Let’s speak.
Tips for Pros
Now for decision-makers, the C-suite executives and the VPs, considering HubSpot’s Sales Hub, do consider this:
- Unifying your data platform: Ensure that all customer data flows into HubSpot to maintain a single source of truth. If you’re using a CRM, there’s no scope for half-baked data.
- Cross-departmental training: Align all teams with comprehensive training on HubSpot tools for better collaboration. The sales team is only as good as the departments complimenting it.
- Continuous optimization: Don’t stop reviewing processes. It’s a problem if you don’t have any problems. And you can always use HubSpot analytics to identify and implement improvements.
Final thoughts
Implementing HubSpot Sales Hub with a RevOps framework isn't just about using new tools; it's about fundamentally rethinking how teams collaborate and drive growth.
It's a strategic pivot that places customer value at the heart of processes, fostering sustainable business growth.
That’s it for the first part of this triptych. Stay tuned for more!
