HubSpot enables marketing, sales, and service teams to collaborate together... all in one place. The key to organizational efficiency for many VARs, IT Resellers, and Solution Providers is keeping communication open and consistent between sales, marketing, service, and operations. Unifying your entire team in one CRM, marketing, quoting, and ticketing tool may be the answer to your prayers. 

When we discuss new client engagements, one of the first things I often ask is about the technology in play for the organization. If a client is looking at HubSpot, it is usually because they have several marketing tools, no automation, and a lot of headaches. Regardless of where the conversation starts; sales, marketing, and service teams tend to have the same efficiency and collaboration challenges. Enter HubSpot: a true business enablement tool.

1. Reporting, What Reporting?

You have no confidence in your reporting. Forecasting is a shot in the dark, sales and marketing alignment is impossible to measure because your lead generation funnel is shaky at best, and a soup-to-nuts marketing campaign report is a figment of your imagination.

2. Contacts Everywhere

Marketing has contacts in an email tool, sales have contacts in Salesforce or ConnectWise, and service is ticketing from ConnectWise or Autotask. Data is out of date; historical customer data is impossible to find. There is no practical way to track customer satisfaction or create cross-sell campaigns to promote continued customer engagements.

3. Too Many Manual Processes

Your Challenge: "We do so many events, but we are manually creating emails, trying to remember to send them. Keeping track of registration is tough because we have different systems capturing data."

4. Communications are Inconsistent

Sales are prospecting. Inside sales are calling, and marketing has a newsletter they send out every month. Communication is key to engagement; consistent communication is critical to success, but what you say, when you say it, and how often you're talking to versus bothering people is necessary to understand, watch, and report on. The marketing and sales alignment in sales and marketing are both talking to your community, but neither department knows when and about what. It reminds me of a classic Abbott and Costello comedy skit: Who's on First.

5. Service Ticketing Isn't Integrated with Sales & Marketing.

Service feels like they are on an island by themselves because we only talk about tickets for management services and break-fix engagements when something is wrong. Proactively automation to sales and marketing to alert to problems, delays, or potentially catastrophic impacts requires a phone tree and several meetings to discuss who will handle what.

6. Your Numbers Don't Match (a big and frustrating topic for my CEO clients)

Nothing is more frustrating, and a bit embarrassing in an executive meeting than when marketing says they generated 15 sales qualified leads. The counterpart sales leaders send a snide eye and mumbles; they'll have to check with the team on the status. Marketing gets annoyed that sales are getting another get-out-of-jail-free card, and sales are annoyed because they think marketing can't spell "Sales Qualified Lead." (You may think this is a harsh picture, but if you are a sales or marketing leader in the IT reseller space... be honest, without the right automation tool, you know this is true.)

Now that you can calm yourself a bit and realize you are not alone in your struggles, HubSpot is probably an excellent platform for you. MarketDesign can help you onboard, optimize, and mitigate the challenges you're facing.

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