There’s a new sheriff in town — HubSpot’s Operations Hub. In this article, we unpack how this software solution helps you build better systems that lead to faster scaling.
HubSpot Operations Hub - A new dawn for business process optimization
HubSpot has recently released its Operations Hub — and that’s a big deal.
As companies scale, their departments tend to buy whatever digital tools and systems they need to do their jobs. This leads to inefficient, non-standard business processes and siloed operations (more on that later). Teams are also challenged by the impermanence of their systems — they need the right systems to scale but if you scale too quickly, you outgrow or even break your systems.
Instead of bashing together bits of software, HubSpot’s Operations Hub gives you a central CRM that connects all your apps, automates business processes, and cleans your customer data. This turns your operations into a unified and beautifully humming machine.
More importantly, you’ll have a clear and analysable data stream to inform your decision-making.
Operations Hub’s features also scale alongside your business, providing you with a permanent system. Your time can then be better spent optimising your processes, instead of searching for tools that can match your needs.
Before we dive into how HubSpot Operations Hub can benefit your operations teams, let’s talk about how HubSpot empowers you to eliminate siloed business processes.
How silos threaten your business
In this Forbes article, Devo chairman Walter Scott writes that siloed data “prevents collaboration necessary to ensure competitiveness.” But what does it mean to be siloed?
From an information-sharing standpoint, a silo mentality is an unwillingness to share knowledge with other departments. This is terrible for your business.
In the worst-case scenario, siloed organisations devolve into departmental turf wars. But as research published in the Harvard Business Review shows, non-siloed companies add more value, earn more and innovate faster. The lesson from this is clear — it doesn’t matter how tall you can build your silo because it doesn’t benefit the overall business.
By bringing separate systems and data streams under one roof, Operations Hub is the antidote to a siloed workplace. Better yet, organisations that make full use of the HubSpot ecosystem, including the Marketing, Sales, CMS, and Service Hubs, will have greater levels of integration and data consistency across their systems.
Business Sally’s operational challenges
Let’s use an example to illustrate how siloed departments and unoptimised business processes can impact a business. Picture an Operations Manager named Business Sally. Sally works at a travel company offering bespoke safari adventures.
Despite an unfavourable market, her company’s innovative approach to travel is winning them customers and they’re growing rapidly. Normally, she’s proud to work there, but she’s beginning to feel overwhelmed because of a problem she recently picked up on:
Due to a luggage mix-up, one of their influencer clients is extremely dissatisfied with her safari experience. This influencer vented to one of Sally’s sales representatives on a post-trip call.
Unlike the sales team, the marketing team doesn’t know about their client’s dissatisfaction. Now they’ve gone and sent this influencer an offensively tone-deaf email asking for a testimonial. Instead of getting a glowing review, this influencer is complaining about the service she received.
This could have been avoided if the sales and marketing teams were better aligned through a CRM system.
This isn’t the first time that a lack of business processes and siloed departments has let Sally down. She runs many aspects of the business from a dizzying array of spreadsheets that are scattered across departmental Google Drives. The data isn’t always where it needs to be and when it is there, it’s not always up to date with the latest developments.
Another problem is that Sally's company uses over 60 different digital tools across its departments for tasks that range from invoicing and SEO to lead capture and website analytics.
And that’s on the low side.
Many companies use over 100 apps to operate their business, and even then these apps don’t fully satisfy their use cases. That’s a mind-bogglingly high number of apps when compared to HubSpot, with its five comprehensive and tightly integrated software offerings.
How you can use HubSpot Operations Hub to optimise your business processes
HubSpot Operations Hub is tailored to overcome many of Business Sally’s challenges. Of course, HubSpot isn’t the only software solution on the market. But we’re seeing that more and more people are choosing HubSpot over its competitors due to its powerful, easy-to-learn toolset.
Now let’s look at how Operations Hub can optimise your business:
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Data syncing — Operations Hub eliminates data silos by syncing your apps. To get 360-degree sightlines of your business, you only need to look in one place. With easy access to all your real-time data, you’ll boost the accuracy of your decision-making.
Returning to the example of Business Sally, Operations Hub will help her to align activities and data, ensuring that her marketing and sales teams can deliver the right messages to the right people. By automatically syncing company data, Sally can move from greasing the operational wheels to using her know-how to accelerate business growth.
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Automated data cleaning and quality control — While being data-driven is critical to building a successful business, this doesn’t hold if your data is as clear as mud. This is, in essence, “dirty data”.
Dirty data includes data that is duplicated, inconsistent, incorrect, outdated, or even useless. And it costs you a lot of money — the global banking industry loses over $400 billion a year due to dirty data. Finding dirty data can be difficult and time-consuming, especially as our minds weren’t built to trawl through rows of information to find errors. It can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Fortunately, HubSpot Operations Hub is built to find needles in haystacks. The platform will automatically clean dirty data, freeing you up for higher-value work. With clean data, you’ll be able to make operational decisions with confidence and your customer-facing teams can more accurately personalise their approach, leading to a more satisfying customer experience
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Programmable automation — How flexible are your workflows and business processes? HubSpot Operations Hub lets you add code so that powerful automation software can fit your business processes. Use cases include creating custom workflow bots, automating your renewal management, and scoring your leads according to properties that you define. This customizability empowers you to automate nearly every operation and it makes it easy to adopt new procedures or adapt to your customers.
By standardising tasks, HubSpot Operations Hub’s automation tools drive reliable performance while reducing the time needed to complete each job. And the workflows that their software builds will prioritise tasks and then tell your teams what to do and when to do it. You can also improve efficiency as the dashboard lets you quickly view and manage asset permissions, task status, and team availability. As a bonus - workflow extensions trigger actions in third-party systems like sending Slack messages, Zoom invites, or Asana tasks.
Should you sign up for HubSpot Operations Hub?
By unveiling its new operations software, HubSpot has further cemented its place as one of the top all-in-one business solutions for operations, marketing, sales, and client services.
With Operations Hub, you’ll bulldozer silos, improve the efficiency of your processes and make better data-driven decisions. But that doesn’t mean that you should sign up for the service. While HubSpot’s intuitive design makes it easy to learn, training is essential for successful adoption.
So if Operations Hub is as exciting to you as it is to us, then our advice is: to make sure your team is equipped to get the most out of it.
To discover more about this service and learn how it can help you scale and automate your business processes, join us on the 27th of May for our free virtual event — Operations Hub: Everything you need to know!
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