In today's rapidly changing and fiercely competitive business environment, the success of a company heavily relies on its capacity to efficiently connect and captivate its target audience. Sales and marketing play a vital role in driving success for businesses, as they shape how customers perceive a brand and directly impact revenue generation. However, many businesses still struggle with disorganized, disconnected, and inefficient sales and marketing processes. The consequences of not implementing a comprehensive sales and marketing system can be significant, including missed opportunities, subpar customer experiences, stagnant growth, and declining profitability.
In this blog, we will delve into the significant challenges that businesses face when they lack a strong sales and marketing system. We will explore how these obstacles can hinder their potential for success and growth. Ultimately, we will highlight the importance of adopting a well-integrated system like HubSpot Sales and Marketing for modern businesses. By the end of this exploration, you will gain a clear understanding of the transformative power of a unified sales and marketing approach and how it can empower your business to thrive in today's ever-evolving marketplace.
What is HubSpot?
In addition to being an inbound marketing and sales platform, HubSpot CRM offers a wide range of features to assist businesses in website development, lead management, and sales and marketing tracking. With its cloud-based platform, all company data is synced across devices, providing seamless access for employees.
It's worth noting that HubSpot encompasses six core products: marketing, sales, customer service, content management, operations, and commerce. Each of these products is connected to the same CRM database, providing valuable insights into the customer journey. When used together, these products create a powerful synergy.
HubSpot also offers integrations with other software tools such as Zendesk, Microsoft, and Azure. The Zendesk integration allows users to conveniently view ticketing information within a customer's profile on HubSpot. Microsoft integration enables users to sign in with their Microsoft account and control database access. Azure integration allows users to connect with Azure AD for single sign-ins.
The seamless integration of HubSpot CRM with other tools and its comprehensive range of features make it an invaluable asset for businesses looking to align their sales and marketing strategies.
Importance of aligning Sales and Marketing strategy
Aligning sales and marketing strategies is crucial for businesses to achieve their goals. It helps to ensure that both teams are working towards the same objectives, which can lead to increased efficiency, better understanding of target markets, improved customer experience, and ultimately, increased revenue growth and profits.
HubSpot is a powerful tool that can help businesses align their sales and marketing strategies. It provides a platform for both teams to work together seamlessly, with features such as lead tracking, lead nurturing, and analytics. By using HubSpot, businesses can gain valuable insights into their customers’ behavior and preferences, which can help them tailor their marketing and sales strategies accordingly. HubSpot plays a crucial role in this by providing a platform for both teams to work together effectively and efficiently.
Key Features of HubSpot CRM
HubSpot is a free CRM software that encompasses various tools for everyone. HubSpot’s top CRM features are pipeline management, automated activity logs, live chat and many more. Businesses can seamlessly connect their data, teams and customer data all in one CRM platform that scales with their business. Some of the HubSpot CRM for sales include:
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CRM Database: Easily store and manage all your customers’ data in one place. There is no limit to the number of contacts you can store in the database. This feature allows businesses to save time and prevents the need to search for contact data again and again. With this CRM database, users can insert information such as customer names, titles, email addresses. View past interactions, view the medium through which leads come through, view customer orders and amount they spent and more.
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Customisable Dashboard: HubSpot’s customisable dashboard allows users to easily customise their dashboard to meet their reporting expectations and to easily analyse business performance. Users can filter data by setting specific data range, showcase pipelines and more. In addition to that, HubSpot has a dashboard template library which provides pre-built dashboards for common use cases. Users can customise the look and feel of the dashboard to match their requirements.
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Outlook integration: HubSpot Sales CRM and Outlook integration allows users to track and record email activities for every email sent to a customer. This feature enables businesses to keep track of customer interactions and assists businesses to better understand your customers’ needs. The integration also records deals made and reminds users to take action.
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Reporting and Analytics: Empower your team to create customised reporting dashboards for an entire business, keep private data secure with advanced reporting permissions and monitor your team’s sales activities. With flexible dashboards, users can combine multiple reports to help everyone view metrics that matter through a single platform without the need to switch from one spreadsheet to another.
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Invoice and quotation: Easily create invoices to collect digital payments through the HubSpot payment tool or to track payments made outside of HubSpot. To create an invoice, super admins and users with invoice object permissions can create an invoice directly from a contact, company deal or quote record, or from the invoices index page. This invoice and quotation tools enable sales team to seamlessly build and send customised quotes to all customers using connected CRM data.
Sales use cases with HubSpot CRM
At VLAN Asia, we use HubSpot CRM for our reporting. Let’s look at a real-life example of a Customer Success Manager using HubSpot Sales CRM.
