4min
We know that cost pressures have never bitten harder, and what you pay for your CRM, sales and marketing software can easily creep up and up until you are at a point where you wonder whether you are getting any value from it in the first place.
Here are the five areas that create the most enormous waste and a couple of ideas to cut down on it too.
Data
The first thing I learned in Computer Science (many) years ago was that if you put Garbage In you get Garbage Out (GI=GO). And this is especially true of your CRM. Missing or incomplete data, out-of-date and duplicated data, is all a recipe for poor results.
Your segmentations will be inaccurate, and your email campaigns will not provide the results you want. As soon as people fail to get the desired result from a tool, they look to another one. Hence, sticking to keeping their data in ‘outlook’ for instance, instead of with the ‘incorrect’ data in the CRM.
Salespeople not using the CRM and taking shortcuts
And poor data contributes to the number one issue facing CRM implementations. A lack of user adoption is the root of all evil here, as salespeople take shortcuts and workarounds to get where they want to go.
I’m not sure that’s worse, people not using the CRM properly or not using it all at all, but both issues are a massive waste of the potential of your CRM.
A CRM is designed to enable your teams to work faster and more efficiently and to provide the leadership of the organisation with insight into the business’s functional performance.
If you have a major part of the organisation not using your CRM, it quickly becomes a pointless exercise and an expensive waste of money.
Marketing channels not integrated
HubSpot is a true market leader in terms of marketing automation and analytics.
It has the enormous benefit of being able to track and attribute results from your marketing efforts down to an individual contact and the money they spend in actual pounds and pence. This is probably the biggest reason you should be looking to HubSpot to run your marketing through, yet so many simply don’t connect everything up.
Having everything connected is what allows HubSpot to measure your entire customer journey from start to finish, and pinpoint exactly what works and what doesn’t – to the contact level.
The following channels could be (should be) connected to your HubSpot platform:
- Advertising,
- Email,
- Landing and other web pages,
- Blogs,
- SEO,
- Website forms,
- Calls to Action
- Organic social media.
If you are not doing this, you are wasting the money you are spending on the awesome Marketing Hub and should save it instead.
If you are not yet using Marketing Hub, there is every chance it will save you a boatload of wasted cash on marketing you don’t need.
Using other point solutions
Today HubSpot is a fully functional business platform. That means you can run many aspects of your business through it. Paying for HubSpot and other software to do the things HubSpot can do for you could be wasting a valuable budget on things you don’t need.
As well as the obvious tools like social media management and email marketing tools, these days HubSpot also comes with:
Prospecting tools for sales
Proposal software
Invoicing tools
Payment tools
Live chat
Chatbots
Knowledge bases (connected to Live Chat)
Ticket pipelines
Survey tools for NPS, customer satisfaction and customer effort
A website building CMS
Data hygiene tools
Security dashboards
Extremely powerful analytics and dashboard functionality
There may be a good reason for using a so-called ‘point solution’ over the HubSpot version of a tool you use, but you need to be careful that reason is stronger than the cost saving you could make by getting rid of stuff added to the tech stack that HubSpot can already do.
And of course, if you do need these tools for the extra functionality you get from a specialist bit of kit, make sure you aren’t including it in your HubSpot subscription AND paying a separate subscription for it too.
Not making use of the analytics
Perhaps the biggest waste of money is in not making use of the analytics in HubSpot and learning exactly what return on investment you are getting from your sales, marketing, and customer service efforts.
There is so much powerful insight built into HubSpot it's not funny! Single and multiple object custom reporting can be set up if not already available ‘out of the box’ for almost any kind of report you can think of. And just looking at the hundreds of reports available in the library will I’m sure, prompt the use of a few more too.
If it’s not measured, it’s not managed. And if you are not measuring your use of HubSpot, you are most likely pouring money down the drain.
The Solution
It’s really easy to spec a software solution. Especially if the salesperson is pointing out the awesome power of what you are buying. But in the cold light of day, you soon realise buying it is the easy bit. Using it and getting your money’s worth is a lot harder.
Here are our tips for getting the most out of the platform.
- Make sure you are not overspending on software you don’t need.
- Give management of the system to someone who can keep it in good order and deliver on the requirements of the teams using it. Hire someone if you have to.
- Keep that data clean!
- Work from the platform, especially at reporting time. There is no point having HubSpot and still getting people to fill our spreadsheets.
- On balance, the best-trained teams win. Constantly teach people what you want from them and how HubSpot can support that effort.
Take our free audit
If you are concerned that you might be overspending, get in touch and we’ll work with you to identify savings you could make, or indeed areas where the platform can be put to better use.
Teach your people to fish
Our passion is in teaching you and your teams to use HubSpot properly, and to make sure you are not getting ripped off by getting every ounce of value you can from the platform.
We don’t believe you can abdicate responsibility for the work you do or the platform you use, but equally, no one can be expected to spontaneously understand what these days is powerful and sophisticated technology.
We believe you need a partner by your side to show you how to do this stuff and set you up on the road to self-sufficiency, meaning you’ll no longer have to rely on expensive third parties to do the work for you.
