What the best HubSpot users (and their companies) look like — An inside perspective from a HubSpot Customer Success Manager

I want to share my experience working as a HubSpot Customer Success Manager in Singapore, my perspective of what the best HubSpot users (and their companies) exhibit in terms of behaviours that make them really successful using HubSpot, by and extension, the success they have achieved at their companies too.

Beginning

I joined HubSpot Singapore as a Customer Success Manager in March 2018, slightly coming close to 2.5 years as I’m penning this. I came with experience working with the largest Facebook advertisers in the APAC region from my previous company Nanigans (acquired by Sprinklr). When I joined HubSpot, I wanted to widen my spectrum of knowledge in other areas of digital marketing, like paid search, SEO, email marketing, conversion rate optimisation etc.

HubSpot pioneered the term ‘inbound marketing’, and to me, running Facebook advertisements had been very outbound (then, but did you know that ads can also be done the inbound way? This is a different topic altogether which I will not be covering in this article), I wanted a different take on how a company could grow. This was the beginning of my journey into HubSpot — to learn on the job and help my clients grow their businesses using the Inbound methodology.

Steep Learning Curve

Since I’d joined, HubSpot had launched Service Hub and most recently CMS Hub. The rate of innovation at HubSpot is much faster than what I can learn, digest, get good at, and then teach my clients. They tell you during new hire onboarding that it’s like drinking from a fire hose, I still feel that way today.

Why does all these matter to how the best HubSpot users (and their companies) look like? Because, according to a research done by Greg Daines (who founded Client Velocity), 6–13% customers are the forward thinkers, the innovators. The majority don’t always know what they need to do to be successful. They often don’t know to ask either.

I work with the majority in my day-to-day, and this is not surprising either, because most HubSpot users work at Small Medium Businesses (SMBs). This means that if I feel like I am drinking from a fire hose every day, even as a HubSpot employee, imagine how that experience is like for HubSpot users. Every other day / week when you login, somehow your world feels like it’s shifted a bit (maybe sometimes a lot) right before your eyes.

Golden Question

I was inspired to write this post from an internal learning session that we had about Leading Rather Than Following Your Customers: Principles and Tools for Becoming a Strategic Consultant by Greg Daines (mentioned above). During the session, he said that the most successful clients, and by success he means the clients who choose to renew their HubSpot contract year after year, invariably gave responses to the question “How are your results?” with quantifiable, and measurable performance that had an impact at their company.

This was an a-ha moment for me. It’s not the clients who were happy with me, or happy with the software that they were using who chose to continue using HubSpot year after year, it’s those who in spite of their frustrations, issues, and obstacles, who still continue to achieve superior economic performance with HubSpot that were the most successful, and also consequently the ones who continued to want to invest in HubSpot and grow with us.

Leading Indicators of Failure

In order to understand success, it is important to understand the failures, because they are two sides to the same coin. Greg shared that there are 4 leading indicators of client behaviour that clearly signal trouble far in advance. These appear even before the client knows that they have failed using HubSpot. I will unpack these in my personal experience working with hundreds of customers in APAC over the last 2+ years.

1. Failure to change process

It will be a fool’s errand to buy into a platform or a technology solution and then go back to operating as if nothing should change. Drawing from a daily life analogy, it is equivalent to going to a car showroom, buying a brand new Ferrari, driving it back home, and then taking the train every single day afterward, just as life had been before the Ferrari arrived.

2. Doesn’t implement the full solution

It takes effort to implement change within an organisation. Many times during the sales process, clients see the full value of how the suite of tools on HubSpot can bring their business to the next level. However, when it comes to implementation, it is no longer simply the CEO’s vision of where she sees the company to be after using HubSpot, it takes an army to implement the full solution, to elicit a change in operations, and sometimes, a 180 degree shift in mindsets from not just the management, but every single employee in the company. It’s hard, and people don’t see it through. They implement the CRM, and then they wrap it up and call it a day.

3. Hands down responsibility

This is a double edged sword of a larger organisation when there are multiple layers of hierarchy and decision making. Oftentimes, the decision maker / sponsor who decides to purchase HubSpot, if given a big enough employee-size, usually also isn’t the same person who will be implementing, using, and training the team on how to adopt using HubSpot. She passes the baton on to the Marketing/Sales/Service/IT Manager to take up the project. The problem with this is that the Manager lacks the vision and has a much narrower scope of work. This becomes another to-do task that they are paid to work on. When responsibility gets handed down, it leads on to the last point below.

4. Loses track of business purpose

In economic terms, there is only 1 reason why any for-profit company wants to purchase HubSpot — because it helps them to make more money. This can come in various ways, from helping employees save time, reduce cost, increase leads, nurture prospects, they all boil down to making more money eventually. When I work with HubSpot users who are quite far removed from management, they are the ones responsible for launching that next weekly email campaign that needs to be sent, or the next landing page that must go live. These are also the same users who do the same thing day in day out, and start losing track of the actual business purpose — does this help the company make more money?

