In 2010 you won because of your product, in 2020 you win because of your customer experience. The world of B2B selling has changed, and your business strategy needs to adapt along with it.
The buying process starts much earlier than the first phone call or email. Today, 84% of B2B buyers start their buying process with a referral. Because of that, your customer needs to be at the center of your entire business. Without delivering a consistently great customer experience, you can kiss those referrals goodbye.
But you have multiple teams, dozens of tools, thousands of customer touchpoints, and new challenges every day. How can you possibly keep tabs on all of this noise?
This reality demonstrates the importance of using more than software to build your business and manage your customers’ experience — today, software sitting in siloes alone doesn’t cut it. Beyond that, it’s also helpful to have an extra set of hands to fill in the gaps of your customer experience that your team might be missing.
Instead, sales teams can integrate their software with apps and use service providers to tackle business needs alongside with you. Juggling leads, prospects, and customers through a disjointed system will only cause things to fall through the cracks.
The good news is that you don’t have to go it alone. A growing ecosystem of tools and services will help you create the experience you want to provide for your prospects.
Look into service providers, partners, and consultants
Most sales reps have had the experience of wrestling with clunky software that seems to get in the way of selling, instead of helping them sell. When your tools are working against you, it’s impossible to focus on the prospect in front of you.
Here is just one way a service providers (typically an external business who is an expert in the help you need) can help. Because they’re equipped with specialized knowledge and tons of relevant experience, they can help build a workflow that gets deals closed. You can use a trusted partner to support your business strategy and bring in the right combination of services and technologies to build out a complete and delightful end-to-end customer experience.
Morgan Jacobson, Senior Manager of Sales Productivity and Enablement at HubSpot sees the growth customers achieve when they tap into the HubSpot service partner community for assistance; “Having an ecosystem that can provide things like hands-on services, data integration and in-app experiences with non-HubSpot products means our customers can get more value out of the tools we provide.”
From technical implementation to coaching teams on the latest selling methodologies to helping crystalize your overall growth strategy, partners and consultants extend the limits of what your team is capable of.
Explore an app marketplace
Think of your CRM as a KitchenAid mixer. By itself, it’s really helpful. But it really shines when you connect other tools to it as well. Only by using all of the attachments available can you create a full banquet feast.
But not all CRMs integrate with all the tools you need. In fact, 17% of salespeople cite a lack of integration with other tools as the biggest challenge in using their existing CRM. And this has big implications on your team efficiency: 27% of salespeople are spending an hour or more on manual data entry each day.
At least 90% of companies use two or more lead enrichment tools to learn more about their prospects. Pulling that information into your sales dashboard builds a complete picture of who your customer is, along with every interaction they’ve had with your brand. This creates more meaningful conversations.
Access to an app marketplace means you can integrate all of the tools you use in one place. That gives your sales team a full dashboard of prospecting information alongside customer interaction history. For example, you can send out contracts for signatures and collect detailed customer feedback about their needs.
Not only can you integrate the tools you already love, but you can also discover new ones. No single piece of software can do everything your business needs to succeed. A robust app marketplace is an opportunity to customize your tech stack.
Get a single system of record
Most companies have multiple places where data is kept. There are conversations stored in the help desk, contact information manually entered in the CRM and valuable lead information collected in third-party survey tools. A single system of record (usually a CRM) can help bring all of this information together so you can use it to better serve the customer.
Ceros, a cloud-based interactive content creation platform, migrated their separate sales and marketing platforms into HubSpot and were surprised at how big of a difference it makes to their team efficiency. Sales and Marketing can now collaborate better because they work from the same data.
“You’re dealing with one contact record,” says Matthew Wellschlager, VP of Marketing, “There are no sync issues, no messing around with the APIs, no deciding which system is the master and which system can overwrite data in the other system. This has empowered us to stop wasting time on integration challenges and focus on getting the process right."
Having one overview of the customer experience also helps with reporting and spotting opportunities to improve. At FlexMR, the sales team uses HubSpot CRM. They have access to a considerable amount of lead information. “Everything is collected in the timeline,” shares Christopher Martin, Digital Marketing Manager, “which allows the salesperson to have much warmer discussions with the potential client.”
When you pull everything into a single system of record you can start to follow your customer through their journey - a critical part of executing the customer experience you want to provide.
It’s All About the Ecosystem
As your business scales, things become more complex, and you need more than a single piece of software to manage your sales process.
Use a trusted partner who can serve as the backbone of your business strategy and bring in the right combination of services and technologies to build out a complete and delightful sales workflow. When you’ve built a strong foundation to grow on, the experience becomes better for your sales reps and your customer!
More than just software, HubSpot is an ecosystem of professionals ready to create custom strategies, solutions, and software for your business. You already know how to grow better — and with the HubSpot ecosystem, you don’t have to grow it alone. Check out our App Marketplace and Solutions Directory to earn more about the HubSpot ecosystem.