A customer success manager would leverage HubSpot to streamline and enhance customer relationship management. HubSpot serves as an invaluable tool for managing customer interactions and ensuring their satisfaction. Here are the key aspects of how a customer success manager would use HubSpot in my role:
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Store Deals as Records in HubSpot: Centralize all customer interactions by recording deals as HubSpot records, providing a 360-degree view of each customer's journey.
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Set Follow-Up Reminders: Leverage HubSpot to establish to-do tasks and reminders, guaranteeing punctual follow-ups and preventing oversights in product subscription renewals, optimising the customer experience.
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Custom Reporting: Leverage HubSpot's data to create custom reports, extracting valuable insights on deals' size, information, and more tailored to the management's preferences.
- Comprehensive Dashboards: Build user-friendly dashboards that visualise the most relevant data, providing a quick, at-a-glance overview for management to make informed decisions.
By implementing these practices in conjunction with HubSpot, we not only ensure a more efficient customer success workflow but also drive better customer satisfaction and engagement, ultimately contributing to our marketing team's overall success.
What is HubSpot CMS?
HubSpot CMS or Content Management Software is a flexible tool made for marketers, powerful for developers and provides your customers a personalised. It is a tool designed to help businesses create and manage their website, blogs and other online content effectively. HubSpot CMS is a broader HubSpot ecosystem that includes tools for marketing, sales and CRM.
Key Features of HubSpot CMS
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Website Theme & Templates: HubSpot’s CMS offers a wide range of pre-built website themes that can be customized to match your brand with just a few clicks. You can also use the drag-and-drop editor to create your own custom modules and stylesheets.
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Web Hosting: HubSpot’s CMS provides free, fully managed hosting that is optimized for speed, reliability, and security. This includes 99.95% uptime, SSL, global CDN, web application firewall, 24/7 security monitoring, and more.
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Content Creation (Blog maker): HubSpot’s CMS includes a free blog maker that allows you to create and publish engaging content using built-in SEO recommendations. You can also use AI blog writing tools to generate high-quality content in seconds.
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Multi-Language: With HubSpot’s CMS, users can create multi-language variations of their content that enable the end-user to view the content in the language with which they are most comfortable. HubSpot sets up several facets of a multi-language website automatically, but there are also a few steps developers should take to ensure their website is multi-language ready.
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File Manager: The HubSpot File Manager can be used to store and serve files for your website.
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Content Staging: Content Staging allows web site creators to update the design and content of pages by staging the changes. These staged changes can then be published to your production site.
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SEO Advisor and Recommendation: HubSpot’s CMS includes an SEO Advisor that provides actionable recommendations for optimizing your website’s SEO performance. This includes suggestions for improving page titles, meta descriptions, header tags, and more.
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Fully Integration CRM: HubSpot’s CMS is fully integrated with its world-class CRM platform, which allows you to manage your contacts, deals, and marketing campaigns all in one place.
Use cases with HubSpot CMS
A marketing executive in VLAN Asia would normally use HubSpot for various purposes but the core focus may be content creation, web hosting and web management, content staging and SEO advisor. Let’s look at some examples:
- Content Creation (Blog Maker): HubSpot’s CMS offers a free blog maker that allows me to create and publish engaging content using built-in SEO recommendations. I can also use AI blog writing tools to generate high-quality content in seconds. This feature has been incredibly helpful in creating content that resonates with our target audience.
- Web hosting and web management
- Content staging
- SEO Advisor and Recommendation
The Synergy between HubSpot CRM and CMS
HubSpot’s Content Management System (CMS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are two powerful tools that can work together to help businesses grow and succeed.
A CMS is a software tool used for building and managing a website, while a CRM is used to track how every lead and customer interacts with your online business. By integrating these two tools, businesses can create a seamless customer experience, launch marketing campaigns, capture leads, and follow up with them all in one platform.
HubSpot’s CMS and CRM are natively integrated, which means that building a website with HubSpot’s content management tools gives you access to all the features included with HubSpot’s CRM platform. This allows you to easily surface data from any CRM object on your site to match your content with your business processes.
By using both a CMS and a CRM, businesses can streamline their workflows, improve their customer experience, and ultimately grow their business. If you’re interested in learning more about how to use both tools for your online business, check out HubSpot’s blog post on the topic.
HubSpot is a powerful platform that offers a range of tools for businesses to streamline their workflows, improve their customer experience and ultimately grow their business. By integrating HubSpot's CMS and CRM, businesses can create seamless customer experience, launch marketing marketing campaigns, capture leads and follow up with them all in one platform.
Contact us today to learn more about how VLAN Asia can help streamline your sales and marketing.