Now that we have reviewed the leading indicators of behaviours exhibited that clearly signal trouble far in advance, there are also plenty other reasons that could cause a user of HubSpot to fail. They didn’t take it seriously, the right people didn’t show up during the onboarding training, leadership didn’t show support, acted like it was a simple tech thing to be used but didn’t think about the business impact, not committed etc. The list can continue, so says Greg. They say that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In this instance, happy HubSpot users are all alike; every unhappy HubSpot user is unhappy in its own way.

Let me now share actual examples of how some of my most successful clients who use HubSpot behave, think and act, and perhaps, serve as a point of reference to your current state and what you (if you are an existing HubSpot user) can be doing to close that gap.

1. Clear understanding and focus of primary business objectives

When Covid19 started rippling its effects from an individual level to the company, many of my clients had to grapple with a shift in their corporate strategies and the way they went about doing business (if they even had any). There was one specific client who came to me and started to engage with me in a very focused manner. He manages a property development company. In this climate, very few people will be thinking about “let’s go shop for a new home!”, instead he knows that sales will slow no doubt, and the next most important thing in any company right now is cash flow. He needs to ensure that his existing property investors/owners will and can continue to pay their deposits / instalments.

He came to me with a very clear understanding and focus of a primary business objective — set up a collections process that was automated and effective on HubSpot for his company. He needs to get as much cash in the bank to tide this out. Prior to booking a strategy call with me, he sent me a powerpoint slide deck with detailed flow charts on the series of events which represented his operations and the users involved. He wanted to understand how best he could get this setup on HubSpot via workflows and pipeline.

For me, I had very little understanding into the context of how his company functioned, because I am not an employee there. However, he’d given me just enough for me to understand, in order for me to consult with him what he needed to implement on HubSpot to achieve what he desired.

A few weeks later as we reviewed it, he happily walked me through the Support Pipeline (or Collections Process) that he had setup, and it was heartening to see that ‘we’ were actually collecting cash in the bank for his company. This was a clear derivative of a successful result achieved from using the Service Hub tools available in his subscription, it had tangible impact on his organisation.

2. Choosing the best opportunities to drive improvement

Any HubSpot user will attest to this, it is overwhelming with the number of tools and features available that one can potentially be using at any point in time. The most successful HubSpot user (and company) I’ve seen are the ones who are selective in choosing the best opportunities they can leverage on to drive improvement that will generate maximum impact for the company, at that point in time, with the resources they have. Yes, that’s a mouthful to type as well. Basically the best opportunities to drive improvement lies in the intersection of:

• What moves the needle
• Who is going to do it
• How are we going to do it
• What is the timeline we have to achieve this
• Do we have the time/money/resource to see this through to fruition

After going through this thought exercise, it will become very obvious that it is impossible to want to setup a new sales pipeline, get ranked on Google search results first page for a set of keywords, put in a chatbot, automate the contact us page response when someone submits an enquiry, and do everything all at once. Haphazardly going down the list of what’s available on HubSpot to use, is as good as trying to add every single ingredient in the kitchen pantry to the frying pan, wishing that a good dish will come out.

I had a private education school who had to move everything fully remote because of Covid19. They came to me asking me how do we move their sales team to be completely online and available via live chat. They wanted the sales team to be available and accessible to their prospective students who will be ‘visiting’ their virtual open house during a specific time/date of the event. We walked through the logic of setting up a chatbot that had qualifying questions in order to assign the conversations to specific schools and their admissions/program managers in charge of that school whether it was engineering, business or the like. This example checked the box in all the points I listed above. They knew this was going to move the needle for the school (continue to operate in a new normal), they came up with a plan of what they were going to do (virtual open house with live chat), how they were going to do (staff their sales team on the live chat during the virtual open house), and the timeline to achieve it (get all this tested and setup prior to the date of the virtual open house).

As their Customer Success Manager, I probably would not have thought of such a brilliant idea for a school to move their physical open house to an online event. However, I could provide my expertise on HubSpot to help them achieve exactly what they desired. This was such a success for them that they went on to host more of such virtual open houses, and even extended it to career fairs, with the same modus operandi.

3. Agreeing on the key metrics for measuring success

I have a very interesting relationship with this one specific client. For the last 2 years, I have engaged in 2 renewal conversations with them. Every year, they tell me that they are unhappy with the results that they achieve on HubSpot, and want to re-negotiate on the price / discount (if any) for the next renewal. However, for the rest of time outside of renewal, this client hardly brings up the topic of ‘not meeting key metrics’ during our regular strategy calls. For some reason though, even though he is clearly ‘unhappy’ with the results, he continues to renew with HubSpot, twice now. In my perspective, HubSpot must be producing some tangible business impact that the cost of investment is less than the economic benefits that they are getting. Over time, I learnt that this client’s key metrics are surprisingly straightforward. They want to attract leads, and close sales. They had targets the marketing and sales teams worked on day on day, month on month.

