HubSpot’s CRM is an attractive choice for businesses looking to improve their customer’s experience and drive consistent revenue. But with options like workflows, deal automation, custom objects, and sales accelerator tools, it can seem really overwhelming when you're trying to figure out how to implement the HubSpot CRM at your company.
According to HubSpot research, 76% of sales leaders believe their team only utilizes a small fraction of their CRM’s capabilities. 50% say their CRM is “difficult to use.”
As a sales leader, you want the benefits of a CRM, but you need to be sure your HubSpot tools are adopted and fully utilized by your sales team. So when it comes to implementing the HubSpot CRM at your company, do you need a highly technical person on your team or to partner with?
Implementing Your HubSpot CRM
The implementation of your HubSpot CRM is a crucial step in optimizing your company’s sales, marketing, and customer service strategies. After all, a CRM that is correctly set-up, optimally configured, and fully embraced by your entire company can have limitless potential.
But, do you need a technical person (on your team or to partner with) to implement the HubSpot CRM correctly?
After working with hundreds of HubSpot users with varying degrees of technical expertise for the past decade, I can tell you the short answer is no. However, you do need three important skills in order to implement the HubSpot CRM successfully:
- Complete knowledge of HubSpot's capabilities and configuration settings
- Understanding of your business’ sales and marketing processes and long-term vision for how you want them run
- Comprehension of your company’s data (i.e. where data is entering your CRM, how it's getting there, and how to segment and analyze your data for campaigns, reports, and automation).
The willingness to acquire and maximize these three skills may be all you need to implement the HubSpot CRM in your organization, but let’s dig deeper into what these entail exactly.
Maximizing HubSpot's Capabilities and Configuration Settings
Setting up your HubSpot CRM can be a deceptively simple process. However, its out-of-the-box templates are a one-size-fits-most approach that more often than not does not speak to the intricacies and nuances of your specific business.
This is why my company developed the “HubSpot Rule of Seven,” a strategy we use daily with our clients. The concept behind this rule is basically for everything that you're trying to do in HubSpot, there's seven different ways to do it. This means that for every campaign you map, HubSpot workflow you design, or process you implement, you need to think through all seven options to reach the most long-term and scalable solution for your business.
So when it comes to implementing the HubSpot CRM, you really need to work with a partner or have somebody on your team who knows all seven ways. They need to understand all of HubSpot's capabilities - how the data's structured, how its features work, how all its configuration settings work, and which configuration settings exist - so that you can plan your CRM architecture.
If you work with someone who can accomplish what you're trying to do, but they only know two or three ways to execute it (versus all seven), you may run into problems down the road. That’s because some options may not play well with existing automation. You need someone who can iterate through all seven ways to do what you're trying to do and figure out the best long-term way to do it for your specific business.
Using the HubSpot CRM to Optimize Your Business Processes
The second non-technical skill you need to successfully implement HubSpot’s CRM is a complete understanding of your business’ sales and marketing processes. Ideally, you need to fully comprehend all aspects of your customer’s journey and how your CRM supports each and every step.
The foundation of your sales and marketing processes will be your lead management strategy. Lead management is the process of knowing:
- What to do with leads
- Where they go in your CRM
- What data gets changed
- How to track and follow up with leads
- How to know where they are in the sales process
- How to spend your time selling, instead of entering data into your CRM
Knowing your sales process and how you're going to grow through your marketing efforts is detrimental in the set-up of your HubSpot CRM. If you don’t have someone in your company that knows these processes inside and out, then you need to consider hiring a HubSpot CRM and sales partner that can help.
Using Your Company's Data to Feed Your HubSpot CRM
The third non-technical skill you need to successfully implement HubSpot’s CRM is an understanding of your business’ data. For example, you need to know where data is entering your CRM, how it's getting there, and how to segment/analyze data for campaigns, reports, and automation.
According to Insights2020 research, nearly 70% of executives working with “overperforming” companies attributed the corporate success to interpreting and acting on disparate chunks of data. Understanding your data and your customer data from the company level, contact level, deal level, and product level is vitally important.
Again, this level of understanding is not a technical skill. Having this basic comprehension of your business’ data and its implications will allow you to successfully implement the HubSpot CRM.
Setting Up Custom Integrations
The one area of your HubSpot CRM implementation where you will need technical skills is custom integrations. A custom integration is a solution that is built specifically for your business. Working with an API and passing data through a custom integration will require somebody on your team or a partner with technical skills to set up, plan, and test.
But for native HubSpot integrations, which are just point and click to configure, you will not need technical skills.
Implementing Your HubSpot CRM Takeaway
You don’t need someone with technical skills to help your company implement the HubSpot CRM, but you do need CRM expertise. Like any skill, CRM knowledge and prowess can be learned and acquired, but it won’t happen overnight.
If you're looking to hire somebody for your internal team or if you want to partner with a HubSpot expert, be sure to look for people who have experience in lead management, CRM architecture, automation design, or sales process optimization. They’ll need to know HubSpot’s full capabilities and how to overlay these options onto the specific processes of your company. This winning formula will give you confidence that you're setting HubSpot’s CRM up the right way for your unique business.
And at the end of the day, implementing the HubSpot CRM is 20% about technology tricks and it's 80% about psychology, process, and adoption for your team. Shifting your focus from technical skills to these important areas will pave the way to success for your company.
