Growth spurts are great when your height gets marked on the doorframe. The thing is, you realize your newfound size can be hard to manage. You end up getting in the way of people and objects around you that were never that close before. You struggle to keep up with yourself, much less everything going on around you. The awkwardness of adolescence illustrates the struggles that scaling businesses face when managing their internal operations. We haven’t even started with how weird that must be for their clients.
HubSpot’s Operations Hub minimizes the growing pains often felt by scaling companies. When company data is centralized and organized in one common place and can be pulled from one common source, it becomes a lot easier to create growth strategies, find new growth opportunities, and make decisions for the benefit of your company and your clients.
Minimize the Growing Pains of Scaling Your Business with HubSpot’s Operations Hub
The more prepared you can be for potential challenges, the better. To be fully prepared, you’ll obviously have a lot of questions:
As you enter the new market level, are the systems you had in place for when your business was smaller still efficient enough? Productive enough? Competitive enough? Will there be an impact on team productivity and/or company culture? How will your customer experience change? Will costs increase faster than revenue? Since you can expect setbacks in the scaling process, how will your growing number of customers feel about your brand – could your brand reputation suffer? What is the brand reputation recovery plan? Can we avoid those setbacks in the first place? How am I supposed to know all of this in the first place?
There are three main ways to positively grow your business without losing control of that process: unify your data, streamline your work processes, and have a clear growth strategy. HubSpot’s Operations Hub can help you in all three ways. Let’s dig a little deeper into what each of these processes mean and how they can work for your company.
HubSpot’s Operations Hub Unifies Your Data
HubSpot’s Operations Hub can help you unify your data without intruding on current processes. Let’s say your marketing team, sales team, and services team have been on different platforms for years and everyone in those departments is well-trained and comfortable with using those platforms. The last thing anyone wants to hear is: “Everyone, all departments are now moving to x platform. Prepare to be assimilated.” Operations Hub lets you avoid becoming public enemy number one. How?
All supported data from all supported sources can be synced to, sanitized in, and synced back out through Operations Hub to all of the original sources. Let’s say that the marketing team has 100 contacts, the sales team has 70 contacts, and the services team has 30 contacts, all on their individual platforms. You already know you don’t have a total of 200 contacts because one specific client may have separate records in each of the marketing, sales and services platforms. When all of that data is brought into Operations Hub, it can be compared, consolidated, and then synced back. If there are a total of 180 records at the end of this data consolidation process, all of the original platforms will have those 180 records. All you would need to do afterwards is communicate a data entry standard to the rest of the company so that future records will match.
HubSpot’s Operations Hub Streamlines Your Work Processes
When we say “streamline,” we’re talking productivity – specifically using automation to perform tasks that would be unproductive for an employee to handle. The question is, how do you streamline without disrupting the processes you already have in place.
Let’s say a site visitor fills out a contact form. The marketing department has a workflow that emails the visitor, confirming their information and establishing a follow-up. At the same time, someone else calls in because they’re interested in a product. The sales team has a workflow that marks them as a qualified lead and assigns a sales rep to them. A third person calls because they’re having a problem. The services team has a workflow that creates a ticket, emails a copy of the ticket to the client, assigns a service rep, and sets a priority. In this example, the workflow automation platforms that each department uses are different, but all are used efficiently by well-trained and capable employees. The thought of introducing Operations Hub may sound like you’d be complicating the situation by adding to the stack of platforms you already have, but in this type of situation, Operations Hub is actually a major asset.
Let’s revisit this example with Operations Hub in the picture, which means that all of your company data is now centralized and organized into the HubSpot CRM. When a site visitor fills out a form, your marketing department has two options:
- Store the contact information in the original system (which will trigger the marketing department’s existing workflow) and let Operations Hub sync the contact information to all platforms within five minutes; or,
- Store the contact information in HubSpot and let Operations Hub trigger the marketing department’s workflow in the original system, and let Operations Hub sync the contact information to all platforms.
The sales and service departments would have these options as well.
All of the supported platforms throughout the company will have freshly synced, up-to-date contact information. Your employees can use the workflow and data management system they have always known and are good at using. Your customer experience will improve because your contact data will be unified across all departments. If a department uses a system that isn’t supported by HubSpot, you can use webhooks (a secure online method of passing information) to pull and sync data. Since Operations Hub links all of your systems together, you minimize disruption, maximize productivity, improve the customer experience, and improve communication and information sharing between your different teams.
HubSpot’s Operations Hub Paves the Way for Clear Growth Strategy
After cleaning up and unifying your data, you realize you have 180 contacts instead of 200. After automating work processes and having your workflow platforms work together, you’ve improved communication, information sharing, and productivity within the company, and your customer experience has improved. How can your cleaned-up data help you plan for your next growth spurt?
Real information helps you set realistic growth expectations and realistic company goals. When you analyze your processes, you might learn new ways to automate. This may free up work hours, allow your company to better care for clients, and reduce overhead. If the stories behind your numbers tell you that gaining 50 new contacts and 5 new clients is a realistic possibility, you might plan for 70 new contacts and 8 new clients to make sure you’re covered. As you get to know these new contacts and clients, you can uncover opportunities to provide new services or products, which can both improve your brand reputation and make your company more profitable. When you have more accurate data, your perspective will be more accurate as well, which will make your strategies and decisions more effective.
Stabilize Your Growth Process with HubSpot’s Operations Hub
As your business grows, HubSpot Operations Hub gives you more stability. You can unify your data, streamline your work processes, and create a clear growth strategy. Most importantly, you can have a clear picture of where your business stands and the direction it is headed, and you can prepare for any challenges that may lie ahead. When all of your data is in one place, the departments within your business can work together during the growth process instead of producing at different rates.
Many scaling businesses with major hopes and dreams ultimately fail because they weren’t properly prepared to handle the growth process. By making Operations Hub a part of your internal structure, you can turn the romance of growing your company into actual growth and progress.