When they came to me with the problem that sales have fallen (not surprising, given the current economic situation), they wanted to understand how other companies are adopting new strategies to cope in order to not have sales go to zero. We went through specific strategies on how to do inbound sales (rather than cold calling), how to handle sales objections, how to insert videos in their sales emails, all in the hope of increasing the conversion of deals to closed won. The measure of success was clearly defined, we need to increase the number of deals being created, and we need to be able to close these deals successfully. Internally, they were clearly aligned that the purpose of HubSpot was to assist the marketing and sales teams in driving more leads, and closing more deals. Because they are data-driven, it is so much easier to work with them to diagnose a specific area we could work on together because they can tell me exactly what is not up to expectation and we can work on changing that.

When clients share with me their SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, with a Timeline) goals, as a Customer Success Manager, I can easily build reports on HubSpot in their account to know if they are on track or off track, and propose a specific set of recommendations based on what they are already using / not using. This sounds simple enough, but I can count with a single hand the number of clients who actively keep me updated on their business goals, and how hard it is for me to know what’s good/bad when I look at everything that’s going on in the account. i.e. a 40% open rate on an email campaign may be astronomical for client A but business as usual for client B. It makes a world of difference for me when I can interpret what the 40% open rate means, and consequentially, the kinds of recommendations I could share to help the client be more successful. The most successful ones tell me exactly what they are, so I don’t have to try to guess the interpretation of the data set I’m looking at.

4. Defining the key solutions and process changes

I have a client based in Thailand I had worked with closely for 2 major projects. One is the building of an e-commerce site to be integrated with HubSpot, and the other is the setting up of custom events tracking to better optimise their home page. They are in the business of selling gold. In order to reach a new market, they wanted to make it easy and accessible for the younger demographic in Thailand to be able to purchase small amounts of gold, all in the comfort of their homes, on their mobile.

It was a clear business objective of expanding into a new target market, and the key solution was to develop an e-commerce website to support that. Internally, they also needed to setup logistics operations to be able to fulfil orders that came in through the website. It was no mean feat and we worked on this for almost a year before both the e-commerce website went live, and the integration with HubSpot was completed.

As it was the first time my client is running an e-commerce website, I shared with them some key automation best practices they needed to have, which were implemented very quickly. The must-haves like when someone adds to cart, but never completes the purchase, it’d trigger an email to be sent with “Hey, did you forget to check this out?”.

Unlike the traditional retail way of purchasing gold, the attention span of a millennial was comparatively shorter. We needed to make sure the entire experience from browsing, enquiring to checking out was responsive, seamless, and easy. With custom events tracking, we could also determine which products to feature on the homepage that drove the highest click throughs and sales for the company.

My client was the one in the driver’s seat, and all I was doing was giving a little advice here and there when she started veering off or become uncertain where to turn next. But otherwise, she had a very clear idea what the key solutions were, what needed to change internally, and how her team can support her implementation throughout.

I hope this gives you a clearer understanding of what makes the most successful HubSpot users (and their companies). As you can tell, I did not spend a lot of time talking about the specific features or tools that needed using. Afterall, HubSpot’s suite of tools is a means to an end, it is not the goal. i.e. Implementing an email marketing campaign is not the goal, it is engaging with prospects to convert them into a measurable, and quantifiable way such as revenue being generated, from the efforts of a marketing campaign that is the goal.

As a bonus tip, our Pricing strategy team has actually put some thought into organising the way the features are being sold on our pricing page:

All the blue headers that I have boxed up in red are key solutions that could be a match to an organisation’s primary business objective. Underneath those key solutions, we tell you which are the best opportunities (features) you can leverage on to drive an improvement. While we are on this, we have even come up with Project templates for each of these goals:

Say you are interested in capturing and converting leads, some of the tools available to you are landing pages, ad management, live chat, chatbot, and forms (as stated in the pricing page). Then we come up with a step-by-step guide on how you can formulate a strategy plan to gather the right team, resources, and set a timeline to implement it through the Marketing > Planning & Strategy > Project, where you can search for Project Templates based on each goal (found on the pricing page).

Leveraging on the right resources

Finally, the most successful HubSpot users also know who and when to reach out to the right resource available to them at HubSpot. I manage mostly clients who purchase the Professional and upwards subscription tiers. These clients get access to book regular strategy calls with me to ensure that they are able to get the most value from their subscription. They regularly use our Support team (available via the “Help” button at the bottom right when you login to HubSpot), in conjunction with taking courses on the Academy. Sometimes when they need to purchase more HubSpot products, they get in touch with their original sales rep. At HubSpot we have plenty of stakeholders rooting for the success of our users, you need to know who/when to reach out to.

Scaling success

These are the same users who after leaving their current organisation, start/join the next one, and advocate for their new company to purchase HubSpot (if they are not already on it). These are also the same users who are drivers of change, roll their sleeves up and are not afraid to get their hands dirty. They learn the most (and I along with them), and are also the most successful ones I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Wherever they go, like the Midas’ touch, they will bring their organisation they work with, to the next level.